With Covid-19, most companies have had to react very quickly to adapt their businesses to lockdown restrictions and to constantly shifting levels of lockdown (some days “we can go out”, others not, others partially with special rules), causing violent fluctuations in a short time on the demand side (sales, commercial activity, service delivery and more).
Internally there have also been adaptations: first working from home during the most intense part of the lockdown, then alternating with strict health measures to partially reopen and now, in a large number of organizations, a hybrid in which some people work from home and others do not, constantly adapting as conditions in each country change. If you have operations in several countries, multiply that by the number of locations.
The first to react were the positions, areas or processes that “face” external people, whether customers (take-out ordering apps, e-commerce, online forms for orders or other requests coming from outside, etc.) or suppliers (forms for submitting invoices or receiving bids in a purchasing tender, and in some cases supplier portals, mostly for submitting documents and checking the basic status of requests).
This first layer of forced automation was essential to survive in a very difficult business environment, in which most of our countries’ governments have focused on health, not on the economy. However, more than a year into this situation, with many months still ahead, I have found that many companies stopped at this point, and their internal processes, what happens behind closed doors after requests arrive through online forms or customer and supplier portals, are still handled “almost manually”: with messaging applications, internal ones at best but often WhatsApp, Facebook or Telegram groups, email, voice apps and even the personal mobile phones of many employees working from home.
Why haven’t we kept moving forward? What has prevented end-to-end automation?
Why haven’t we kept moving forward? What has prevented end-to-end automation? First, many of those externally facing “vertical” or specialized applications (CRM, supplier portals, online forms) already existed before the pandemic; what companies have done is adopt them at a forced march because of the crisis, which knocked down any excuse we might have had for not doing it before.
However, automating behind closed doors requires creating from scratch, or at least adapting, the technology to the way we work. In the details, every organization, every company, is very similar but slightly different in the way it works: the rules for when something is done, the way internal approvals are routed between positions and sometimes even the definition of who plays which role. Take two positions in three different companies: a CFO and an HR assistant may be very similar in their job descriptions, but in the detail of their day-to-day work, in their companies’ processes and their role within them, they are different.
The IT staff of small and medium companies deserve credit for quickly adapting “vertical” cloud applications to handle their critical external processes, but when it comes to designing their organization’s internal processes from scratch, many simply do not have enough specialized people to do it all alone.
This is where the problem begins: 95% of the business fabric of any country is made up of small and medium enterprises, which usually have at most a relatively small IT department, focused on what is critical. Company IT staff deserve credit for quickly adapting those ready-made specialized “vertical” cloud applications to take orders, handle customer or supplier requests, connect people through Zoom, MS Teams, Office 365 or Google Apps and keep working during the lockdown. But when it comes to designing their organization’s internal processes from scratch, many simply do not have enough specialized people to do it all alone.
Anyone who has ever been involved in traditional systems development knows it is hard work that consumes many hours, where “customization” to the company takes a long time, first to talk to the end user and understand the requirement and then to make it a reality. This in turn generates feedback from the client (in the form of “add a new field here, remove this, put this text in red”, etc.), producing several revision loops until the application is “stable” and ready to use.
Most IT departments would be overwhelmed by this task, or would move very slowly given their real installed capacity, however committed they are to the organization.
Most IT departments would be overwhelmed by this task, or would move very slowly given their real installed capacity, however committed they are to the organization. This is precisely where “low-code” comes in: the name given to a set of applications designed so that “citizen developers”, functional users rather than IT staff, can build their own automation applications without having to program or know code. Through a drag-and-drop interface, an HR assistant can automate the vacation request and approval process on her own, an accountant can automate how requests for manual journal entries are received, and an administrative or purchasing employee can automate how purchase requisitions are made, budget availability is validated and the purchase order is placed.
The fact that low-code technology lets business users take control of automating the manual work that happens outside the ERP, HRIS, CRM, WMS or any other enterprise system completely changes the rules of the game. The technology area stops being the limiting factor of automation (because of installed capacity) and becomes the “navigator” of automation: it looks to the future and its possibilities, defines the rules for how we will automate, controls and empowers users, and makes sure good practices of automated management are followed. Broadly, this role is called “IT governance”.
If you are a business owner, a general manager or CFO, or any other functional leader in a small or medium organization, talk to your technology lead and ask what low-code options your organization has available… Many companies already have tools in their arsenal, and this route is the way to accelerate the digitization of all those processes running on email or messaging, making them more efficient, more controlled and faster, and contributing to your company’s competitiveness in this post-pandemic world.
Don’t wait until the last minute to act; in business there is nothing worse than “arriving late to the party”.
Many have said it already: we are at the dawn of a deep transformation in the way we work and manage business, perhaps comparable to the revolution at the end of the 19th century, when the technologies of the time (the steam railway, the gasoline engine and personal vehicles) transformed the economy and the paradigms of how business was done. Don’t wait until the last minute to act; in business there is nothing worse than “arriving late to the party”.
To see how we approach low-code today, visit our page on low-code process applications.
From our archive. Originally published in Spanish on LinkedIn on 20 February 2021; translated into English. Read the original (in Spanish).