Enterprise Applications should Evolve in Accordance with the Transformational Shift to Mobile
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Merline Saintil, Head of Global Engineering Operations, Yahoo
In the recent years, the industry has displayed an active inclination towards mobility. In view of this massive platform shift to mobile, it is expected that through 2017, around 3.8 billion mobile devices would be connected to the Internet. This transformative shift is driven by proliferation of mobile devices and user behaviour as the mobile surfaces as an integral part of our daily lives. Further, these developments have been impacting the current ways of product design and development at Yahoo. The other significant trend is Anticipatory Computing or Contextual Search on mobiles, which revolves around enhancing user experience. Finally, the industry has evolved considerably with respect to the possibility of levelling the playing field for an individual and an enterprise. The abundance of platform tools for servers and clients has been the driving trend behind these developments.
Focusing on Enterprise Applications
The platform shift to mobile has redefined the industry. Yet, many enterprise applications, especially several traditional applications has fallen behind in keeping pace with this shift. The relatively slow pace at which enterprise applications are moving towards innovation in terms of mobiles remains a major roadblock.
The Priorities
Currently, we are working towards building a worldclass team, developing beautiful products and executing against rapid launch cycles. It is our mission to make people’s daily habits more entertaining and inspiring, and often, delivering mission-specific products surfaces as a great challenge. Another challenge is to facilitate operationalization across the engineering section, while ensuring high efficiency levels and focus.
My experience in different areas such as program management, operations and engineering has been highly helpful in successful execution of my current role. Moreover, my stints with world-class organizations have been instrumental in my ability to stay relevant in the industry.
Thoughts on Innovation
With respect to the importance of innovation, I would say that an ideal innovative approach should not end with a creative idea. Instead, innovation takes place when we are able to transform an idea into scalable and sustainable business solutions. In order to drive innovation across our organization, we focus on short development cycles. This approach has been helpful in accelerating p r o t o t y p i n g , iteration, and creative thinking through hackathons, proof of concepts and others. As a result, we are able to experiment with different technologies. The Yahoo News Digest, is a recent innovative approach that breaks down a piece of news into its fundamental elements and further, meaningfully combines them with selected views from across the web. The product has served its purpose successfully, as it enables a summarized form of important news twice a day. Moreover, the News Digest facilitates a simplified, effortless and comprehensive reading experience. (As told to Thomson Antony)
