As the name implies, situational apps are on-demand apps that are created in response to a specific business situation (or need) that may arise infrequently. In general, the productivity gains attributed to a situational app are limited to only a few occasions a year and to few individuals. Therefore, most corporations are unlikely to devote significant resources to the development of such apps, and typical develop cycles may be so long that the situation itself will have expired before a professionally-developed app is ready.

However, in our daily jobs, situational apps can be very effective and useful, which provides motivation for business users to create them on their own. For most managers, this means reaching for their favorite tool: the spreadsheet. For many, the spreadsheet is the universal tool for storing, processing, and sharing data. Most business users are already familiar with the basic functionality of spreadsheets, making them easily accessible to everyone. In essence, whenever we use a spreadsheet, we are creating an app to address a given situation, in other words, a situational app.

The majority of situational apps are created by a small audience of users who have a personal stake in ensuring that a business task is performed successfully. Since situational apps most likely will be used by only a few people, they normally don't follow the corporate style or structure required for enterprise apps. They are down-and-dirty apps created to get the job done as quickly as possible.

An addition to spreadsheets, some users have resorted to building situational apps using public cloud solutions, which can lead to a proliferation of cloud accounts that the IT department is unaware of. In many cases, if the person who signed up for the solution has left the company, no one maybe aware of its existence and the corporate data it stores. As a result, it can been a real challenge for corporate IT to manage and control all the web services that individual departments have signed up for.

Ideally, it would much better if users had access to an internal, easy-to-use solution that allowed business users to create and deploy their own situational apps as needed. At the same time, it would provide corporate IT the ability to monitor, control and manage the apps and the data at the level that has been defined by the business.

By the way, one of the first tools that allowed business users to create situational apps on demand was Lotus Notes. It allowed any user to create small targeted apps that served their needs, thus improving their productivity and effectiveness. Most of these apps had only a few users within a department or group. Lotus Notes became one of the most successful solutions for creating situational apps -- even to this day. It empowered business users to quickly create the targeted apps they need, while meeting corporate requirements in terms of data control and security.

Next time we will compare spreadsheets versus apps.