Transforming the organisation into a true digital enterprise

When your low-code development process takes off, structuring the organisation becomes a high priority. Once your challenges shift towards efficient maintenance and effective operation of the development teams, you might be ready to ‘scale’. This is the final phase on the road to full digital transformation. Here’s how to successfully progress from ‘structure’ to ‘scale’.

How to tell you’ve got the optimal structure in place

Obviously, every structure is born out of chaos. In various phases you will need to work towards a structure with the following features:

• Professional development teams – There are often two or three active development teams working in parallel on multiple applications. There is a good mix between business and IT developers, with a clearly defined role for the product owner. Business and IT team members possess an agile mindset.
• Mature governance – Functional governance (establishing consultation structures) and technical governance (e.g. rules concerning security or enterprise architecture) are firmly anchored in guidelines.
• Clear portfolio management – Your organisation is able to assess the business value of potential applications.
• Automation and reuse – Applications are increasingly tested automatically (test automation) and various components from applications are reused.
• The organisation works with DevOps – Development and Operations teams have merged in order to develop applications even faster, decrease the time from ‘staging’ to ‘live’, and optimise maintenance.

Efficiency and productivity improvement

The transition from ‘structure’ to ‘scale’ is often an organic process. Along the way, the mindset shifts from a focus on continuity and predictability to one in which increasing productivity and efficiency are key focus areas. It marks the final step of the digital transformation process and its importance cannot be overstated: this is how your organisation can maximise the business value of low-code.

Transitioning into this phase is a three-step approach:

1 – Complete a Maturity Assessment

Reflect on where you stand in the digital transformation process. Are you really ready to scale up? What impediments prevent increased efficiency and productivity of low-code?

A maturity assessment yields insights in the 4Ps of digital transformation and offers strategies for improvement on the following aspects:

• People

  Set up an ongoing training programme for employees to help progress towards extra certifications and qualifications. Empower colleagues to train the rest of the organisation. Consider establishing a growth strategy that aligns population growth and the number of applications in the organisation. Also, think about how you are going to select and train people. Expanding your development capacity, for example, should be accompanied by additional integration specialists and enterprise architects. They can give the core teams a boost with their expertise.

• Portfolio

  Does the organisation have a clear image of its desired current and future app portfolio? Are the criteria for low-code development clear? Check whether the organisation makes use of a decision tree to assess applications. Also, check whether the application lifecycle management is configured correctly. Will development teams continue to work on fully developed applications? Will this be outsourced to an Ops function or does the organisation prefer an offshore model? What applications are no longer used? Should they be part of the portfolio? Diligent portfolio management enables development teams to work even more efficiently.

• Platform

  Provide a flexible, forward-looking enterprise architecture. Low-code should easily be integrated with the existing IT-landscape and best practices (e.g. Microservices) should easily be applied.

• Process

  An optimised process is an essential requirement for companies looking to scale. Consider how technical and functional governance processes can be improved even further. Organisations regularly underestimate the process changes that rapid application development entails. Reduced lead times in development and prototyping means having to adjust budget and development planning accordingly. In addition, carefully look at aspects such as test automation, cloud strategies and the reuse of components.

2 – Digital strategy

Re-evaluate your company’s digital strategy; it should evolve over time. In the first phase of the digital transformation, the objectives of low-code projects are the most important. Ultimately, many organisations find that low-code has a significant impact on how business and IT work together. In a mature digital strategy, low-code impacts the strategic objectives of the company as a whole.

3 – Complete the digital transformation

At the end of the ‘scale’ phase, the digital transformation of the organisation is complete. In this last phase you also see that conflicts between business and IT have been resolved. The business and IT sides work well together and create more and more opportunities. Organisations can increase the number of applications released, furthering the business impact of low-code.

Initially, organisations spent 90 percent of their time on legacy problems, 5 percent on their current problems, and 5 percent on their future problems. At the end of the ‘scale’ phase, organisations spend eighty percent of their time on the problems and challenges of tomorrow and just 20 percent on yesterday’s and today’s problems. This enables the company to gain a competitive advantage and to grow further.

Want to know more about working with low-code?

Pre-register for our “lessons learned in low-code” webinar series

In recent years, Bizzomate has developed a lot of expertise on how organisations can shape their digital transformation. That is why we are organising a series of webinars in which we will share the most valuable lessons we have learned over the years. Pre-register below to join this exclusive webinar series, and we’ll notify you once the regular registrations are opened.