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The article by Arjun Jamnasdass, Chief Customer Officer of AgilePoint explains the concept of codeless, a new paradigm in software and enterprise application development.
Digital transformation has become a cliché. Still, it is crucial for mature and large organizations to remain competitive and relevant in the market. You may compare Digital transformation to the process of remodeling a house. Just as remodeling a house involves updating and upgrading different aspects of the home to meet modern standards and improve its overall functionality, digital transformation involves updating and upgrading a company's processes, systems, and technologies to meet current business requirements and improve its overall efficiency and effectiveness. In both cases, the goal is to create a more modern and functional environment that can better meet the needs of its inhabitants or users. Just as a home remodel might involve updating the plumbing, electrical wiring, and appliances to improve the overall comfort and convenience of the space, digital transformation might include implementing new software, updating IT infrastructure, and improving data analytics to enhance the company's operations and competitiveness in the market. Overall, digital transformation is a complex and ongoing process that requires a comprehensive approach and a commitment to continuous improvement. It may involve integrating digital technologies into all aspects of an organization to fundamentally change how it operates and delivers value to its customers. Or modernization of part of operations, like finance, supply chain, or compliance. Ultimately, digital transformation enables organizations to stay competitive and thrive in a volatile business environment. Below we unpack why digital transformation projects fail and why winners win in their Digital Transformation initiatives. Why Does Digital Transformation Mostly Lead to Failure? According to studies by McKinsey, more than 70% of digital transformations lead to failures, while the success rate of tech-savvy industries is around 24%. Companies with less than 100 employees are 2.7x more likely to achieve success in digital transformation than those with 50,000 or more employees. “ There is no alternative to digital transformation. Visionary companies will carve out new strategic options for themselves — those that don’t adapt will fail .” Jeff Bezos, founder, and CEO of Amazon. There’s no denying that digital transformation is challenging as you need to master continued innovation to leverage new technologies like AI, IoT, Digital Process Automation, and data analytics. However, triggers keep varying as sometimes you may need to meet the change in customer expectations or consolidate an organization after a merger. These fluctuating needs require companies to adopt flexible, governance-ready, and innovative technologies. Below we list which factors determine the success and you can win in the race to digitally transform operations. Critical Reasons Why Winners Win? Having the right tech in place is only one part of the story, and the crucial part is how companies utilize this technology to support changes is the deciding factor of a successful digital transformation. Deploying the right tech-savvy leaders Adding the right leaders at the right places in the hierarchy is one of the key factors in digital transformation. Senior leaders must be more involved in the transformation journey. Many organizations have emphasized how engaging a chief digital officer (CDO) resulted in 1.6 times higher chance than others to report a successful digital transformation. Selecting a clear goal and transformation candidate A vague idea of succeeding in digital transformation doesn't cut it. Selecting a clear use case for a digital transformation project is essential to ensure that the project is relevant, achievable, and adds value to the organization. It helps to define the project's scope and expected outcomes, build support from stakeholders, and align the project with the company's strategic outcome it plans to achieve. Bridge the gap between legacy and modern tech platforms Another essential factor is engaging integrators and technology-innovation managers, which helps bridge the gaps between traditional and modern technology solutions within an enterprise. Below we list five pillars of Digital Transformation journey, from talent development and reduction in technical debt to innovation across departments and agile governance. Five Pillars of Digital Transformation 1) Talent development Invest in talent acquisition and retention strategies that align with your team’s digital transformation goals and objectives. World Economic Forum estimates that by 2024, 40% of workers will need up to six months of reskilling, and 94% of business leaders anticipate their employees to acquire new skills. Low-Code/No-Code and Citizen Development platforms can help upskill workers. For example, GC-SDA, an AgilePoint customer, trained its non-IT staff for application development. Brian Schimpf, formerly a Business Analyst (BA) and Citizen Developer at GC-SDA, studied criminal justice and project management. His manager helped Brian acquire and polish his digital skills by training him on the AgilePoint platform. It allowed the organization to upskill the internal workforce to develop in-house apps. It is just one example that shows how you can upskill and train employees on the latest technologies like business intelligence (BI), AI, IoT, and digital process automation. If you are a large team/organization, you might have to establish digital upskilling and reskilling program to equip employees with the necessary skills. Project Management Institute (PMI) offers a range of Citizen Developer courses to help your team upskill and reskill in this emerging tech. 2) Culture of innovation and continuous learning inspires creativity and experimentation: By encouraging continuous learning, you can retain employees longer than the industry average. Hence, technology becomes an avenue to foster creativity and participation as your team members develop new solutions. 