Age old problem for CIO’s has been solved

If you have been in IT for a few years, you will be very familiar with the Triangle of Doom – the triangle that for years has been the incontrovertible hard truth that any project has three dependencies, and messing around with any one of them negatively affects at least one other.

As a quick reminder for those who are less familiar. At the points of the triangle are three connected factors:

1.?????Time

2.?????Quality

3.?????Cost

The longstanding theory for any project is that if you want to deliver a project at super speed, it will potentially impact quality and probably cost even more.??Conversely, if you want the highest quality project, it will most definitely cost more and may take significantly more time.????Time is curious, because you have elapsed time (I.e., how long did it take in days, weeks or months, etc), or human hours of time.??So, you can move quickly in elapsed time, but you will need more humans to deliver it, thus taking more time (human time, and associated cost)…. The obvious issue is Cost – sure, you can save money, but it is highly likely to be of less quality (lower functionality too).

Make sense?

The IT Backlog

Every single IT department has a monumental backlog of projects to deliver and noisy business people demanding solutions to their problems.??The businesspeople may even suggest solutions, after all, everyone is a techspert these days but these will often be point solutions, not integrated, likely to fall over, have loads of data issues, etc.??On the surface, these solutions may appear cheap, but they never stay that way because of the cost to maintain them.??

Invariably the same IT department will be limited in resources and budget.??So what does the IT director do???Well, some cry, some crack, but most develop a leathery skin, take the pressure and deliver what they can, when they can, with what they can afford.??So EVERYONE hates them and non-IT people think they know better.??OK, a bit of an extreme statement, but you get it.

I have walked into countless organisations where thousands of cheap IT products have been lashed together like a hideous raft which leaks, cracks and often sinks.??Others, have fewer technologies and just survive on manual solutions.??Others spend a fortune to have the perfect solution – just as they sink under the weight of IT cost. Or that perfect solution becomes an unachievable holy grail, but you still spend money to get it.??I recall a CIO suggesting that SAP was the answer, but he had no idea what the question was…. That ended in $100m of waste.

It’s only going to get worse, because organisations have now become wise to automation and bespoke solutions to make their operation run smoother – so they want and need those solutions. Several reports suggest 500 million apps will be needed over the next 5 years.??More than all the apps built in history to date.??There just isn’t enough people to build them in the traditional way.

Low Code Solutions make the triangle?a lot?smaller

We have all heard of low code, some even use it, but often its in the hands of maverick users across an organisation, creating a spaghetti of unmanaged, disconnected solutions.??They have the right idea, but a na?ve and ultimately tremendously wrong approach.

Low code solutions ARE the answer to the Triangle of Doom and IT Backlog of Hell.??With a little thought, Low code solutions can be used to build Apps at lightning speed, automate manual processes, build chatbots, create websites and portals, and deliver beautiful dashboards to provide insight and improvement to an organisation.

Microsoft’s Power Platform is the low-code suite of tools to break the triangle.??IT Projects can be delivered quickly, for less cost and at high quality. Also, they can be easily and natively delivered on mobile devices as well as traditional ones.??Critically, they can be incorporated into the tools you know today – such as Microsoft Teams.??So, you can build a custom application or automation for your organisation and it will just be a tab or button within Teams for anyone, or specific people to use. The user experience will be family, easy to adopt and require very little training.

Today we are helping a large firm with over 5,000 home-made databases and disconnected workflows, to bring them together in a single architecture, single interface, and the data will be in the Dataverse – the database that sits under Microsoft Office, Teams and Dynamics365.???Therefore, all the data is available across every application.??Duplication is eliminated and integration is native.??Furthermore, this organisation will release huge numbers of people from manual tasks, poor systems and disconnected teams.??A massive win and delivered in pieces instead of a big bang approach – so its safer too.

If you want to reduce your IT backlog – come talk to Ingentive about Low Code solutions.??We can take three approaches:

1.?????Train your team to build them internally

2.?????We can build them and manage them

3.?????We can provide governance, handle the really complex architecture or solutions and train your team to be largely self sufficient, except the tricky stuff.

Stuart

Written by me, no one else, and not ChatGPT.??All errors are mine.

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