Businesses benefit from having fewer technology tools in their 'enterprise stack'. Yet CIOs still need to encourage innovation and employ software tools as an enabler for growth and cost reduction. This white paper focuses on the role of Situational Applications platforms to reduce the number of technology platforms whilst increasing opportunities to serve the long-tail of applications demands from individuals and communities of users whose needs are unfulfilled by core enterprise platforms.

1. Serving the Long-Tail
of Demand for Enterprise Software
Fewer, better
software platforms
for less $$$s
WHITE PAPER
Originally published in September 2010
Updated in May 2014
Ian Tomlin and Nick Lawrie

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Introduction
This document describes how Chief Information
Officers and IT procurement leaders can achieve
greater economies and drive through more
process efficiency savings by delivering fewer,
better information systems.
It examines the reasons for a growing long-tail
of demand for situational business applications
and explains why off-the-shelf software
applications may represent both high cost and
high risk answer.
It then qualifies why platforms able to
repeatedly produce and operate situational
applications at very low cost may represent the
best-fit solution to meet long-tail demands.
CONTENTS
A New Economic Imperative
The Bottom Line
Serving the Long-Tail
Codeless Situational Applications Tools
Known Roadblocks
Technology to Empower Process Improvement
Evidence of Results
Qualifying the ROI

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A New Economic
Imperative
For decades, well established large
organizations with robust business models have
enjoyed IT budgets of relative plenty. But the
slow-down in economic growth of recent years
has installed a new economic reality.
The role of IT in organizations has not changed
fundamentally – even while operating in a
depressed economic period organizations need
information systems to fuel process
improvements, creative innovation, growth and
front-line customer services. What HAS changed
fundamentally is the size of IT budgets, probably
forever. The world of corporate IT is facing a
permanent change in its funding.
To achieve significant cost reductions whilst
avoiding direct impact on frontline services and
growth, organizations are re-visiting how they
run IT and procure services. Decision makers are
pressured to inject innovation into procurement
approaches and to take marginally more risk
where the promise of step-change rewards
exists.
Nowhere is the potential for rewards greater or
more achievable than in the supply of business
software applications that satisfy stakeholder
demands to source innovation in information
systems, improve the efficiency of processes and
inject new ways of engaging with customers and
finding new markets.

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The Bottom Line
The total cost of IT for organizations should not
exceed 1% of income. For many organizations, a
target outline cost for IT in the order of 0.5% of
turnover is achievable.
Organizations that have already thoughtfully
engineered their IT function, like easyJet in the
United Kingdom, can today run their IT
operations at a cost that represents less than 1%
of total revenues. This compares to the majority
of organizations whose IT costs will range from
1.5% to 6% of income. easyJet is profiting from
moving its core platforms to cloud computing
and adopting Software as a Service solutions for
utility applications like email, calendaring and
office software.
This paper argues that yet more rewards can be
achieved through more thoughtful approaches
to IT procurement without significantly
increasing risk. For organizations that face more
extreme changes to compliance and market
conditions, more can be done to deliver
adaptive, better-fit IT to proportionately more IT
users.
A myopic focus on cost reduction can result in an
inward looking culture that ignores the potential
to power growth through technology innovation.
The potential of IT to create competitive
advantage, boost customer service performance
and streamline business processes to create
operational excellence has taken a knock over
the last two decades – but the potential still
exists for IT to do just that.

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Serving the Long-Tail
The majority of large enterprise have by now
adopted core platforms for business computing
to service the ‘majority need’ for software
applications. But a faster pace of change in
business markets, the need for greater
compliance and control, greater access to data
made possible by ‘big data’ technologies and
the joint impacts of social networking,
consumerism and mobile working have led to
greater demands by individuals and
communities of users for ‘enterprise-grade’
software applications to meet their ever
changing information needs.
In most large enterprises, the majority need for
applications is met by a small number (i.e. the
top 20%) of enterprise applications. Sourcing
and deploying these ‘big wheels’ of enterprise
computing architecture - that underpin the core
mission-critical processes of the enterprise - has
been the focus of enterprise computing for
decades. Economies from these deployments
come from the adoption of best practice and the
consolidation of business operations to shared
service centres able to fulfil business needs
across the enterprise.
The last decade however has seen an ever
growing demand for additional applications to
respond to the ever changing needs of
individuals and communities. While the net
number of users for these applications may be
lower, the importance of the information, and
the role of these individuals as innovators and
change agents in the enterprise, has placed
greater pressure on IT and procurement
departments to source an ever increasing range
of business applications.
This demand by smaller numbers of users for
higher numbers of applications has become
known as the ‘Long-Tail’.
Situational applications platforms meet this need
by providing a common technology platform able
to repeatedly author applications and deliver
them to individuals or communities of users in a
fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost
of traditional tools. This is made possible by
their adoption of codeless authoring and use of
ready-to-use templates and design building
blocks that negate use of traditional best-of-
breed platform tools and coding skills.
The first ever situational application platform
was the spreadsheet. Times are changing.
Information workers need to deal with much
bigger data sets and IT leaders must ensure that
data is organized, always-secure and any
software application must adhere to necessary
standards of governance and compliance. The
new generation of situational applications
platforms like Encanvas (www.encanvas.com)
are engineered to meet ‘IT hygiene standards’ of
security, performance and scalability, yet they
provide unrivalled self-service tooling to enable
web workers to exploit existing systems data.
The ‘long-tail’ of demand for situational apps