3) Reducing Technical Debt As part of your Digital Transformation journey, you may thoroughly audit the organization's legacy systems and infrastructure to identify areas that require modernization and optimization. We still come across prospects and customers running their operations through Excel. Hence, you can even start your digitalization journey with Excel . Assessing platform fit is vital to reducing technical debt and modernizing your systems and processes. The platform you choose to enable digital transformation should support a range of use cases. You may start with upgrading your SharePoint workflows, moving on to cloud-enablement of existing apps, and building greenfield app projects. Develop a phased approach to legacy system modernization that prioritizes critical systems and processes. We also call it the 'proof-of-value' approach instead of proof-of-concept, the former being rooted in identifying modernization projects that provide the best ROI. 4) Innovation across Departments Another trend is to create cross-functional teams to foster collaboration and innovation across departments. It has become a significant theme for new digital transformation projects as IT leaders are expected to build cross-functional solutions that span horizontally across the whole organization, even to its partners and subsidiaries. To understand more about creating cross-departmental solutions (that provide higher ROI) and knocking down traditional silos, you may check out our session post on “ Can Citizen Development overcome the great divide between business and IT ”? 5) Agile Governance As you start contemplating digital transformation use cases for mature organizations with high compliance and reporting requirements, choosing platforms that support your compliance needs becomes crucial. Apart from establishing clear guidelines and protocols for decision-making, risk management, and resource allocation in transformation projects, you may probe into the transformation platform’s governance tooling. For instance, here’s a video blog explaining the governance model of AgilePoint . It may give ideas about how to approach governance, even in the case of other platforms. Fig 2- Layered Enterprise Governance Framework
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Category: Digital Transformation
The article by Arjun Jamnasdass, Chief Customer Officer of AgilePoint explains the concept of codeless, a new paradigm in software and enterprise application development.
Digital transformation has become a cliché. Still, it is crucial for mature and large organizations to remain competitive and relevant in the market. You may compare Digital transformation to the process of remodeling a house. Just as remodeling a house involves updating and upgrading different aspects of the home to meet modern standards and improve its overall functionality, digital transformation involves updating and upgrading a company's processes, systems, and technologies to meet current business requirements and improve its overall efficiency and effectiveness. In both cases, the goal is to create a more modern and functional environment that can better meet the needs of its inhabitants or users. Just as a home remodel might involve updating the plumbing, electrical wiring, and appliances to improve the overall comfort and convenience of the space, digital transformation might include implementing new software, updating IT infrastructure, and improving data analytics to enhance the company's operations and competitiveness in the market. Overall, digital transformation is a complex and ongoing process that requires a comprehensive approach and a commitment to continuous improvement. It may involve integrating digital technologies into all aspects of an organization to fundamentally change how it operates and delivers value to its customers. Or modernization of part of operations, like finance, supply chain, or compliance. Ultimately, digital transformation enables organizations to stay competitive and thrive in a volatile business environment. Below we unpack why digital transformation projects fail and why winners win in their Digital Transformation initiatives. Why Does Digital Transformation Mostly Lead to Failure? According to studies by McKinsey, more than 70% of digital transformations lead to failures, while the success rate of tech-savvy industries is around 24%. Companies with less than 100 employees are 2.7x more likely to achieve success in digital transformation than those with 50,000 or more employees. “ There is no alternative to digital transformation. Visionary companies will carve out new strategic options for themselves — those that don’t adapt will fail .” Jeff Bezos, founder, and CEO of Amazon. There’s no denying that digital transformation is challenging as you need to master continued innovation to leverage new technologies like AI, IoT, Digital Process Automation, and data analytics. However, triggers keep varying as sometimes you may need to meet the change in customer expectations or consolidate an organization after a merger. These fluctuating needs require companies to adopt flexible, governance-ready, and innovative technologies. Below we list which factors determine the success and you can win in the race to digitally transform operations. Critical Reasons Why Winners Win? Having the right tech in place is only one part of the story, and the crucial part is how companies utilize this technology to support changes is the deciding factor of a successful digital transformation. Deploying the right tech-savvy leaders Adding the right leaders at the right places in the hierarchy is one of the key factors in digital transformation. Senior leaders must be more involved in the transformation journey. Many organizations have emphasized how engaging a chief digital officer (CDO) resulted in 1.6 times higher chance than others to report a successful digital transformation. Selecting a clear goal and transformation candidate A vague idea of succeeding in digital transformation doesn't cut it. Selecting a clear use case for a digital transformation project is essential to ensure that the project is relevant, achievable, and adds value to the organization. It helps to define the project's scope and expected outcomes, build support from stakeholders, and align the project with the company's strategic outcome it plans to achieve. Bridge the gap between legacy and modern tech platforms Another essential factor is engaging integrators and technology-innovation managers, which helps bridge the gaps between traditional and modern technology solutions within an enterprise. Below we