By now we’ve all heard of the transformational power that the gig economy will bring to enterprises. It’s assumed that by 2020, over 40% of the workforce will be contractors.
One question that I’ve repeatedly received from development leaders revolves around how to become more agile in leading development initiatives within more mixed and complex environments.
I believe that there will be three key considerations for leaders to become more successful in leading development in the gig economy.
Three ways to lead development in the gig economy
Give developers the right toolset – and a choice
Like all good carpenters, developers need the right tools – they need a set of programmable interfaces that are well-documented and that just work. Especially in mixed environments, if this does not happen employees will become disengaged, and the work will show that.
Our developers chose to integrate the Mapbox mapping capabilities with our programmable communication API’s so that developers could build applications quickly. Working with Mapbox, we put together use cases to embed maps/dynamic location via 2-way messaging into mobile applications.
Now, logistics companies can let their consumers know where their package is on the driver journey, and whether packages need to be rescheduled.
“Ride-sharing, package delivery, and on-demand services require accurate location and timing to be communicated to users. I want a 15-minute window for when my package will arrive at my door, not a half-day. Anything less is a hassle for a modern consumer, and will bottleneck adoption of an app, platform, or service. SAP Live Link 365 pairs seamlessly with Mapbox location services at an API-level to expose these capabilities to developers to provide precise, traffic-aware arrival times and send them via SMS,” said Matt Irwin, Director of Business Intelligence and Data Visualization at Mapbox
Select and build communication capabilities early on in the lifecycle
Often when organizations provide development timelines, the last thing they consider is how these applications and systems will communicate with their customer and audience.
Given the global nature of work today and the challenges that it brings, orgs may be forced into an integration with a API that is incompletely documented, insecure from an authentication perspective, or even one that does not provide universal capabilities.
Interfaces need to work with intelligent notifications, enabling customers to consume API’s across any channel (push, email, SMS, and social). Organizations shouldn’t have to hope that their communication provider will support the next big social app that varies across geographies – it should just work.
Connect with things
Sometimes lost in the gig economy discussion is that by 2020 there will be billions of things that will need to be connected all over the world, and there are a number of IoT interfaces that are emerging – wideband, narrowband, LoRA, etc..
The technology that connects these ‘things’ needs to also be ubiquitous, and not fail as the device roams on various networks. Simplifying challenges must be top of mind, and woven through everything that developers do in the future.
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