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Encanvas was created 2002 by the founders of
NDMC Consulting. The founders believed that
business users would seek to work in social
groups that would span across and beyond
enterprise boundaries and, having experienced
this new form of business workplace, key
knowledge workers and creative contributors to
business processes would seek to be able to
author applications for their communities in a
form purposely sculptured to the needs of the
community of use.
This idea of socially-centric, built-for-purpose
and potentially thrown-away software was
unknowingly endorsed by technology thought-
leader Clay Shirky in his essay ‘Situated Software’
published in March 2004 when he wrote, “Part
of the future I believe I'm seeing is a change in
the software ecosystem which, for the moment,
I'm calling situated software. This is software
designed in and for a particular social situation
or context. This way of making software is in
contrast with what I'll call the Web School (the
paradigm I learned to program in), where
scalability, generality, and completeness were
the key virtues.”
In August 2007, Luba Cherbakov and a team
from IBM wrote the first of two articles on what
they described as ‘Situational Applications’.
In their paper titled ‘SOA meets situational
applications, Part 1: Changing computing in the
enterprise’, Cherbakov and her colleagues
defined the attributes of Situational Applications,
stating, “The loosely accepted term situational
applications describe applications built to
address a particular situation, problem, or
challenge. The development life cycle of these
types of applications is quite different from the
traditional IT-developed, SOA-based solution.
SAs are usually built by casual programmers
using short, iterative development life cycles that
often are measured in days or weeks, not
months or years. As the requirements of a small
team using the application change, the SA often
continues to evolve to accommodate these
changes. Significant changes in requirements
may lead to an abandonment of the used
application altogether; in some cases it's just
easier to develop a new one than to update the
one in use.
The emergence of BIG DATA technologies has led
to the rediscovery of the important role of
expert situational applications tooling as
organizations acknowledge the need to equip
analysts and middle-managers with self-service,
community-centric applications to assimilate,
analyse and act on the actionable insights
they’re surfacing.
Nevertheless, situational applications remain a
largely misunderstood concept in enterprise
computing due to many misguided pre-
conceived notions that are now proven to be
fatally flawed. These include:
•Applications that can be designed cheaply
enough to ‘throw-away’ can’t possibly be
expected to meet enterprise data integration,
security, performance and tuning expectations.
•It’s not possible to create the critical-mass of
building blocks and tooling required to remove
the majority of programming overheads.
•Organizations are better off buying best of
breed solutions, to then mackle them together.
•There is no competitive advantage to be gained
from IT as companies now use the same
platforms.
•If players like Microsoft, Google, Oracle and
IBM haven’t made it work then it isn’t possible!

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Codeless Situational
Applications Tools
SITUATIONAL APPLICATIONS represent the
MAJORITY of emerging demands for software
‘systems’ beyond the core platform
components of Financial and Enterprise
Resource Planning (ERP) systems.
Situational Applications Platforms are cloud-
based tool-kits that support repeated production
of situational applications. Their commercial
licensing or rental models presume that
organizations will produce a near-infinite
number of business applications. They offer an
alternative approach for the provision of new
applications to serve the long-tail of demand.
Before engaging a procurement process or
custom coding development, the majority of
‘systems’ requirements are considered for
internal delivery by business analysts embedded
into change management teams (and motivated
through targeted remuneration packages to
improve the process areas they serve).
Situational applications development is
performed on software platforms that analysts
can use themselves to create applications in
consort with stakeholders to support
improvements in business processes without
having to code or acquire tools and skills that
would necessitate an ‘IT project’.
This approach places focus and rewards on
process improvement and business outcomes
rather than the technology componentry.
Situational Applications offer a practical
alternative to custom coding, software
procurement or outsourcing.
Benefits of this method:
 Project complexity and risk is removed
by creating applications in workshops
 No programming skills and competencies
are needed.
 No dependencies exist for middle-ware
software or third party tools in areas
such as business intelligence, geo-spatial
intelligence etc.
 New applications are created without
additional software costs
 No costs are associated with browser
compatibility testing, applications re-
working, de-bugging or performance
tuning.
 No version upgrades or maintenance
costs apply.
Economies of self-authoring business applications
without custom coding (Source: Encanvas Inc.)

