 "TechEd India 2013: Re-Imagine The Way You Build")
Microsoft’s TechEd India 2013 started on a theme that the company has begun to take quite seriously itself. Re-imagine. As all of us know, Microsoft has taken major steps to re-imagine itself in the eyes of enterprise customers over the last two years in the light of waves of disruption such as mobility, apps, cloud, etc.
Over the last two years Microsoft has taken some giant steps to move to the next level and now has very competitive offerings in the mobility and cross-functional space.
Microsoft TechEd India 2013 started with an address by Amit Chatterjee, MD, Microsoft R&D, India. Chatterjee said that given the state of technology today and the multiple devices that are making an entry into the market, ’re-imagining’ apps, platforms and user experiences has become an imperative.
In addition to this, Chatterjee touched upon the transformation of development practices from the original waterfall method to a more agile methodology, which I will cover in detail in my next post.
CIOs will agree that conventional development practices are becoming obsolete, especially given the evolving computing landscape. . It is indeed time to re-imagine the way solutions are built for end users and customers alike–across platforms and devices.
Today’s end users live in a hyper connected universe with multiple end points to data flow. As a CIO it is important to understand this paradigm shift and adopt it as early as possible to avoid being left behind.
Citing the example of fashion retail giant Nordstorm, Chatterjee explained how new and evolving agile development practices can help CIOs deliver better products for their end users, products that can actually ease their lives and are smart enough for any business user to use intuitively.
In this particular example, developers from Nordstorm actually used agile development practices to work in parallel and build an app right at a particular branch of Nordstorm. What makes this approach unique as opposed to completely eccentric is the fact that the developers were able to build out modules while taking real time feedback from shoppers at the store.
This approach helped Nordstorm make an application that eased customers’ lives at a store level, giving them an app that they could really use, as opposed to figuring out how it is used.
In this age of hyper connectivity, this is as real time as it gets!
This example makes it very clear that today consumers are looking for value, end-users are getting smarter, and every one is getting comfortable with technology. It is extremely important to realize that building intuitive apps is not just a differentiator, but an imperative.
Newer development practices can certainly have an impact on the time and effort that technology teams place in developing a product and the number of revisions that are released. Not just this, but CIOs are also under increasing pressure to establish IT as a cost center, which leads to the conclusion that cutting corners smartly is extremely important when it comes to resourcing and optimisation.
Reimagine the application cycle. People experience technology through modern apps powered by cloud, socially integrated, multiple end points. CIOs must keep these factors in mind while building their enterprise strategy so that end-users and customers alike can benefit.
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