We offer an argument for calculated and diligent solution design, within the framework of the user population, organization and firm. This requires a new perspective on how applications are designed; a perspective that compliments the power and agility of the new world of web application development.
Today's Environment
The arena for building web applications to support today’s business has changed. Modern web application tools make it possible for agile development cycles that take a fraction of the time of traditional processes and create lightweight, responsive solutions. This is especially true in technology industries where firms are increasingly using web applications for mission critical analysis, testing and customer engagement.
The result is the ability for business teams to own much of the development process, especially in organizations already invested in technology focused skill sets. In this environment, point solutions can be quickly developed to meet niche needs throughout the organization. While the organization can leverage this situation through the quick development of responsive solutions, it also requires a new look at how business solutions are fit into a greater organizational strategy.
A call to anchor development in organization strategy is not an argument against agile development. This is an argument for calculated and diligent solution design, within the framework of the user population, organization and firm. This requires a new perspective on how applications are designed; a perspective that compliments the power and agility of the new world of web application development.
This perspective can be achieved with a hybrid of traditional, strategically oriented services with the operational and tactical activities required to actually develop a solution: A new independent, highly focused, multi-disciplinary style of consulting service. A service that provides the strategic orientation and alignment needed to manage quickly evolving tools with the technical and engineering domain knowledge and creative design expertise to actually execute on an application development project.
Part Management Consulting Firm
It begins with an appreciation and understanding of strategic alignment tools traditionally associated with management consulting. With an ever increasing set of solutions within an organization, strategic planning is required to influence how tactical development decisions are being made. Additionally, as solutions are continually being developed outside of traditional, legacy IT paths, an organization’s portfolio of solutions must be strategically balanced to deliver the best solution for the customer and shareholder.
The downside is that often traditional services fall short of delivering actionable, operational level tools from which development projects can work. Due to a lack of domain knowledge and development experience, management consulting often cannot trace strategic needs all of the way to meaningful, actionable, operational application requirements.
Part Application Development
To remedy this, a rich understanding of the tools available today for both model and data development, as well as expertise in user interface and user experience design is needed. At the end of the day, application projects are building a technical solution to a business problem. Developers, either internal or external to the business, deliver the lines of code that make a concept a reality.
The downside is that, as projects and requirements evolve, developers can often become detached from the needs of both the end user population as well as the organization. This is especially true as applications are being deployed to a diverse set of users, from analysts to CEOs, and to a variety of organizations, both internal and external. Additionally, as more technology companies begin to rely on these solutions, developers have less knowledge of the sophisticated modeling techniques needed to support analysis and data model design.
Applied by Design Bridges the Gap
The solution is a hybrid of strategic, development and design thinking to deliver the tools and processes you need to make your development project work. In this mode of thinking, strategic needs driven by organization, customer and shareholder requirements can, through the use of the appropriate tools and frameworks, be traced into actionable steps in an application development program. User experience and user interface can be developed with an understanding of both the opportunities and limitations that might exist with respect to the users, as well as the models and data at hand. Analytical processes can be customized to fit the organization and firm, and can be designed in such a way to evolve and leverage future capabilities.
This is our philosophy at Applied by Design. By combining domain knowledge and technical understanding with the ability to develop and execute on strategic planning tools, we believe a greater solution can be delivered to an organization; one that exceeds the expectations of its users, creates value for the organization, is designed to evolve within the organization’s application portfolio as well as within the application development environment at large, and one that delivers for the organization’s customers.
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