Covid-19 has upended business operations and our very way of life around the world. Yet the disruption to business is unevenly distributed.
To be sure, the nature of each industry and the ability of people within that industry to work from home (WFH) is a major cause of this unevenness. But even within industries, some companies have been better able to deal with the turbulence than others.
In many cases, this difference comes down to their information technology (IT) – in particular, the applications they depend on to serve customers and to keep employees productive. The underlying causes of these technology-driven differences, however, are more difficult to spot.
The reason: technology differences that lead to different abilities to weather the Covid-19 storm are symptoms. The underlying cause: variations in business agility.
Putting Business Agility to the Test
We define business agility as the ability to respond quickly and efficiently to changes in the business environment and to leverage change for competitive advantage.
Such agility depends upon two types of change: the unavoidable change from outside and the innovation-driven change from within. Changes from the business environment are usually competitive moves, customer whims, or new regulations.
But what about pandemics? A disruptive force like none other in our lifetimes. If anything will test our organizations’ business agility, this will.
Business agility is important in good times and bad, of course. The question today is how will organizations pass this test in the face of new rules of business.
How, then, do today’s businesses (and government agencies) stack up? Many, unfortunately, were caught completely unprepared by the pandemic and are now struggling to adapt. Others had been sufficiently agile to make do, transitioning to a WFH environment as best they can.
And then there are the singular organizations that are ahead of the pack – the ones who are not only able to deal with the disruptive change the virus brings, but who are also able to leverage change for competitive advantage – making lemonade from a pandemic of lemons, as it were.
Given the sudden and unprecedented nature of this crisis, there are three characteristics this latter group of organizations share:
- Nimbleness – they are able to make many small changes quickly in response to a variety of unpredictable occurrences.
- Preparedness – processes and technology they had put in place before the pandemic helps them to adjust to surprising changes in the business environment quickly.
- Resilience – they are able to recover rapidly from adverse events, even when those events counteract any nimbleness or preparedness they might have had.
These three characteristics are clearly interdependent. If an organization were insufficiently prepared for the pandemic, then a high level of nimbleness and resilience may be able to compensate for that fact.
The Context for Low-Code
This discussion of business agility and changing priorities in the face of a crisis are the backdrop for pointing out how low-code fits into the mix. To be sure, low-code is no panacea, and many other technologies also improve organizations’ agility.
That being said, low-code fits the bill surprisingly well, all things considered – especially process-centric low-code tools like AgilePoint. Before the Covid-19 pandemic came along, many organizations had already been experiencing success with low-code tools for building a range of both employee-facing and customer-facing applications.
On occasion, low-code tools had been part of some large, mission-critical application rollout or another, but for the most part, low-code was more about reducing the application backlog while at the same time, empowering more people in the organization to play a part in application creation.
Then along comes Covid-19 – and this existing context for low-code proved to offer the nimbleness, preparedness, and resilience that were just what organizations needed to deal with a rapidly shifting set of priorities.
This story is now being repeated around the world, across many industries, in small and large organizations. Covid-19 is suddenly generating a need for new and different applications, whether they be applying for loans or dealing with medical equipment or responding to new WFH priorities or dozens of other requirements.
Apps that perhaps were ‘nice-to-haves’ are now mission critical. Others that were buried somewhere in the backlog are now suddenly urgent. And everybody is realizing that the business environment is changing day-to-day, and thus the app creation teams must be ready for anything.
More agile business processes facilitate continuous improvement and adaptation within the organization. Leveraging low-code to support ongoing process evolution thus speeds up continuous improvement – and the ability to do so at scale.
However, the majority of no-code/low-code tools are not process-centric. To facilitate WFH, organizations must fundamentally change the way they do work on a day-to-day basis.
Leveraging end-to-end automation that connects people, systems, and data with manageable, dynamic processes is absolutely essential to maintaining focus on business priorities in times of crisis like these.
AgilePoint is an important case in point. “AgilePoint digitally transformed how The Salvation Army works,” said David Brown, Director of Applications at The Salvation Army, USA Western Territory. “This allowed us to scale and respond quickly in a time of crisis.”
The Intellyx Take
It’s human nature to look for silver linings no matter how foreboding the cloud happens to be. Covid-19 may be the uniquely disruptive and traumatic crisis of our lifetimes, but it’s still possible to find its bright side.
Whether we like it or not, the virus is pushing for organizations to be better – to better meet customer needs, to build better apps, and to leverage technology better than we have before.
The virus will eventually be behind us, but the lessons we learned will largely remain. There will be many such lessons to be sure, impacting all facets of our home and work lives.
Given how important IT is for the successful workings of today’s businesses, we can clearly expect Covid-19 to teach us important lessons about how to get the most value from technology. It’s no wonder, then, that this pandemic is pushing us toward low-code.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. AgilePoint is an Intellyx customer. Intellyx retains final editorial control of this article. Image credit: Marco Verch.
