Unleashing Optimisation by Democratising Expertise
This week is the Gartner Symposium 2019 on the Gold Coast and last week Gartner released the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020.
Gartner identifies a strategic technology trend as “one with substantial disruptive potential that is beginning to break out of an emerging state into broader impact and use, or which is rapidly growing with a high degree of volatility reaching tipping points over the next five years”
The key strategic technology trend we want to focus on this week is the “Democratisation of Expertise”. This is defined by Gartner the following 2 areas:
- Providing people, with access to technical expertise such as Machine Learning or Application Development tools
- Business Domain expertise such as sales process and economic analysis via a radically simplified experience without requiring extensive and costly training
Digging deeper within democratisation, there are 4 key aspects:
- Data and Analytics
- Development
- Design
- Knowledge
Today we will be focusing on the last two – Design and Knowledge.
Design
This aspect covers ‘Low code’ and ‘No code’ solutions, with automation of additional application development functions to empower the citizen developer.
While the terms low code and no code are often used together, they are targeted at very different end users. Low code is still targeted at developers and can have complexity to using it. Low code is intended to make development faster but some software engineering skills are still needed. The tools provide for agility in the development and deployment lifecycle, and are designed to simplify life for software engineers.
No code end users are intended to be business users, who know what problem they want to solve and what features their apps should have, but don’t have the necessary development skills to create a solution from scratch. A common misconception is that no code products are for building simple apps. With the tools available to software vendors today, highly capable and sophisticated products are being built with no code solutions – providing business users an array of easy to use features to build, easily, out their business processes.
Drag and drop fields allow users to quickly design interfaces that suit their requirements and render them automatically based on the device form factor – regardless of smart phone, tablet, mac or PC – to provide a consistent experience.
Knowledge
This aspect covers non IT professionals gaining access to tools and expert systems that empower them to use and apply specalised skills.
Historically there has been a “them and us” relationship between IT and the business. Stemming from the highly specialist skills required to deliver IT capability into the business. We’ve seen the last decade or so provide us with much more consumer-friendly technology solutions in our personal lives – from smart phones to in home entertainment. Once the domain of the local geek, these can now be easily configured by a much broader demographic. The constant improvement to ‘just-in-time’ and ‘step-by-step’ user guides integrated into the devices themselves, and coupled with reference material for troubleshooting and a plethora of online support, mean that the knowledge to set up and modify these devices is now (quite literally) in the hands of the end user.
That simplicity has progressively made its way into the business environment through different software solutions. This started with configurable products that were a hybrid of low code or a simple ‘logic-centric’ approach (still very much aimed at software engineers) but is rapidly progressing to the dawn of a new era – one in which the organizational solutions of choice utilize a ‘no-code-first’ approach to allow for internally driven optimization and scaling.
How can this help you?
Gartner has published their strategic technology trends based on their discussions with business and technology leaders across their wealth of networks. These technologies are already available and in use across many industries.
Alan King’s article on ‘Extending TCO by integrating IT and OT’ was published last week here, where he wrote about the areas you could focus on with a modular platform, to bring together business, technology, governance, process and people management. To be truly scalable, that modular platform should be a no code solution that – beyond bringing together these areas of your business – also empowers your teams to take action and deliver their own capability for the future.
Takeaway Tip
Look to implement solutions that offer no code development functionality. This will dramatically improve the flexibility of any initial implementation, ‘future-proof’ your organization against challenges presented by changing requirements and evolving processes, and reduce the overall cost of maintaining the solution moving forward.
When presented with a no code solution, delve into the limits of it’s scope and flexibility to uncover how broad this functionality is – and if there’s a ‘threshold’ after which a low code (or even full code) functionality is required to achieve what your organization needs.
The difference in cost between a robust and scalable no code solution, and that of a low, or even full code option is often far less significant than you might think – so always look for the solution that gives you the most control over your organisation’s future.
So how do you get started? Speak to the team at Dusk about our experience in delivering our collaborative work management SaaS solution to your business. Using bite size deliverables and incremental change, your business can transform progressively. Clean, secure integration with a polished user interface to design and build your baseline quickly.
This leads to improved productivity and visibility for your workforce. Connect to your existing systems to create an all of customer view that can be shared between all authorised parties.
The Dusk Mobile Intelligent Operations Platform is an industry leading collaborative work management platform. It connects your staff on any device, any time and in any location. Integrate your favourite products quickly and easily for real time collaboration amongst your teams.
Automating work functions and delivering a connected experience has never been easier and achieving productivity improvements can start tomorrow.
If you’d like to find out more on visibility, consistent messaging, workflows, automation with project management and easy integration for your teams or business, get in touch today with our friendly team.
Any questions: Our community is here to help in the Support & Updates area!
References
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