list five pillars of Digital Transformation journey, from talent development and reduction in technical debt to innovation across departments and agile governance. Five Pillars of Digital Transformation 1) Talent development Invest in talent acquisition and retention strategies that align with your team’s digital transformation goals and objectives. World Economic Forum estimates that by 2024, 40% of workers will need up to six months of reskilling, and 94% of business leaders anticipate their employees to acquire new skills. Low-Code/No-Code and Citizen Development platforms can help upskill workers. For example, GC-SDA, an AgilePoint customer, trained its non-IT staff for application development. Brian Schimpf, formerly a Business Analyst (BA) and Citizen Developer at GC-SDA, studied criminal justice and project management. His manager helped Brian acquire and polish his digital skills by training him on the AgilePoint platform. It allowed the organization to upskill the internal workforce to develop in-house apps. It is just one example that shows how you can upskill and train employees on the latest technologies like business intelligence (BI), AI, IoT, and digital process automation. If you are a large team/organization, you might have to establish digital upskilling and reskilling program to equip employees with the necessary skills. Project Management Institute (PMI) offers a range of Citizen Developer courses to help your team upskill and reskill in this emerging tech. 2) Culture of innovation and continuous learning inspires creativity and experimentation: By encouraging continuous learning, you can retain employees longer than the industry average. Hence, technology becomes an avenue to foster creativity and participation as your team members develop new solutions. 3) Reducing Technical Debt As part of your Digital Transformation journey, you may thoroughly audit the organization's legacy systems and infrastructure to identify areas that require modernization and optimization. We still come across prospects and customers running their operations through Excel. Hence, you can even start your digitalization journey with Excel . Assessing platform fit is vital to reducing technical debt and modernizing your systems and processes. The platform you choose to enable digital transformation should support a range of use cases. You may start with upgrading your SharePoint workflows, moving on to cloud-enablement of existing apps, and building greenfield app projects. Develop a phased approach to legacy system modernization that prioritizes critical systems and processes. We also call it the 'proof-of-value' approach instead of proof-of-concept, the former being rooted in identifying modernization projects that provide the best ROI. 4) Innovation across Departments Another trend is to create cross-functional teams to foster collaboration and innovation across departments. It has become a significant theme for new digital transformation projects as IT leaders are expected to build cross-functional solutions that span horizontally across the whole organization, even to its partners and subsidiaries. To understand more about creating cross-departmental solutions (that provide higher ROI) and knocking down traditional silos, you may check out our session post on “ Can Citizen Development overcome the great divide between business and IT ”? 5) Agile Governance As you start contemplating digital transformation use cases for mature organizations with high compliance and reporting requirements, choosing platforms that support your compliance needs becomes crucial. Apart from establishing clear guidelines and protocols for decision-making, risk management, and resource allocation in transformation projects, you may probe into the transformation platform’s governance tooling. For instance, here’s a video blog explaining the governance model of AgilePoint . It may give ideas about how to approach governance, even in the case of other platforms. Fig 2- Layered Enterprise Governance Framework
By now you’ve certainly heard all the news about the latest trend to set the internet alight – ChatGPT. Some have rolled out the red carpet for our new robot overlord, while others screech in terror about the implications of this new technology and the fact that we don’t quite know why it works as well as it does. Wherever you fall on this spectrum, it promises to have huge implications in your business applications. What is ChatGPT? According to OpenAI, the team behind ChatGPT, they’ve ‘…trained a model.. which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises and reject inappropriate requests.’ Well, that sure sounds like a mouthful. If you’re a fan of brevity, ChatGPT is the smartest, most context-aware chatbot the world has ever seen, and has characteristics you might even call ‘human.’ What Does ChatGPT Mean for Business Apps? This is the million-dollar question. So, let’s go right to the source, and see what ChatGPT has to say on the subject: It can be integrated into customer service chatbots to provide more accurate and human-like responses to customer queries, leading to improved customer satisfaction, reduced response times and increased efficiency. It can be used for language-related tasks such as sentiment analysis, text summarization and content generation. This can help businesses automate certain tasks, saving time and resources, and improving the overall quality of the output. So in short, the incorporation of ChatGPT into business apps can provide businesses with a competitive edge by providing more efficient and effective customer service, and enabling more accurate language-related tasks. Sounds pretty good to us! What Will I See in the AgilePoint ChatGPT Demo? Being at the forefront of technological advances, the team has cooked up 2 demo scenarios to show how ChatGPT might be used in a B2C context to improve customer experience, and improve conversion rates in an eCommerce scenario. In this demo, you will see: Leveraging ChatGPT from an AgilePoint form to reduce friction and provide decision support ChatGPT called as part of an AgilePoint process to conduct research in the car buying process, and make suggestions You’ll notice that in this demo scenario we are calling the ChatGPT API directly using our REST connector, but don’t worry, support for native, fully abstracted lookups and process activities are in the works!