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Known Roadblocks
A series of road-blocks have prohibited
innovation in IT procurement approaches to
serve the long-tail of demand for software
applications. Thanks to developments in the
science and application of computing, these
roadblocks have now been overcome.
Norms of IT buying behaviour
Problem: There is a widely held view in business
IT procurement circles that ready-built software
represents a lower risk than custom-built
software. This is mainly because buyers presume
projects will require custom programming.
Furthermore, IT buyers are pressured to consider
outsourcing as a means of offsetting cost
without being able to monetize the ‘downside’ of
outsourcing strategies, or consider alternative
insourcing strategies.
IT buyers must look beyond accepted sourcing
approaches if they are to achieve step-change
cost and efficiency benefits made possible by
new innovations in computing.
Overcoming limitations of Web browsers
Problem: Until very recently it wasn’t possible to
provide assurances to corporate IT buyers over
the performance, security and usability of
applications delivered via web browsers owing to
the limitations of operating systems platforms
and browsers. The presumption continues to
pervade that applications installed on a client or
server internally are somehow ‘better’.
Recent events in the development of web-
based computing such as increased competition
in the web browser market resulting from
Google’s entry, market acceptance of AJAX
technology, the release of HTML 5, the launch by
Microsoft of Active Server Pages (ASP) 3.5 etc.
have collectively made possible the design,
deployment and operation of Rich Internet
applications in a client server architecture that
perform just as well as (if not better than) pre-
installed desktop and server software.
Project cost and complexity resulting from
custom programming
Problem: It is presumed that custom
applications can only be developed by custom
programming.
New innovative (so-called ‘codeless’) software
like Encanvas Secure&Live facilitates the design,
deployment and operation of sophisticated Rich
Internet Business Applications without the need
for custom programming. Applications are
developed by business analysts working closely
with stakeholders and users. Applications are
designed in workshop environments without the
need to programme.
Use of multiple development tools
Problem: It is presumed that new applications
developments will require multiple separate
technology components to discharge the varied
functions of a business application – such as
database, workflow software, intranet and
content management software, reporting and
dashboarding (business intelligence) software,
mobile computing software, geo-spatial
information and mapping software etc. For each
of these software tools, unique IT competencies
are needed, leading to large project teams and
complex projects.
New codeless software development platforms
like Encanvas adopt an approach similar to
LEGO® whereby building blocks of technology
are ready-made so that applications designers
can create new applications with all of the
necessary features supplied ‘out-of-the-box’
without custom programming.

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Dependence on middleware
Problem: When data is held in different systems
and in different formats, it has been traditionally
very difficult to acquire and return data to and
from new software applications. Another
presumption therefore exists that it’s not
possible to easily acquire and return data to
different systems at the same time, or robustly
govern the security and organization of data.
The advent of enterprise mashup technology
and services oriented computing has overcome
these obstacles. It means that new applications
can be rapidly created that re-use data that
exists in internal systems or is accessible via the
web without compromising security or systems
resilience. Products like Encanvas include
sophisticated data acquisition, data
transformation, data aggregation, data query
design and database creation features thereby
removing any dependency for middleware tools
to exist.
Software development project complexity
Problem: Decades of failed IT projects have
convinced IT buyers that custom software
applications are high risk. IT projects often fail as
the result of several associated factors that
combine to create complexity:
1. Organizations have been traditionally
required to use many tools to develop
software applications.
2. Use of multiple tools demands multiple
competencies; therefore the number of
people required for projects swell.
3. Communications between project
outcome specifiers and deliverers break
down. Applications are programmed
‘offline’ in backrooms against a design
specification that must be authored at a
time when it’s difficult (if not impossible)
to envision the end solution and whether
it will deliver an ROI.
4. The need for programming (particularly
in the area of logic scripts and user
interface appearance) leads to large
volumes of custom code that is non re-
usable yet must be tested for cross-
browser compatibility, security, server
performance and resilience. This results
in a major cost overhead for testing and
debugging on any custom project.
5. Owing to poor communications between
project sponsors and deliverers, it’s
common for large amounts of re-
working and editing of applications to be
required amounting to as much as 15%
of project total costs.
In simple terms, demands for custom
programming and large number of tools results
in project process complexity and poor
collaboration between project sponsors and
delivers resulting in high project cost, long
delivery timeframes, unpredictable ROIs and
high risks.
The solution to these challenges is to adopt
agile design software that business analysts can
use to deliver applications without needing to
resort to programming and complex IT projects.

