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Digital transformation (DX). Everyone is talking about it and wants to get on the bandwagon. Take for example Razer’s story. As far as transforming a modern workplace and collaboration goes, it's considered a phenomenon. By supporting teamwork, rapid communications, and real-time collaboration using intelligent technology solutions, Razer has gained a competitive edge in the multibillion-dollar gaming industry.

You can observe a similar story at Virgin Atlantic, where they aim to develop apps quickly and easily to empower employees with tools and information to help field workers get a better view of customers and deliver better service.

Digital transformation comes in all shapes and sizes. It is all-encompassing and can have different connotations for different stakeholders. How do you interpret it? Does digital transformation for you mean the same for your peers? A CIO may translate it as improving operational efficiency, while it may mean augmenting customer engagement for a CMO.

What does digital transformation actually mean for you and your enterprise?

While every enterprise wants to modernize and transform, not everyone is successful in digital transformation. What it requires is commitment and involvement, enterprise-wide.

According to the CIO’s 2019 State of the CIO Survey, “88% of CIOs say that they are more involved in leading digital transformation initiatives compared to their business counterparts.” In the ‘2018-2019 State of Digital Transformation Report’ by Altimeter, “CIOs are cited as the most typical official owners or sponsors of transformation initiatives.”

Executive Ownership of Digital Transformation 

As business modernization and transformation continues to mature, CIOs are required to have a stronger presence in revenue-generating initiatives and in areas they have not delved before. What’s your level of involvement? Are you skin-deep or knee-deep in digital transformation? When revenue and ROI become the name of the game and as you wade into uncharted waters, where do you begin, what’s your first step?

The Crucial Kick-Off In Your Digital Transformation Journey 

Make the first step count!
In your digital transformation journey, the best starting point would be the core. And the core of digital transformation is IT.

As ‘application organizations’ are constantly evolving to adapt to the hybrid world and the digital workforce, IT is expected to not only modernize technology but also deliver business value, augment user experience (UX) and achieve core innovation.

Enterprise application development is emerging as an integral requisite to achieving digital transformation success. Rapid Application Development platforms are gaining sway by empowering IT, providing the bandwidth to focus on core innovation, advancing time-to-market strategies, and helping to achieve competitive differentiation.

How can you drive digital transformation ROI using enterprise application development and low-code platforms? Continue reading our next post to find out more.

"By 2022, skills required to perform most jobs will have shifted significantly and no less than 54% of all employees will require significant upskilling", according to the World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs 2018 Report.

Not all Java development teams have upskilled to stay relevant. Java developers, once valued, are finding themselves challenged and in a way, dispensable. New programming languages, development tools, and delivery platforms are being introduced every week.

Modern enterprises need to innovate and deliver faster in order to remain competitive. With all the buzz around multi-channel delivery, ultra-rapid development cycles, fab front-ends, microservices, and cloud nativity, traditional Java development teams need to learn new skills, new vocabulary, and adopt new approaches to enterprise app development. The skills mismatch combined with rapid delivery demands has put immense pressure on Java development teams.

Here’s how existing Java development teams can become full-stack developers using low-code, rapid application development platforms.

Let Low-Code Platforms Do All the Heavy Lifting

What normally requires 10 developers can be done with 4

Traditional Java development teams require developers with specific skill sets at different stages in the application development lifecycle. To simplify the application development process and to address the shortage of skilled developers, here's how rapid application development platforms help:

Embracing new technology need not necessarily mean a radical transformation. It is about upgrading existing skills to keep up with changes in the industry. Find out how the ‘Survival, Revival and Arrival of Java Developers’ will depend on how they can upskill to full-stack developers using the right tools such as rapid application development platforms. Download this Whitepaper

When we talk about an agile enterprise, we usually refer to its ability to organize and make the best use of its available resources to deliver projects on time. Factors like this and then some more – being able to make quick deployment of the right people to the project, establishing governance practices that allow quick decision making, and standardizing key processes – lead to an increase in agility and performance of an enterprise.

Some may ask whether enterprise agility is the same as digital transformation. The answer is no. Digital transformation deals with the ‘how to deliver’ aspect of a business strategy, adapting your business offering to cater to the digitally savvy customer and omnichannel customer engagement. Enterprise agility deals with the nuts and bolts of this adaptive ability. It is more technical in nature dealing with the whole life cycle of application development, including intra-departmental APIs, rapid app building platforms, cloud technology and collaborative microapps.

Why the need for agility?

The traditionally accepted waterfall model of app development required each stage of the development process to be completed fully before the next phase can start. Reviewing and documentation take place at the end of each phase to figure out whether the project is moving along the right path and whether to continue or discard it. Software testing in case of waterfall method takes place only after the development process is complete. This method has its limitations as user expectation might change even when the developer is working on the UI screens and server APIs. This means discarding the entire application and starting all over again. Beside this, there are other disadvantages of the waterfall method –

Though it has certain shortcomings, the waterfall model is sometimes beneficial for the limited functionality of small budget apps. But when it comes to enterprise and consumer mobile apps, this model fails to meet cost and time to market expectations. This is where agile methodologies make its mark. It breaks down the application development process into small steps, while at the same time integrating review, documentation and testing at each step. It takes an iterative approach to application building which is streamlined and flexible, allowing for changes to be made on an as needed basis.

The current trend

In the run to compete in the market, every organization is trying to become faster and better in what they are doing. No matter how efficient they are, it is always difficult to determine what changes to make to create the maximum impact in the market. One way to determine the agility of your organization is to look at the software development lifecycle. Let us look at the phases that constitute an app’s lifecycle –

With time, new and emerging trends in enterprise application started impacting application development in a big way. Ease of usability and responsive design became the norm of the day. Technology today is more consumer oriented to increase accessibility and ease of operation for users of enterprise applications. Catering to this requirement, applications today are hosted, developed, and customized on the cloud. Traditional methods of building software applications failed to meet these demands, not just for web applications but for mobile applications as well.

The low-code way of app development

Low-code development emerged as an easy answer for successfully delivering applications and improve business agility. It enables development teams to rapidly develop, test, and deploy applications with little to no hand-coding. This process makes use of declarative approaches specifying the actions of the desired application which the platform then creates or renders. It follows an iterative process where customers are involved at each phase of development. Changes are incorporated immediately, making the process much faster.

Let’s look at how low-code addresses app development across its lifecycle –

What is your agility score?

Low-code platforms have modernized the way enterprises build, deliver and manage web and mobile applications, improving business agility and fostering innovation. The benefits have a direct bearing on the cost and schedule of enterprise application delivery.

The agile development approach to building application encourages the team to deliver the project within the deadline, resulting in earlier market reach. It contrasts the waterfall model’s lack of flexibility and its linear stages to software development.

The agile model focuses on customer collaboration, continuous delivery, constant feedback and communication between developers, customers and users while delivering software incrementally.  Agile can work wonders for app development, provided you know how to make agile work for your business needs.

Originally published in The Tech Portal