Super Bowl XLVIII will pit the Denver Broncos against the Seattle Seahawks. As always, it will be fascinating to see which coach guides his team to victory—and glory—thanks to a sound game plan and flawless execution, on the field and off. In many ways, football is a great analogy for application development: the coach (CIO) implements a system (platform) and set of plays (methodology) to help his team march toward the goal (new apps). The reality, though, is that application development teams face countless challenges, making them underdogs in the big game. This playbook is designed to help you identify and overcome those obstacles, and execute a winning app delivery strategy. **Download report: Gartner 2015 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Platform as a Service (aPaaS) Download this report to better understand the aPaaS landscape and how the right platform can accelerate your software delivery cadence and capacity. http://ww2.mendix.com/gartner-magic-quadrant-q1-2015.html Twitter: https://twitter.com/Mendix LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mendix

1. The New Application
Delivery Playbook:
The CIO’s guide to executing
a winning app strategy

2. CIOs: Are You Ready for the Big Game?
Super Bowl XLVIII will pit the Denver Broncos against the Seattle Seahawks. As always, it will
be fascinating to see which coach guides his team to victory—and glory—thanks to a sound
game plan and flawless execution, on the field and off.
In many ways, football is a great analogy for application development: the coach (CIO)
implements a system (platform) and set of plays (methodology) to help his team march toward
the goal (new apps). The reality, though, is that application development teams face countless
challenges, making them underdogs in the big game. This playbook is designed to help you
identify and overcome those obstacles, and execute a winning app delivery strategy.

3. The Score: App Dev is Getting Blown Out
Application Delivery
If application development was the Super Bowl, the IT team would be getting blown out.
According to the Standish Group, 94% of large IT projects are either in trouble or fail altogether.
Rather than suffer a humiliating defeat in the big game, let’s look at some of the team’s big
challenges and how to overcome them.

4. IT teams today are hard pressed to deliver new
applications in tight timelines, whether to improve
existing processes or to help the business innovate or
capitalize on new opportunities.
Yet, as you may be painfully aware, custom
development projects plod along slowly, taking several
months or even years. In today’s fast-paced world, this is
simply unacceptable. And like a football team facing a
much quicker opponent, it can feel like sucking wind.
Play: Accelerate App Development
Rather that getting outrun on every play, look for ways to speed up
application development. Many CIOs are turning to visual modeldriven development (MDD), which teams find more intuitive,
collaborative and quicker than traditional programming languages. A
benchmark study by global system integrator Capgemini found MDD
to be 5-6 times faster than C# and Java.
By shrinking project timelines down to weeks or days, your team will
march quickly toward the goal line, erasing any deficit along the way.

5. To bring home the Super Bowl trophy, all players must
be on the same page, working towards together a
common goal. Application development is no different;
yet, IT/business collaboration remains elusive.
Consequently, the process of translating user
requirements into working software is too complicated,
lengthy, and costly. More often than not, the business
doesn’t get what it needs and another project fails.
Game over.
Play: Bring IT and the Business Together
Instead of keeping IT and the business on opposite ends of the
bench, look for a platform that brings them closer together and keeps
the entire team on the same page throughout the game.
For instance, a platform with social collaboration and project
management capabilities can help keep stakeholders aligned and
engaged. Moreover, visual application models—like football play
diagrams—are easily understood by the entire team, allowing
developers and business users to jointly build and review
applications to ensure better outcomes.

6. Great quarterbacks like Peyton Manning are able to
instantly read the defense and react accordingly.
Unfortunately, this skill is lacking on most app dev
teams. Although they may see changing business
needs, they’re unable to react quickly enough.
As Forrester Research notes, “what most firms lack is a
predictable, stable approach to accommodating rapid
change as the norm.”
Play: Enable Agility & Flexibility
In order to compete in today’s dynamic, fast-paced game, IT teams
must possess extreme flexibility and agility. At any time, they must be
able to quickly and easily call an audible—whether to accommodate
evolving requirements during the development process, or to
implement changes to applications in production.
By doing so, they can deliver what the business needs before the
play clock winds down, resulting in another loss of yardage.

7. Off-field distractions have proven costly to the focus and
productivity of many a football team.
The same applies to development teams. While their
focus should be on building great software, they
frequently get bogged down with deployment issues,
such as database and infrastructure set-up, security
concerns, and more.
Play: Eliminate Deployment Issues
Keep your team focused on what really matters by completely
removing infrastructure and deployment issues from the equation.
One solution is an application platform as a service (aPaaS) that
includes the entire technology stack and automatically manages
operational tasks.
With these platforms, applications can be deployed to the cloud
literally with a single click. This way, your team can always keep their
eye on the ball.

8. Traditional application development approaches are
like washed up athletes: while they might have been the
‘go to’ in years past, they’re now too old and too slow to
compete with younger, faster players. Instead, they eat
up budget and clock, producing almost nothing in return.
As coach, it can be difficult parting ways with a player
that may have served your team well in the past. But it’s
time to shake things up and pave the way for your next
rising star.
Play: Sign the Emerging App Dev Star
Forward-thinking CIOs are replacing traditional code-based
development approaches with enterprise application platforms as a
service (aPaaS) that combine visual model-driven development,
social collaboration, enterprise integration, and secure cloud
deployment.
What they find is that these new players are faster, cheaper, and far
more productive than their older counterparts.

9. Revamp the App Delivery Offense
A football team that is consistently struggling to score
doesn’t just tinker with its offense; it completely
overhauls the system.
The same holds true for application development.
Many CIOs have found that identifying incremental
improvements simply isn’t enough. In order to win the
app delivery game, they had to embrace an entirely
new way of building and deploying applications.
Who are these app delivery champions? You’ll see a
few examples on the next page. But what they all have
in common is their use of the Mendix App Platform.

10. The App Delivery Champions
Click helmets to learn more.