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Technology to
Empower Process
Improvement
The internal delivery of situational applications
by business analysts (embedded into change
teams) presumes the existence of development
tools business analysts can master to build,
deploy and support robust applications by
themselves - without custom coding - in order
to embed IT expertise into change teams.
To adopt SITUATIONAL APPLICATIONS DELIVERY
three things need to happen:
1. A codeless platform for situational
applications design and delivery should be
selected and installed.
2. Analysts should be trained in situational
applications project delivery.
.
3. IT procurement ‘norms of behavior’ should
consider suitability of situational
applications before turning to off-the-shelf
software solutions.
These three key steps are described in more
detail here:
1. Installing tools
Provision of an integrated applications platform
that supports design, deployment and delivery of
situational application means that analysts are
able perform both design and delivery roles. This
bleed of the IT function into change teams
dramatically reduces the number of people
engaged in IT projects and the level of expertise
required of candidates. It dramatically reduces
dependencies on internal programming teams
and outside consultants.
Organizations like Volkswagen Group have for
several years adopted Process Improvement
Managers as part of change teams. These
individuals are expert IT professionals
(traditionally business analysts or IT project
programme managers) and possess both an
understanding of business processes and
technology. Motivated by remuneration plans
associated with process improvement targets
and achievements, the focus of process
improvement managers is to instigate and
deliver perpetual improvement in core business
processes, rather than simply build applications.
2. Equipping the analysts
For situational applications delivery to be
successful, analysts require a common toolset
(computing platform) that can design, deploy
and operate potentially hundreds of secure and
live portal spaces containing hundreds of
applications without creating a burden on IT
resources or creating performance, security and
systems resilience issues.
The economics of the platform must enable
applications to be designed and then discarded,
modified or sustained without high costs to
encourage innovation and the creative use of IT.
It’s important that business software
applications can be iteratively designed in real
time by analysts working in workshop
environments without requiring programming
teams or advanced IT programming skills; or the
need to work with multiple technology tools that
would demand too high a level of skills and
competencies for any single person to master
application design.
It’s important that the selected software
application platform delivers Rich Internet
experiences and levels of collaboration now
expected of modern applications – a benchmark
standard that is guided by the quality of
applications offered to consumers by both Apple
and Google.

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3. IT procurement norms should adapt
Unless IT procurement practises adapt,
possibilities for insourcing through situational
applications delivery can never be achieved as
successive applications requirements are
packaged into boxes for procurement without
consideration being given to alternative sourcing
approaches.
Encanvas Secure&Live is an example of a
purpose-built technology platform to support
situational applications delivery by analysts.
Encanvas Secure&Live adopts technology
architecture similar in ethos to LEGO
,
employing ready-made building blocks of
technology by a single person with a single skills-
set to author applications that install new ways
of capturing, analyzing, presenting and sharing
information. No programming skills are required
to use the software.
All of the components of Encanvas are built in
the same way – including design elements for
business intelligence, mapping, social networking
and collaboration etc. – so one person can ably
deliver cradle-to-grave software applications
without exhaustive knowledge of traditional IT
competencies.
Situational Applications - Achieving a step-change in
applications delivery

