There’s no doubt that 2020 has been a crazy year. And with all the uncertainty in the world, business leaders have needed to make important pivots in order to experience continued success--or even just to continue to survive. 

But the old adage in life, leadership, and business remains true: you should never let a good crisis go to waste. Every year, there are innovations that become strategic opportunities to advance your organization. And in such an upset year like 2020, those advancements become all the more important.

So as IT leaders reflect back on everything that’s happened this year and plan for the future, here are 5 lessons that smart IT leaders are taking with them into 2021 and beyond.

1. The way UX design is implemented in enterprises needs to be modernized.

The fact that UX innovation is essential to the success of a business is a given for smart business leaders. Leading edge organizations are always seeking to get innovative ideas to market quickly and to update iteratively as they track user patterns and rise to meet customer expectations. 

And in order to accomplish that goal, you need to think innovatively about your approach to not only designing UX but how you’re developing and deploying it as well. 

On the backend, microservices have served to modularize app development and increase organizational agility. But for many organizations, the frontend monolith remains. This is why smart IT leaders are turning to micro frontend architectures to extend that same level of modularity to the frontend.

2. The news that “portals are dead” is dead.

Web portals have long been declared dead, pretty much since the advent of Google. And for that particular use case, it’s absolutely true. 

But as James Governor points out, just because something has been declared “dead” by the IT community, that doesn’t mean it isn’t still an important piece of revenue generating technology used by large organizations. Portals might serve different purposes than was common at the time of their conception, but they still offer a great deal of value to organizations trying to aggregate information into user-specific dashboards.

3. Smart enterprises are looking into how they can increase code reuse.

While code reuse isn’t the best option for every situation, there are many instances when it will enable teams to dramatically decrease their time to market while also providing an overall better experience to the user. It also can help large enterprises maintain consistent functionality and look and feel across separate apps within the same organization, which increases usability and overall brand identity. 

This is another benefit of developing applications in micro frontends, as these individual pieces of functionality have codebases that can be reused more easily than if they were a part of a different style of application architecture. This is also why we here at Entando have created the Entando Component Repository, where UX/UI components can be stored and reused across multiple projects. 

4. Kubernetes operators help enterprises modernize but they need to find ways to simplify building apps on Kubernetes.

Smart enterprises have already adopted containerized deployments on Kubernetes. And they’ve found that it has enabled them to more productively build cloud-native apps that are resilient and highly scalable. 

But what they’ve also found is that Kubernetes deployments introduce a degree of complexity that now needs to be managed in new ways. So smart IT leaders are looking for ways to streamline their deployments with Kubernetes platforms like Red Hat OpenShift, Amazon EKS, Platform9, Azure, GKE, and others. Leveraging the capabilities of these platforms helps keep costs down, relative to doing everything manually and in-house. 

And what’s great about a platform like Entando is that it integrates with these Kubernetes platforms to provide tools to build innovative UX in that Kubernetes environment. 

 

5. Low code platforms, while easy to use, are limited in their capabilities.

The great thing about low code platforms is that it’s easy to get a website or web app off the ground quickly and without a great deal of technical skill. However, they are incredibly limited in their capabilities, leaving many organizations without the flexibility to deliver the kinds of functionality and user experiences their customers, employees, and stakeholders are looking for.

On the other hand, what smart IT leaders are looking for is a way to standardize and streamline how code is built, deployed, and maintained without having to build their own framework to do it. This is where a platform like Entando can come in to help.

Build better enterprise apps faster with Entando.

When release cycles take months instead of weeks, your business is left unable to deliver modern online experiences. Development and deployment bottlenecks slow your ability to make application updates, keeping you from iterating and innovating. And outdated or clunky UX keeps you from winning customers over and retaining them.

So that’s why we created a platform to help you get your ideas to market faster.

Entando is the leading micro frontend platform for building enterprise web apps on Kubernetes. We want to change the way enterprises think about building their apps, sites, and portals in order to innovate more quickly.

With Entando, you can:

• Leverage customized blueprints using the Entando Component Generator (built on JHipster) to quickly create micro frontends and assemble them into an app.
• Reuse UI/UX components across multiple projects via the Entando Component Repository, saving money and increasing development speed. 
• Scale apps quickly and effectively with Entando’s custom Kubernetes operator, automating the deployment of high availability, self-healing applications. 
• Centrally manage user roles with Entando Identity Management (built on Keycloak).

Entando is open source with available enterprise support and services. Begin developing on the platform today, and get a quote to see how our team can help your enterprise build better apps, sites, and portals--faster.