Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Kairos Society’s Global Summit in New York City – a networking event for college entrepreneurs and current industry leaders. The event was held at the United Nations and the New York Stock Exchange – not typical networking venues, but conducive to the Society’s goal of “Uniting the Brightest Young Minds to Fuel Innovations for a Better Tomorrow.” Beyond the fervent entrepreneurial ambition exhibited by Kairos Fellows, we had the honor of listening to several impactful speakers, one of which was Thomas Goetz, Executive Editor at Wired Magazine.

His talk particularly struck my interest as it relates to the topics I often discuss on this blog; the interaction of end user and software developer, the behavioral change (both organizational and operational) that comes with adopting Agile development, and the cyclical feedback that imparts better aligned software to the enterprise …all wrapped into Goetz’s two words: feedback loops.

IT Gets User Friendly

As the consumerization of IT continues to change the landscape of enterprise technology and the coinciding trend of mobile applications surges, will employees begin to expect a series of easily accessible applications customized to their enterprise? An interesting post from CIO’s Shane O’Neil brings light upon the emerging demand for a custom enterprise app store.

Depending on the current IT environment, this dream may be difficult to execute, but large organizations can better manage the way employees use their technology if they offer a convenient way of attaining, managing and updating it. Specifically, when it comes to mobile applications, where numerous options from Apple, Android, and Blackberry are used in conjunction with enterprise applications, does an enterprise AppStore make the most sense.

A Common User Experience

Enterprise IT systems are moving towards a common user interface customized to their brand aesthetic. In other words, every system a company uses will look, feel, and work in a similar fashion (at least on the top interface level). If this is the case, an enterprise AppStore full of apps and add-ons would be a logical method of distributing and managing applications and components of applications.