Jason HugginsDirector Global Delivery, Uniface

Agility and Innovation in Application and Mobile DevelopmentSometimes, building on what you have can be the best way to innovate

– and mobile is a key example of this evolutionary style of innovation.

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Why innovation and business agility are vital - and independentBusiness agility is essential to survival. With economic uncertainty everywhere, and disruption in many marketplaces, businesses need to respond fast to change. A key enabler for this ability is an IT function that is inherently good at innovating. IT must produce ingenious ideas that will facilitate the required fast business response, for example by equipping the workforce for mobile working. There are any number of innovative uses of mobile technology: for example, a sales person can take and personalize an order while walking around a shop with a customer; a doctor can receive real-time information about a patient’s vital signs.

IT innovation is essential to business agility. However, you also need agility before you can innovate in IT or anywhere else. Which comes first is hard to judge. Organizations tend to start life with both agility and innovation. However, as they get bigger, their agility tends to become constrained for various reasons. Hence their rate of innovation declines, creating a vicious circle.

Complex though the relationship between innovation and agility is, we can probably agree that both are vital to a healthy business, and particularly vital when a business is contemplating digital transformation (where the organization rethinks aspects of its existence to take full advantage of digital technology, rather than simply automate the existing way of working). Digital transformation implies that a business must be able to innovate digitally to overtake the competition, with enough agility to reshape itself around the resultant landscape. An agile IT department has the ability and opportunity to create what the business needs – or else to go out and find it fast.

In this paper, I’m going to focus on innovation and achieving this through mobility.

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So why isn’t everyone innovating?If innovation is so important, why isn’t everyone doing it? Sometimes people simply get too comfortable with the status quo to try something new. Think how many users were reluctant to move from Windows 7, which admittedly let them do their job fine, to Windows 8, which some considered less perfect. But, once they were through the Windows 7/8 mourning curve, it was easy to change to Windows 10, with very quick emotional acceptance and significant benefits.

Another major reason for not innovating is that people have more pressing things to do, and this is no doubt true. Throughout life, we often hear phrases like: “I’m too busy,” “I’ve got higher priorities,” and “We have to clear the backlog.” Within the IT function, some technical teams are big enough only to keep up with day-to-day maintenance, leaving no scope to craft new solutions or modernize legacy applications. Large organizations may also find they spend too much time and resources “keeping the lights on,” with little left for innovation.

A Catch 22 situation then arises, because by not moving forward, it becomes harder to deliver. This can lead to a failure to give the organization the business agility it needs.

Another reason for failure to innovate at the right pace, is that for many organizations, it’s difficult to make innovation work. As discussed in a recent article by Anderee Berengian1, the innovation lab model has often failed. I’m going to elaborate on Berengian’s conclusion that “real innovation comes from outside your company,” as although that may be true for some, for the rest of us there is an alternative.

1 https://tinyurl.com/nxt2e2p Anderee Berengian, “It’s time to ditch your innovation lab,” VentureBeat, Mar 22, 2017

…by not moving forward, it becomes harder to deliver.

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Innovation can be evolutionary as well as revolutionarySo how is it possible to have your cake and eat it – to keep up with your urgent tasks while moving forward at the same time? Various solutions have been put forward, such as the idea of bimodal IT.

From what I’ve experienced, a good, pragmatic approach is to follow what is sometimes called “evolutionary innovation”. By building incrementally on what you have, it’s often possible to push forward with innovation without putting everything else on hold or disrupting business-as-usual.

Let’s look at how to approach evolutionary innovation under three headings:

1. Build on what you have

2. Make the most of the available ideas

3. Be ready to fail

Finally, we’ll consider mobile as an example of evolutionary innovation.

1. Build on what you haveAn idea doesn’t have to be brand new to be innovative. It’s often about doing the same thing better. Think about mobile phones. An initial step was going from wired to cordless. Since then, we have seen a lot of evolutionary steps, bringing us to the smartphones we use today. There have of course been some revolutionary jumps; however, for the most part, the innovation has been evolutionary.

Rather than await a flash of inspiration and light-bulb “eureka moment” – going from nothing to revolution – we can innovate by listening to people’s challenges and turning these into creative new ideas.

Those ideas can often be implemented with what you already have. In the case of IT innovation, it’s possible to work with solutions that take care of encapsulating technical complexity. That way, you can quickly utilize your existing business assets, getting more out them, with zero (or minimal) rework effort. For example, you may be able to move a legacy application to the web without rewriting core business code. This means you have the time and resources to go on continuously improving your solutions to keep pace with business, consumer and technological change.

We can innovate by listening to people’s challenges and turning these into creative new ideas.

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2. Make the most of the available ideasIt’s important to listen to what other people are thinking – everyone is innovating. The best ideas of all will often come from your own workforce, so it is important to find ways to develop this important resource. With the consumerization of IT and the 24x7 access available to users, particularly through smart devices, the era of apps, bots and assistants sparks many ideas and demands. Combined with the many continually improving features available on these devices, the scope to innovate is immense.

Organizations should try to provide employees with “play time”. Children learn and very rapidly develop through playing; the adult version of this is called R&D. Unfortunately, as we mature, the amount of play appears to decline. Organizations should aim for a range of individual and group activities such as personal experimentation time and team hackathons. It’s important to include individual activities as well as group ones because not all ideas come to the surface in the context of a group, especially if a few people are particularly dominant. As simple as this last statement may seem, it is often overlooked.

