The Seismic Shift In Application Portfolios

Driven by rapidly changing customer engagement models, enterprise application portfolios are evolving at dramatically different rates on either side of a fault line. Systems of engagement applications for digital customer experiences, such as mobile and web applications, are iterating at an accelerating pace, completely turning over their code in as little as 12 months. On the other side, back-office systems of record, such as financial, customer relationship, and enterprise resource systems, evolve at a much slower pace. So tension builds up at the integration layer. Back-office apps cannot ignore the fast-moving evolution of customer- and employee-facing applications; if systems of record don't flex to integrate with the front end — on the front end's terms — enterprises risk redundancy and inconsistency in activities like compliance, business intelligence, and data reconciliation. This report details the shifting demands placed upon enterprise portfolios, driven over the next decade by the cumulative impact of digital disruption, mobile mind shift, customer experience, and big data analytics. App dev leaders will respond with radically different application development strategies and organizational structures.