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Evidence of Results
Moving to situational applications delivery for
business applications is a proven formula for
rapid ROI in the creation of cost-effective, low
risk projects as evidenced by these examples
kindly provided by Encanvas Inc.
Ernst & Young
The senior partners of one of the largest and
most successful professional services firms were
finding it extremely difficult to evidence their
supplier credentials for new projects owning to
weaknesses in their IT systems. Whilst much was
known about past projects, clients and staff
expertise, none of this information was in a
single place. As a consequence, much manual
work was involved in bringing together
evidentiary content for inclusion into bids. In the
full knowledge that no off-the-shelf solution
existed, and with many varied expectations
being outlined by the many country leads, the
project lead for the international Power and
Energy Knowledge Center elected to use
Encanvas to work iteratively with business
analysts to develop a solution. Over a period of
6-weeks a series of forms and data structures
were designed that aggregated data and
presented a ‘single page view’ of past Ernst &
Young projects. With the advantage of iterative
development, the system was seen to offer a
best-fit solution after 12 weeks of User
Acceptance Testing and was later adopted as an
enterprise system.
Transport for London
In 2003, the world’s largest metropolitan
transport authority, responsible for both the
strategic planning and provision of transport
services for London found itself challenged to
meet new compliance requirements as the result
of the 2004 Traffic Management Act. The lack of
coordination of road works undertaken by street
works undertakers including its own activities
and those of the 33 London boroughs meant
there was an unnecessary frequency of
disruptive works across the region. Seldom did
on organization take advantage of work being
undertaken by another to minimize congestion.
It was recognized that a cross-industry
partnership working portal was needed that
could capture the relevant details of proposed
works, accurately plot them and then make the
proposed works available for viewing to all
interested parties in a secure environment to
enable coordination and arbitration processes
that would ensure the most efficient
implementation of the proposed works.
Having proven that, by using Encanvas, it was
possible to edit maps (plot road works) and store
spatial data in one integral record, the
application was built and deployed as a secure
extranet in 6 1/2 man-days during an elapse
period of 12 weeks.

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Canon Europe Ltd
New compliance procedures placed on its
Japanese parent meant that the
European marketing headquarters operation of
Canon Business Solutions was given a 6-week
deadline to formalize the way it managed license
distribution of the utility software tools it
provided with its hardware. An administrative
system was needed to monitor the distribution
of software utilities across Europe with 100%
traceability and full statistical analysis
capabilities. From concept to completion, the
internal team used Encanvas to develop and
deploy a solution in less than 2 weeks.
Sponsor comments - ‘Against a very tight
deadline, we’ve achieved the delivery of a
sustainable compliance management solution
that minimizes administrative overheads placed
on the team.’
West Sussex County Council
At the introduction of the Traffic Management
Act in 2004, WSCC identified the current
information management of the Council was
unworkable if all aspects of the new legislation
were to be met. Engineers were required to
reference six different systems to build a picture
of planning considerations – and even then
mistakes could be easily made. The project team
identified the sources of data from across the
department and mapped out requirements.
Samples of each of the data sources were
gathered and a ‘start-point’ proof of concept was
developed. This was presented to a workshop of
users and stakeholders who spent a day
discussing the format and operation of the
system. The systems design was completed
during workshops and a fully functioning system
was deployed in 2 days.
Sponsor comments-‘It is via Encanvas that we
were able to demonstrate regionally what true
GIS coordination was about, before any of the
later industry systems.’
West Midlands ‘Mattisse’ Project (Telent Ltd)
The Transport Authority for the West Midlands
(UK) operating a transport and travel incident
management system found their existing IT
solution consumed the annual budget on
maintenance alone leaving no resources for
improvement. This meant that new users and
uses couldn’t be accommodated although a new
legislative was leading to demand for richer,
more accessible information. Using Encanvas,
the system was redeveloped as a client - server
solution able to support no-client browser use.
The application included geo-mapping of data,
data entry/update forms and reports. Encanvas
was chosen as it presented the most
economically advantageous option, providing the
fastest application time to market and lowest
operational overhead for customer. Other
rewards included affordable economics, reduced
project risk, sustainability and adaptability.

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Qualifying the ROI
To measure the ROI advantages of insourcing
made possible by situational applications
delivery you don’t need to expose your
organization to high risk or costs.
Trial implementations from software platform
suppliers like Encanvas mean that organizations
can affordably trial situational applications
delivery by simply equipping one or two business
analysts with the skills and tools they need to
develop applications on-demand.
Vendors like US Tech Solutions, Wolfpack Risk,
NDMC, Sovereignty Technology and Ambridge
Consulting provide introductory programmes
combining training, coaching and software
provisioning to equip organizations with the
know-how and tools to move to situational
applications delivery as a sustainable model for
supporting systems modernization and process
improvement.
The Encanvas ‘ROI Builder’ programme consists
of the following:
Introduction to Situational Applications
Delivery
1-day Workshop
Training for Business Analysts
3-day training (normally onsite)
Coaching and Knowledge Transfer
Including the provisioning of knowledge transfer
for business analysts and IT departments
6-days of consulting time
Platform Supply and Installation
Supplied on 21-day trial
Copyright Encanvas Inc. 2010 - 2014. Encanvas is a registered trademark of Encanvas Limited. All other trade
names and trademarks used in this document are recognized as belonging to their respective owners.