When you ask the question, ‘what is stopping digital transformation at my company?’, you might be surprised by the answer. In many cases, it is those who are supposed to provide the ‘resources’ that are actually stopping progress from happening.
In our commissioned study from Forrester, we found some interesting facts around this topic. Business Analysts and managers were asked about obstacles that stop them from automating processes, here’s what they said:
77%: resources for me to automate processes are unavailable
74%: help from my technical colleagues is not available
74%: training for me to automate processes is unavailable
Who’s to blame for all of this?
What is really stopping digital transformation from moving forward? Often, you’ll find that the resources that are designed to help are actually hurting. When you look at those survey answers, you can find a few ‘culprits’ to blame for holding these analysts and managers back.
The first culprit is the lack of technical help. You see that 74% said that help from technical colleagues is not available. However, this is not usually the fault of IT departments, in-house developers, or others whose job it is to provide technical help. They are often understaffed and overextended from managing the myriad of applications and data requirements they have. Even if analysts and managers have tools, they could technically use to automate workflow processes, the lack of availability from technical teams stops them from getting off the ground.
The lack of technical help and training that our survey respondents claim leads us to another question. Why did they need so much technical help to begin with? For that, the most logical place to look is within the systems and software that they have been asked to use.
Many Business Process Management (BPM) suites are not all that easy to set up, use, or maintain. They have complex requirements and configuring them often requires expert help. Essentially, to use them requires a good amount of help from IT and making changes to them almost always requires waiting in line for the experts. If the experts aren’t available then using those systems is not going to be easy or even all that productive.
Simpler systems, such as task management apps, may not require so much technical help. They can be cloud-based and have quick and easy setup. However, with many of these systems the full-fledged functionality to truly capture a complex workflow is just not there. So, for many businesses, the trade-off is between impossible to manage systems that might work (if they could get the help they need), or easy to manage systems that don’t do everything they need.
What if we were able to meet our needs without technical help?
No-code programming platforms offer the perfect solution for the ~75% of analysts and managers who cannot automate their process due to lack of resources. With the simple drag and drop creation of the fields, forms, and workflows that they need, the people who understand their processes best can now automate them with no outside help.
No-code solutions free up resources for digital transformation simply because less specialized resources are needed to make things happen. When end users can set up their own workflow automation, they no longer have to burden their software developers and IT departments.
Eliminating barriers, freeing up resources, without creating risk
By eliminating the barriers that stop businesses from automating their workflows, we free up resources at the same time. The reason for this is simple: It’s the reliance on technical help to use challenging or unsatisfactory software programs that ate up those resources to begin with.
No-code platforms essentially cut out the resource drain on application development and IT experts by putting the power in the hands of the end users, without creating the risks typically associated with self-service innovation. In HighGear, end users are not creating risky standalone applications, instead they are configuring new managed pathways for work to flow through HighGear’s existing platform.
Because building workflows in HighGear is 100% visual, later enhancements, changes or corrections are done visually as well, typically by someone else in the same team. HighGear’s approach significantly reduces the incidence of “solution boomerang”, where end users build unmanaged and siloed solutions in generic no-code app generators, causing the maintenance and support of these applications to bounce back to IT. To make matters worse, the busy IT professionals usually lack the benefit of subject matter expertise, documentation or visual diagrams, especially after employee turnover.
If your business is finding itself stuck with unproductive, disjointed, or manual processes, switching to no-code solutions will empower your teams to create new and better processes without the hiccups and roadblocks that typically come with implementing a new system.
