In today’s data-driven business environment, enterprise tools and apps are an essential part of daily operations.
They help employees collect, understand and share company data to streamline and simplify processes, reduce costs, and enhance collaboration and communication between business units, partners and customers. They can be small mobile apps or large-scale enterprise systems, and the typical organization has around 254 applications – some off-the-shelf and some proprietary.
The majority of off-the-shelf tools are rigid and domain-specific, and therefore have intrinsic feature ceilings. To achieve the desired functionality, organizations will often develop custom applications to meet the needs of the business and the tasks at hand. However, developing these complex, data-driven tools from scratch is fraught with many challenges:
- Development is time-consuming and resource-intensive, often requiring highly skilled technical staff to develop both the frontend UI/UX and the backend infrastructure.
- Tenuous integrations with proprietary and third-party APIs are necessary connect systems together, and incompatibilities will eventually arise, usually when you least expect it.
- Data exists in each system in heterogeneous formats and must be migrated from one system to the other, leading to inconsistencies and errors that complicate data governance.
- Developers must ensure data security throughout development to protect customer information, trade secrets and internal business processes.
- Business requirements change frequently. No one can predict with 100% certainty what the business priorities will be tomorrow, let alone in the next three to six months – yet that’s how long it takes to develop an internal tool. Developers building software based on ever-changing specifications can find themselves in indefinite limbo, finding it difficult or impossible to complete and deliver a solution.
These challenges and business requirements put unreasonable expectations and deadlines on developers, leading to less-than-desirable outcomes and technical debt. Organizations end up investing heavily in tools that – in the end – may not even meet the initial requirements or the needs of the business.
Configure, Don’t Build – In Minutes, not Months
Fortunately there’s a better way to create purpose-built, customized internal apps faster and more cost-effectively than the traditional way.
Directus is being used by a number of Fortune 100 companies to power any data-driven project, including business-critical internal tools for any purpose. Our no-code Data Studio allows you to intuitively define a data model that creates an agile backbone for your internal application.
With that solid data foundation in place, you can then craft a completely tailored app experience for your business users. Choose from various highly configurable Layouts for browsing data, Interfaces for managing data, and Dashboard panels for data visualization.
And since Directus is a white-label solution, you can fully customize branding, themes, and general look-and-feel to embrace your company’s styleguide. It truly becomes your platform.
Most importantly, Directus Studio isn’t your typical no-code platform with a nice façade, but proprietary data and spaghetti code behind the curtain. With Directus, you get a pure and unopinionated SQL database that engineers and database administrators can actually work with.
If you already have a SQL database, you can even install Directus on top with absolutely no changes being made to your precious data. Either way, you'll get a set of auto-documenting REST and GraphQL APIs based on the architecture you defined, along with automation tools, event hooks, and everything else you need to connect your new tool with the other services your company uses. It’s a solution that grows alongside your ever-changing needs.
Build Faster and Thrive
With the average business managing roughly 162.9TB of data, internal tools are essential to extracting the value of that data and enabling your business to thrive. Directus enables data democratization across all users, so organizations can unlock the power of their data without having to rely solely on their limited engineering resources.
With Directus, you can build purpose-built, data-driven internal tools and apps quickly, while reducing overhead. Get started with Directus Cloud today.