Hands up anyone who doesn’t have enough apps on their Smart Phone? Thought not. Hands up everyone who remembers the passwords for all the apps on their Smart Phone? 

Even if you said yes I wouldn’t believe you.

The fact is, for me at least and I know many others, the folders on my iPhone are getting to the stage where they need sub-folders and I’m fighting an ongoing battle not to have to swipe to yet another screen. Maybe I’m disorganised but either way, we do all seem to be adding more and more apps to our devices. 

So what? I like apps

That’s good right?  OK, there’s a slight issue with laying them all out, and storage… but it’s all more choice and productivity, and largely that’s true in the consumer world. I have a wide range of public domain information at my finger tips that companies are keen to share with me.  Anything from handy product catalogues to lists of recommended nearby restaurants to apps that can tell me about the weather and probably sell me an umbrella at the same time. 

And besides, if it does all get a bit much for me we have a whole wave of bots coming along, so pretty soon we’ll just be talking to all these apps anyway. 

Governing for the future

But, while it’s all an open playing field in the consumer world there is a big complicated word that compels us to do things differently for business, namely 'governance'.  Now it’s a broader topic than I’ll cover extensively here, but part of it is about managing who sees what, when & where, and while it’s OK for a product catalogue to be shared extensively, the same may not be true for other types of corporate data. 

While the word ‘governance’ is generally a good indicator that conferences and presentations including it will likely be heavy going, it is nonetheless pretty fundamental. With more and more data swirling everywhere, and the types of data now being held becoming more critical and often more sensitive, working out who sees what and when is as important as who you let in your house, if not more so, as the results can be far more wide reaching. 

So when it comes to company data, including everything from customer data, to order history, financials, intellectual property and account information, we don’t want everybody, even in our own companies, to see everything. Being able to provide the right data to the right individual at the right time in the right place (and in a secure way) is really at the heart of enabling us to transform our organisations. 

If you can’t do that, you can’t be said to be controlling the flow of information. And if you can’t do that, you can’t be said to be digitally transforming your business, at least in any meaningful way. 

Password overload

On top of that, as a user, I’m generally confused enough about my corporate systems without having to navigate fields of data and apps that weren’t designed with me in mind and that I don't need to use in my day job. 

But, you can’t do it by sacrificing the very agility that allows apps to deliver business value in the first place. Don’t make me log into lots of different systems with lots of different passwords - my ability to remember non-personal, non-ascending or descending 12 character passwords including alpha-numerics, upper case letters and symbols is seriously so past capacity, it feels as if part of my brain has shut down. And don’t bolt everything down to such an extent that getting to the information I actually need to do my job feels like US passport control on a busy day. 

Setting Access & Sharing Information

The next instalment of our How to Build an App with Salesforce App Cloud webinar series will address the topic of Setting Access and Sharing Information. 

Whether this is making it easy to have the apps your employees need in one place (whoever produces them), controlling which parts of your data you want displayed to which people and when, or even pulling data easily from other systems into one view. We’ll show how, with the right platform, it is possible (with your governance policies) to give the right access to the right people in the right way. 

Register now to access the live webinar, and you can also take the chance to view recordings of the other webinars in the series so far.