It’s easy for companies to talk a good game about digital transformation, but it's a lot harder for IT Departments to truly transform an entire company. Because of that, an increasing number of businesses are turning to enterprise architects (EAs) -- skilled IT team members who can understand a company’s overall business strategies, and then design and execute an overall digital architecture to turn those strategies into success. Read on to learn how enterprise architects are driving digital transformation and business innovation in their organizations.
Jeremy Bergsman a practice manager at CEB (now Gartner) notes in a blog post, “Some EA Teams Reinventing Themselves as Innovation Coaches,” that, “In the past, a lot of IT teams have taken the ‘if you build it, they will come’ approach to helping with innovation by launching an ‘innovation lab’ or something similar, and waiting for employees to make use of it. But, as IT teams who have set up one of these labs in the past few years will attest, it now attracts an underwhelming number of participants.”
The answer to the problem, he says, is that Enterprise Architecture teams should “develop an easy-to-use, lightweight framework designed to be used by non-architects for technology experimentation” and then “encourage people to participate by explaining how colleagues have already made use of it, rather than just focusing on some of the more hard, measurable benefits of participation, such as the number of days it took to get a prototype up and running.”
That’s easier said than done, of course. And one of the biggest problems for enterprises is to find an application development and deployment framework that is ideal for both IT and business users, or citizen developers.
That’s exactly how we've designed Alpha Anywhere, our low-code platform that allows IT developers to rapidly build any kind of mobile and web business app. It includes a unique no-code capability that lets business users, who cannot code, build enterprise-grade offline mobile data capture and dispatch apps optimized for smartphones. The complete solution represents a unique unified, low-code and no-code mobile application development and deployment platform that enables business workers to work in parallel with IT professionals (in particular, Enterprise Architects charged with innovation). In fact, Gartner recently recognized Alpha Anywhere as an alternative to the Microsoft PowerApps tool for business users. Understand the intricacies of PowerApps pricing and how PowerApps performs on app development projects.
- TransForm is a no-code capability within Alpha Anywhere that enables line of business people to take advantage of their domain knowledge and create & deploy impressive offline rich-media, multi-table smartphone data capture/dispatch apps themselves. It also includes a full API for integration replying JSON and REST.
- Alpha Anywhere is a complete mobile and web app development and deployment platform aimed at professional developers. It has has an innovative low-code design with an open/standards based architecture that has resulted in its adoption by 3,000 companies globally and caused it to be awarded "mobile product of the year" by InfoWorld and earn top ratings on Gartner Peer Insights. It includes robust reporting, workflow, offline, analytics, integration and security capabilities. Using the platform, Enterprise Architects can improve cooperation and encourage innovation between line of business and IT within a company.
In short, Alpha Anywhere - with its Transform capability -- is built for Enterprise Architects to drive digital transformation quickly and efficiently at their organizations.
Enterprise Architects who would like to consult with Alpha Software on how to drive innovation at their organizations can reach our Director of Digital Transformation at sales@alphasoftware.com.
NOTE: It is important to understand that no-code platforms and low-code platforms are in fact fundamentally different. Low-Code vendors claim they can serve IT departments and business departments, but business users cannot code like IT developers. Alternately, no-code tools lack the ability to add code for critical enterprise requirements around security, authentication, data governance and more. The graph below shows where low-code and no-code succeed respectively for each group, and where the Alpha Anywhere platform (with both modes) succeeds for both groups. See our blog article on this topic.
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