The trick is to strike the right balance between business tasks, prescribed learning, and play time. When you hit the sweet spot, you may be surprised how many ideas you have at your disposal – who knows, you may even have enough to spin off additional solution offerings or even new business entities.

3. Be ready to failWith any form of innovation, you must be prepared for some of your ideas not to work. Eddie Obeng’s TED talk on Smart Failure for a Fast-Changing World2 memorably captures why this is so important. We don’t experiment enough, and although companies pay lip service to the idea that it’s OK to fail, they often find it hard to follow through.

This is one of the biggest blockers to innovation, and we need to overcome it. We have to find ways to experiment with new ideas, some of which will fail. We must ensure that businesses of all sizes fully understand and account for this requirement. If we take the phrase “Be ready to fail” and replace the word fail with experiment, test, try, learn, play, develop, grow, evolve or many similar words, the emotional response is very different – however, the end goal remains the same. Whatever word we choose, the process of innovation is normally iterative. It is important to understand this principle and not give up at the first hurdle.

2 https://tinyurl.com/jym99p8 Eddie Obeng, “Smart Failure For A Fast Changing World,” TED Talk, Oct 15, 2012

The trick is to strike the right balance between business tasks, prescribed learning, and play time.

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An example: mobile is a form of evolutionary innovation that almost every business should be looking atWhy mobile? Mobile technology is a great example of the power of evolutionary innovation, and is proving to be a major way of doing things better. Although mobile apps may have been just a fun distraction until relatively recently, companies increasingly see them as a way of unlocking their enterprise. In some environments, such as academia, users have already come to expect the applications they use to be accessible via mobile devices – and consumerization means this is increasingly the case across the board. What’s more, provision of mobile support often needs to happen fast.

Mobile lends itself to evolutionary approaches You can add a lot of value by simply delivering existing applications’ business functionality via a mobile device, especially given they are typically always on and at hand 24x7. Porting key business tasks to mobile is a prime example of evolutionary innovation, especially as putting functionality on a mobile device can unlock many more innovative ideas. These could be as simple as capturing expenses on the fly, putting an end to lost receipts and time-consuming monthly admin.

Ideas could also be more ambitious. For example, a retailer could use location data to avoid missed deliveries and present alternative drop-off locations should the customer be away from home. Today, we already see notifications being heavily used to maximize the efficiency of deliveries.

With the right development platform, you can do this without much additional overhead. The team can focus on building good, responsive applications that can be deployed across platforms, whether desktop, web or mobile.

It is worth noting that for mobile apps, you don’t have to deliver the whole enterprise solution, just key processes that are relevant to the mobile platform. For example, in an HR application you can save a lot of time and money by putting holiday or expenses approvals on a manager’s phone. This is far more efficient than checking emails and possibly forgetting to act, as they can do the job with one or two touches in response to a notification.

Porting key business tasks to mobile is a prime example of evolutionary innovation, especially as

putting functionality on a mobile device can unlock many more innovative ideas.

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Mobile promotes innovation What we’ve just described can be truly innovative and evolutionary because you go back to basics. You start by thinking about what’s going on in a manager’s day and what they need to work smarter. You then enable that vision one bite at a time, reusing functionality you already have.

As well as reusing your existing solutions on mobile, you can also innovate by combining them with other technology. For example, a mobile device can continually gather information about location and other aspects of the user’s situation, presenting the right options when most appropriate. You can take advantage of all this real-time information to make your applications better. For example:

• A salesperson could be alerted when they are in the neighborhood of a new lead.

• While a shop assistant is talking to a customer, the assistant’s augmented reality glasses could feed live facts about products they’re looking at.

• A building automation app could use geolocation information to manage lighting, heating and security as a person navigates the location.

A choice of approaches Mobile innovation can pay big dividends. How evolutionary it is depends partly on the approach you adopt. Possible approaches range from native device development through to mobile web sites. Each has its pros and cons. By taking a pragmatic view, it is possible to combine the best aspects of different approaches.

A hybrid approach combines native and mobile web development, arguably giving you the best of both worlds. It yields opportunities to reuse much of your current functionality and team skills, while also taking advantage of device features. This opens up many innovative ways to improve user experience and efficiency when using the business application.

A hybrid approach combines native and mobile web development, arguably giving you the

best of both worlds.

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Conclusion: Innovation doesn’t always have to be a revolutionI would expect that any business could innovate incrementally in the way I’ve just been describing, and many would find it vital to do so. Yet organizations can easily find themselves stuck when it comes to innovation. They don’t always realize how much they can gain right now from moving forward, or how much they have to lose should others overtake them.

For many businesses, when it comes to IT, the type of innovation to focus on could be improving user experience, making them more efficient, by creatively using and connecting what is already there. This in turn can contribute to a virtuous circle of growing business agility and innovation. By becoming more agile about the way they innovate with technology, companies can become more responsive, freeing themselves up for business innovation.

Mobile is one of the most important ways to unlock innovation. The first step of moving existing capabilities to mobile isn’t necessarily very innovative; however, it can lead to many innovative possibilities.

Could moving some functionality to mobile unlock innovation and hence agility for your business? Is there some other evolutionary step you could take that would do the same?