A Digital Transformation without Application Innovation

From optional and “For the future”, to indispensable and “Now!”

Analysts such as IDC, Forrester and Gartner have long predicted that any business will eventually evolve into an IT company if it wishes to maintain its competitive advantage. Until recently, many CEOs took such reports with a grain of salt and digital transformation investments were often pushed forward. This was not always unjustified: not every company needed to be an “early adopter” of new technologies. Companies themselves had the choice of when to step into one or more aspects of the digital transformation depending on the sector or the type of product / service offering. The pressure was mainly imposed by the major IT service providers in this world.

Mid-2020, however, we find ourselves in a completely new world: COVID-19 has abruptly put an end to this wait-and-see attitude around digital transformation, examples of this are countless: Working from home suddenly became the norm and companies were obliged to ‘quickly’ adopt new technologies. implement to make this possible. The office suddenly became a virtual office. Transformation projects planned over 2 years were suddenly implemented at 2 months.

Working from home is the new standard, but it doesn’t stop there. In this new world, companies will be forced to really take and embrace the digital transformation seriously. Every day a news item appears in the media of a company – from SME to Enterprise – that is in danger of going bust, and this often concerns companies that had too much of a wait-and-see attitude to deploy the full spectrum of digital transformation, both internal, as external, or both.

In the new world, “anywhere, anytime” access to data is no longer sufficient. Applications must evolve to provide smarter insights. Ease of use and transparency should always come first to avoid frustrated end users. Companies will also increasingly have to make applications and data available to their customers if they want to maintain the competitive advantage.

Hybrid Cloud brings application development at full speed

Every company will become an IT company and application innovation plays a crucial role here. The new trends are putting enormous pressure on the application developers within organizations. The reasons for this are diverse: more and more applications need to reach the end user faster and faster, systems need to be better integrated to increase the quality of the data, and the use of artificial intelligence to provide users with smart data and insights is not longer an option but a must. And all this with a view to user adoption and ease of use …

Gartner predicts that by 2024, three-quarters of companies will deploy at least four “low code development tools” for IT application development. In other words, cloud native application development and integration is no longer the easiest, fastest, and cheapest way to innovate applications – it will be the only way.

Evolution in the relationship between customer and IT partner

As a result, there is also an evolution in the relationship between companies and their IT partner (s). The increasing complexity of technologies that are coming our way faster and faster has an impact on this relationship. This will evolve from separate IT projects to close partnerships. This prevents the digital transformation from becoming a slow and unwieldy process, or that more and more silos of applications arise, or to avoid that companies need to gain knowledge in areas for which the IT partner has already developed solutions. Speed and agility are only possible with good cooperation in both directions and with a clear long-term commitment when it comes to integration and development of innovative, flexible and intelligent web applications.

Application Innovation within service companies and departments

As already mentioned, corona has accelerated this evolution anyway. However, even without corona, at a time when digital services are globalizing, everyone understands that traditional service companies or departments must rethink their role, processes and offerings if they are to survive.

Service companies and / or departments mainly rely on their knowledge workers. To let these people work together with enthusiasm every day, 3 points must be tackled:

• Increased maneuverability
  Agility is the critical factor for competitiveness. “It’s not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.“
  This famous quote by Charles Darwin applies more than ever to organizations. The environment is so turbulent that only agile organizations are able to be and remain successful. For application innovation, this translates into the following questions: How do I organize DevOps and DataOps; How do I put together small development teams that can go from concept to production faster? In short, how do I reduce the innovation cost?
• Increased knowledge capacity
  80% of the information in companies is not structured today. The majority of these are in text form (documents, web pages, chats,…). In service organizations where knowledge workers are the driving forces, an enormous impact can be created by automatically converting unstructured data into relevant insights. For application innovation this means, for example: How to bring valuable information into context of business applications; How can new scenarios be mapped and, above all, how to approach all of this in a way that makes the user experience simple and accessible?
• Increase the quality of services
  Better customer loyalty is crucial, but not so easy in today’s “bubbles”. Great customer loyalty requires more and meaningful interactions with customers. This is then driven by a qualitative digitization of services.