How a focus on design of your business applications removes barriers to achieve operational excellence

It was great to present at a Process & Operational Excellence event this week on how a focus on getting the design of your business applications right helps drive just that - process and operational excellence within your business. I’ll refer to operational & process excellence as “opex” for the remainder of this article.

Two of the biggest barriers to achieving opex are lack of information and outdated IT systems.

On the first point, I think it’s more about ease of access to information more than anything. Organisations have so much information sitting across multiple different systems in their IT landscape that it’s difficult for business users to access everything they need, easily, in one single place. They have to traverse multiple different systems, and a lot of those systems have user interfaces (UIs) which are out of the box and difficult to use (lots of fields, lots of scrolling etc.).

On the point about outdated IT systems, it’s the same story. Legacy IT systems bog people down in endless detail and eat up large amounts of their time trying to shuffle between applications to integrate the output of multiple systems. As a result, users can spend 80% of time getting the systems to work for them and 20% of time on actually executing on the information. That has a very negative impact on achieving opex.

Focus on Design of your applications

So building better business IT applications/solutions is part of the answer but the key thing is that great solutions are designed from the start, not built from the start. This is equally applicable to products, services, processes - anything in fact.

How do you get to great design of your applications?

So how do you approach getting to a great design for your business applications? Well, that’s where Design Thinking comes into play.

Not wanting to go into an overview of what Design Thinking is in this post (there are stacks of great posts already available on this) I’ll summarise below a couple of key points of why Design Thinking is great for designing business applications:

• You get to really understand the user you are designing (and eventually building and delivering) the system for. Truly understand what the solution means for them and how it will help (no preconceived assumptions!)
• Take an unconstrained view of what the solution will deliver (don’t be thinking about cost, time, technology limits at this point)
• You get to move quickly into a prototyping phase where you make the solution tangible. Moving solutions from ideas to ‘working things’ is the true driver for feedback and refinement (from those you are delivering the solution for)

Building Prototypes and moving from Design to Delivery without having to code

To be able to prototype the solutions you build during Design Thinking (which is, of course, a continuous cycle and which also links to an Agile delivery methodology for the productive solution) then you need to be able to build applications at pace. You need technology that allows to easily execute this pace and that isn’t writing streams of code, coding takes time.

No-code application development platforms truly allow you to build and iterate both prototypes and productive solutions at speed meaning you can deliver the necessary solutions to fix the problems you are solving by using Design Thinking. If you can’t build and deliver the solutions quickly, then they only stay as designs.

Bringing it back to achieving opex

So if unifying data from multiple sources together is a significant contributor to getting to opex then that’s another reason why no-code platforms can help, because they allow you to bridge data together from multiple backend systems into a single, simple, easy to use application (interface) for business users to work with, meaning they spend the main proportion of their time doing what they are paid to do,  not trying to stitch information together.

Just to close this off, I’m not talking Business Intelligence applications here (i.e. read-only analytical views of the information), I’m talking about composite analytical and transactional applications that surface all of the data to a user in one place, but also allows them to undertake business processing and actioning too. Again, no-code application development platforms allow this.

Design great solutions with Design Thinking, make them a reality through no-code platforms.