Something shifted this year. Not overnight, but clearly enough that we've all felt it. Enterprise clients aren't coming to us with website briefs anymore. They're coming with platform briefs. The conversations are different, the problems are bigger, and honestly, the work is a lot more interesting.
What You Need to Know
- Enterprise web projects are shifting from "build us a site" to "build us a system"
- The five-page brochure site still has its place, but it's not where the interesting problems are
- Web applications that serve internal teams, process data, and integrate with other systems are the new normal
The Brief Has Changed
Two years ago, a typical enterprise brief looked like this: home page, about, services, contact, maybe a news section. Five pages. CMS for content updates. Responsive. Done.
The briefs we're getting now look nothing like that.
"We need a portal where our 200 staff can submit and track applications." "We need a system that pulls data from three sources and presents it in a dashboard." "We need an internal tool that replaces a process currently running on email and shared drives."
These aren't websites. They're applications that happen to run in a browser.
Why Now
The web grew up. Browsers can do things now that required desktop software five years ago. Organisations that used to build internal tools in .NET or Java are realising they can build them for the browser instead, and get the benefit of access from anywhere, no installation, and updates that happen once instead of on every machine.
Cloud hosting is getting cheaper and more reliable. The NZ tech sector is producing developers who can build these things properly. And enterprise clients have seen enough bad internal tools to know that "functional" isn't good enough anymore.
What This Means for Us
We're doing more application development and less traditional web development. The projects are bigger, longer, and more interesting. They need proper scoping, architecture, user research, and iterative delivery. You can't waterfall a web application the way you can a five-page site.
The skillset is different too. Our team needs to think about data models, user roles, permissions, integrations, error handling. Not just layouts and content blocks.
We're not complaining. This is exactly the kind of work IDESIGN was built for. Strategy and design from the start. Build it right. Make it work for the people who use it.
The five-page website isn't going anywhere for small businesses and marketing teams. But for enterprise? The brief has moved on. And for those of us who care about building things people actually use every day, this side of the work is where it gets good.