Digital Transformation is on every CIO’s mind right now. But exactly how to get there is a big challenge.
Everyone knows the benefits of digital transformation. According to a report from Forrester, the top drivers from most CXOs are improving the customer experience, quickening the pace of innovation, and decreasing the time-to-market for essential services. Altimeter adds modernizing the IT infrastructure and improving operation agility.
With a fully digital company, you have access to incredible amounts of data about your operations and interactions that can make you more customer-centric, efficient, and quick to make any needed changes.
So What’s the Hold Up?
Although the benefits are clearly in everyone’s mind, becoming a completely digital company is still a long way off for most companies. The Forrester report says that only 11% of companies are even digitally mature and most are a long way off.
There are many hurdles in the path to digital transformation. Proving the ROI of new measures, getting the needed budget, and dealing with competing departments are some of the largest culprits.
However, one of the biggest hurdles of all is the lack of digital culture.
What Is a Digital Culture?
In digital culture, everyone has completely bought into the need for consistent and clear data. Team leaders collect information on their work, store it in shared databases, and regularly produce reports. In positive digital culture, people embrace the fact that you can’t change what you can’t measure, and they recognize that digital platforms provide the best way to record and measure progress.
However, if you are like most companies, getting every different department excited about and living inside digital platforms is a big challenge. There is a lot of pushback from leaders who say things were easier before and feel that all the digital hype doesn’t live up to its promises.
Another struggle is digital fatigue. In many organizations, a new major software application is rolled out every month and team members must undergo training to learn the new system. IT spends most of its time implementing new systems and running training programs to the extent that people start to shy away and complain when yet another new digital system is put into place.
Low-Code as a Path to Better Digital Culture
Low-code development platforms can be a great way to push your company towards better digital transformation. They enable your IT team to produce more custom applications faster and help bring more tools like low code to your digital transformation arsenal.
But can they also improve your digital culture as well?
Instead of forcing new tools onto your teams, low-code platforms let teams create their own software.
Let’s look at this from the example of process automation. Candace runs HR in your company. She’s tried several different HRMS options, but hasn’t found one that she likes. So, she starts meeting with the IT team to talk about building her own collection of automated processes to run things like paid time off (PTO) requests, new hire requests, employee onboarding and offboarding, and many others.
The IT team gets an idea of what Candace needs, but also asks her additional questions about how the items will be processed. This leads to a broader meeting with all of the HR leads, each of whom has important input to add about the new software.
Because the IT team uses a low-code platform, they can adopt a rapid application development methodology and have a few prototypes ready within a few days and ask the HR team to review them. The team leads are mostly happy with how it looks, but have several additional features and workflow changes to request. After another week, they are ready to test out a full suite of HR applications to get larger feedback from everyone else.
In this situation, rather than just forcing a new program onto HR, they are allowed to quickly be involved in the creation of their own applications.
No-Code Creates Complete Digital Buy-In
Going beyond low-code development is a no-code application platform. With a no-code tool, the process of making apps is so easy that Candace and her team can not just design the apps, but also maintain and update them.
In the same situation, using a tool like Kissflow, Candace can build separate automated processes for each need. Support can be provided from IT, or from the vendor. The interface is so easy-to-use that creating a new process is nearly as easy as opening up a new spreadsheet and starting your own database.
Giving business leaders the power of app creation instils a strong digital culture where people not only respect the results they get from applications, but also manage the software on their own.
Use Low-Code to Achieve Digital Transformation
If leading your company into digital transformation is a priority, you can’t just do it by forcing new software onto everyone. It must be done in a collaborative way that encourages a positive digital culture. Using low-code and no-code platforms is a great way to create applications that involve everyone and get the whole team excited about the prospects of being a digitally mature company.
If you’ve never seen one in action, try Kissflow Low-code today and see how a no-code process application platform might be just the thing you need!
