Summary: Many businesses face an application development bottleneck. Application development efforts can’t keep up with business demands. As a result, business users are often stuck waiting around for the applications they need. Learn how one company solved this very problem, and how you can do the same.

Driven largely by recent trends, IT departments are evolving. In the past, IT departments were typically viewed as a back-office function that supported the business. Their main responsibility: Keeping the lights on. These days, that’s changing.

Keeping the lights on is no longer good enough. As technology plays an increasingly important role in all aspects of business, modern IT departments must permanently shift their focus from maintenance to innovation. They must move quickly. They must drive business forward.

How? While this article lists some great steps, much of this boils down to the elimination of traditional IT bottlenecks. For instance, the time and effort required to maintain legacy systems is a bottleneck. The overly complex project approval process is a bottleneck.

But, perhaps the most common bottleneck of all lies in the application creation and delivery process. When users need new applications (such as reports, dashboards, etc…), what do they do? Traditionally, they put a request into the IT department. Then, they wait….and wait…and wait. Turnaround time often requires days.

If IT is to properly serve the business, they must eliminate this bottleneck. How? Rather than try to explain everything in this post, here’s a great example of a company that successfully fixed the problem. They implemented a multi-department application development platform, which lets end users create their own applications, and frees up the IT department for other tasks.