European Commission Effort Highlights App Development Challenges in Government
Blog: Appian Insight
Public organizations the world over are facing pressure to ramp up their app development capabilities. Application development platforms play a critical role in streamlining and accelerating this process by empowering government organizations to quickly create unique apps and services tailored to their constituents’ needs. This functionality is particularly important when you consider the diversity of users that will interact with the government.
Varied levels of technical comfort, access to technology, and ability to interact with traditional user interfaces all come into play when developing government apps—your audience is everybody living within your region, not just a specific user demographic. This creates escalating app development challenges, something that is emphasized in a recent effort by the European Commission.
“Government agencies are facing escalating app development challenges.”
EC pushing for app accessibility
The EC has noticed a somewhat troubling trend across the European Union—many government apps are not built to be accessible from those who are blind, deaf, or hard of hearing. These accessibility issues are set to become even more pronounced moving forward, and the EC is establishing new government app standards to encourage accessibility to be built into public sector apps, Mobile World Live reported.
The EU has been working to develop a digital single market where constituents can interact with government entities and private sector organizations seamlessly across digital channels, having a common experience regardless of which devices they use to access services. This isn’t possible if significant portions of the population are unable to interact with government apps because those solutions have not been designed to be accessible. This is a huge problem, the report explained, as 80 million people in the EU are affected by a disability, and approximately 120 million will be impacted thusly by 2020 due to aging in the population.
Staying ahead of app development demands
Government agencies, whether they are in the EU or US, are faced with more development challenges than simply creating new apps. They must update those solutions as new functions become necessary, tweak apps to work with different hardware and device configurations, patch security vulnerabilities, and make them accessible to a wide range of user groups. The development burden here can be staggering.
Business process management software with built-in app development platforms allows government agencies to accelerate app development, quickly customize solutions to meet the needs of different users, and ensure apps end up aligning with process workflows. Accessibility for individuals with disabilities is just one component of app customization that is increasingly critical in the public sector, making efficient development processes critical.
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