The Digital Storm Since the rapid growth of cloud computing, IT infrastructure has dramatically changed from being a centralized system to a connection of multiple systems. Now, instead of one provider holding an organization’s toolbox, several do, which has brewed a digital storm whereby legacy apps need to be modernized to adapt to changes in real-time. One common approach to managing this storm is to modernize existing applications, integrate them with new applications, and hash out any problems later. However, the problems that surface from this type of approach make the storm faster and stronger, and thereby more catastrophic for the future. To counter the storm, a new approach is needed, one where businesses are able to bunker up with stormproof IT infrastructure that is also future-proof. One possibility is to use a Low-Code Development Platform, or LCDP to future-proof your organization's IT infrastructure. LCDPs allow organizations to build new infrastructure, applications, processes, and workflows much faster than the traditional software development approach. They also provide critical features needed to ensure your IT infrastructure is never compromised, even when inevitable changes are demanded. The following is a list of critical characteristics that an enterprise-grade LCDP provides so that you are never caught out in a digital storm again: Architecture Manageability Deployment Embeddability Devices and browsers Mobile platforms Upgrades to business platforms Downtime Scalability New technologies Reliability New standards All of these features are detailed in our white paper, which you can download here . How does AgilePoint fit into your digital transformation roadmap? A key step in starting your digital transformation journey is to identify a tool that can provide you with the speed and agility needed to power your organization. The tool needs to be an enterprise-grade business process management, but also an application development platform that empowers citizen developers to create countless applications to automate every touchpoint in the customer journey and your internal processes. A platform capable of being both a business process management and low-code application platform is what Forrester calls a Digital Process Automation (DPA) platform. Take for example AgilePoint NX, a powerful digital process automation platform that includes all the future-proof characteristics described above, and the one with most out-of-the-box functionalities such as:
The article is based on PMXPO 2022 - PMI Virtual Experience Series. Jesse Shiah, Co-founder and CEO of AgilePoint delivered a talk about Citizen Development's role in Digital Transformation.
Srikant Radhakrishnan, Head of Business Solutions & Services at AgilePoint introduces the concept of RME or Relevant Market Exposure. He argues that RME provides a more nuanced product development metric than Time-to-Market.
" Rather than acting as the technology gatekeeper, CIOs and their IT organizations need to become the enablers of crucial business change and innovation ", wrote Sriram Sabesan, Senior Manager – Technology Strategy, Software & Platforms, Accenture , and Christian Kelly, managing director at Accenture. Sriram co-authored other thought provoking primers about low-code/no-code technology including " Technology Democratization for smaller companies ", and " The Seven Levers of Digital Transformation ". I reached out to Sriram to ask him about his take on: The emerging landscape of low-code/no-code technologies The way he sees things from his extensive engagement with large enterprise clients How business leaders should strategize about the low-code/no-code technology space as a means to make their enterprises more agile and resilient? Sriram has a rich background in establishing the right enterprise architecture to scale digital transformation initiatives. He also advises the client firms on leveraging new and innovative technologies and implementing them by setting up the right foundation. Below is a lightly edited version of a Q&A session with Sriram Sabesan.
This article is a lightly-edited summary of Ian Duncan’s appearance on our Podcast, “Why Transformations Fail?” If you haven’t listened to our show yet, be sure to check it out here. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ian-duncan-on-why-transformations-fail/id1621277278?i=1000558854543
In this webinar, you can learn how to use a Low-Code Platform to quickly digitize and automate business processes previously managed in Excel files and…
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