For many organizations, the ability to access the right data quickly and easily has become the laggard in the app development value chain. Why? Because organizations are challenged with the ability to unite and integrate data silos, measure the actual effort to deliver value, and remove redundancies, waste, and inefficiencies in the release pipeline.

To reach a new pace of app dev, we need to create a template for app dev transformation success. On January 26 at an IDC Virtual Roundtable cohosted with Delphix, IT executives from across a range of industries met to discuss how to lay the foundation for application development transformation. 

The first discussion centered on understanding how to achieve end-to-end continuous delivery capabilities, identifying core challenges and urgent issues that need to be addressed to optimize release cycles. Five core friction points were identified.

The second discussion explored points of data friction.

Data friction manifests itself in a variety of ways and adds to complexity and delays in delivering, consuming, and making sense of data in the enterprise.

This is of course a growing concern and the discussion touched on several challenges that continue to inhibit application development and delivery cycles — thereby impacting business performance.

The following were the most common data challenges/points of data friction impacting day to day operations:

• Lack of formalized testing/availability of test environments across teams
• Engaging “business testers”
• Manual testing/manual data intervention
• Data dependencies/controls/pockets of automation
• Cost optimization when using cloud-based services (i.e., risk of redundant services)
• Culture—traditional mindsets and legacy processes
• Resource constraints
• Data quality—data from multiple upstream sources
• Data volume/data deluge, and long drawn-out processes for data collection from different sources 

The final discussion of this virtual roundtable transitioned to debate the pathways to accelerate app delivery and fuel continuous transformation, in other words “how to speed up to keep up.” Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) excellence is a guiding principle for app dev and delivery. However, what is evident is that automation priorities reflect current challenges in app delivery—typically, silos persist, complexity prevails, and integration is challenging. There is without doubt the underlying need to focus on automation consistency, self-service, best practice identification, and modern, reusable architectures. 

The next phase of app delivery and the ability to “set a new app dev pace—with fast, lighter, and safer data” requires organizations to tackle a number of friction points across the app delivery value chain. When considering the next most urgent thing to do to drive improvements it was clear that tackling “data quality” issues was at the top of the agenda.

The ability to ingest, manage, and organize ever-increasing volumes of data is a top challenge for any large organization in 2021. Ensuring that app delivery teams have access to quality data is critical in driving speed and agility, particularly as an increasing number of app delivery teams prioritize on implementing AI/ML analytics to accelerate app delivery.

Just think the more good data an ML algorithm has, the faster it can produce results and the better those results will be. Data quality drives better customer experience and delivers faster, more accurate decision making, positively impacting business performance and profitability. Data quality was not the only priority identified, discussions circled back to underline the criticality in having both technological and behavioral change management agendas. Ensuring a structured plan is in place to transition largely traditional organizations to a digital culture. Importance was placed on consistency in “digital culture capabilities” and what this means in terms of workplace, skills, and behavior. 

This article was written by Jennifer Thomson, senior research director & lead for the Accelerated App Delivery Practice for IDC.