Enterprise application developers have gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to notoriety and glory for their work. Speaking broadly, they do not enjoy the same "cool" factor that is often associated with commercial applications.

But as the workforce becomes more entrepreneurial than ever, they're also leveraging technologies that allow them to solve business needs quickly and efficiently. This gives them the "cool" factor to meet the needs of their customers, which in the past would never have been possible. By bringing these business applications to the browser and phone and making them easily accessible, end users can consume and turn around their negative "built by IT" stigma.

Another way to increase the cool factor is by empowering enterprise employees to build applications that require little or no coding or development support. Building your own application (BYOA) is taking off, but what is next for the revolution?

Here are five ways business users can build cooler enterprise apps and do it faster and more effectively:

Bring Your Own Data

Gone are the days of porting data between systems to get to the information. Today's app building platform seamlessly connects to the structured and unstructured data that resides in existing, even legacy, systems. Surfacing this data in a new but familiar way allows the app designer to immediately provide value instead of having to start with the steep learning curve of a new data model.

Jump Start by Appifying

Building your own application shouldn't include grunt work that allows the app to work – basically the plumbing between the data model, the forms and the workflow. "Appifying" starts with something you know, such as a SharePoint List, a Salesforce Contact or SAP Products, and generates the glue that every application needs. All the methods for working with the data and the forms for users to do something meaningful with the data are auto-generated. On top of that, the workflow can use these generated forms at points where there needs to be some user interaction. Appifying allows designers to accelerate building the application by focusing on the real business value without having to worry about the mundane building blocks.

Read the complete article at Enterprise Apps Today.