App Development:
Why Six Months Is Far Too Long
Quick — name three things besides the global pandemic that happened in 2020. Did you remember that:
- Kanye West ran for president?
- A mysterious monolith popped up—and then vanished—in the Utah desert?
- Elon Musk and Grimes named their newborn infant X Æ A-12?
If you did, give yourself a pat on the back! If you didn’t, there’s no need for a facepalm. In the modern world, speed is everything, and headlines that seemed important three months ago now feel like they’re so last year.
The same is true in application development. Consumer demands change on a whim. New legislation arrives with the stroke of a pen (or the tap of a smartphone). Novel apps launch almost daily, many of them threatening to outperform the apps you have in the market right now.
For IT teams, keeping pace isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity. In fact, if it takes your company six months or longer to launch an app, you may already be behind the times.
Why You Must Move Faster
According to our recent report, The Speed of Change: How Fast Are You?, more than half (57%) of IT professionals told us their companies can launch apps in four months or fewer. In fact, 20% say they can launch an app within one to two months. That means they’re delivering solutions to their customers while other companies are still coding. It also means they’re meeting emerging trends head-on and leaving their competition far in the rearview mirror.
If app development slowdowns are keeping you from leading the pack, start catching up today. Take notes from these companies that respond to market forces and pivot quickly, measuring app development timelines in days and weeks, not months.
Keeping Ahead of a Global Market
Insurance is a relationship business, and AXA became the #1 ranked global insurance agency by forming great relationships with 3,000+ brokers. But independent brokers with AXA Commercial Lines had become frustrated. They wanted easy online access to claim information from any device. Instead, they had to call AXA’s customer service center and waste precious minutes on hold.
AXA felt the pressure. These independent brokers could move their business anywhere, and they would if the bottleneck wasn’t solved. But there was another complication: The AXA IT team spent most of its budget managing existing applications and outdated legacy systems.
Still, they found a way to win the race. Discover how they built an insurance portal with legacy system integration in just 3 months.
Responding to Massive Product Demand
As one of the biggest names in engineering, Bosch has an equally large IT department. With over 11K collaborators, this unit delivers most of the company’s internal apps. However, the IT team worked with a limited budget, meaning requests with a higher return on investment would always jump to the top of the pile.
So, after launching a successful program with OutSystems that enabled technologists who weren't developers to build apps, Bosch adopted the platform for its central IT team. In four years, Bosch trained over 1,300 OutSystems power users, 400+ of which use the platform actively. Looking at the past twelve months, Bosch registered an average of 24,000 application users.
Bosch's developers are pleased with the automation of tedious and cumbersome tasks. Integrating with core systems, for example, once took weeks or even months with traditional development, but with OutSystems, they can do it with just a few clicks.
Pivoting During a Global Pandemic
Estafeta is one of Mexico’s largest logistics companies, and its 8,200 employees handle nearly 43 million shipments per year. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, they suffered a tremendous blow. As COVID-19-imposed lockdowns occurred worldwide, Estafeta saw its traditional logistics traffic fall by 83% in just one week.
This left the company with a host of challenges. Estafeta needed an app to help pharmacy store managers request and monitor deliveries. It needed another app to fulfill those orders. It needed an app to enable contactless sign-offs for proof of delivery or package drop-off. And it needed an app to engage a small army of third-party logistics partners who made last-mile delivery possible for B2C customers during the pandemic.
How fast did Estafeta create these apps? Discover how they launched not one, but six new apps in days, not weeks.
Get Up to Speed
Make sure the speed of your app development keeps pace with the world around you. Read this fun infographic. You’ll get more lightning-fast solutions that helped other companies roll out new apps swiftly. And you might even see a funny meme or popular streaming title that you missed in 2020, because, you know… that was so last year!
