Mar 12, 2020 | Agile Codeless, Codeless, Wireframing
About
Agile Codeless is a software development life-Cycle *(SDLC) approach that embraces codeless authoring methods and tools to produce enterprise apps. Developed by NDMC Consulting over a decade of enterprise software projects, it removes the barriers that exist between IT and the Business when authoring enterprise applications software.
The challenges of developing software applications
A level of trial and error can be expected for any creative activity but the excessive risks of software authoring are born out in studies both in terms of slow time to market and burgeoning costs. The article ‘Why Your IT Project May Be Riskier Than You Think’ by HBR (November 2011) followed a survey of 1,471 IT projects with an average spend of $167m and found:
- The average overrun was 27%
- One in six projects studied experienced a cost overrun of over 200%.
- Almost 70% of black swan projects also overrun their schedules.
Though the pitfalls of software applications development are by now well documented the IT industry has been singularly unable to overcome them. But as globalization increases apace, business models change ever more rapidly and organizations seek to leverage ‘Big Data’, the need to reliably produce better applications right-first-time has never been more critical.
An unprecedented pace of change in business models is creating a need for more agile IT
For a hundred years management thinking has valued mechanization over creativity…
..but after decades of automation, the core business processes of organizations are pretty slick – that is until markets change and business models need to realign. Then concepts of operational excellence evangelized by management consultants sound hollow.
As the very structure of markets change, smaller, more nimble companies benefitting from closer ties to their customers, and a clearer understanding of their value, are able to steal a march on vendors 100 times their size.
Even global brands aren’t safe – new aggressors can emerge from a different industry altogether to take a big bite out of a market they see as fair game in an open, global market-place (such as retailers venturing into the car insurance market for example).
“Institutionally, the ability to be agile enough is the gut issue in leading an organization today.” James McNearney – CEO, Boeing
Organizations that could once survive without reviewing business models more than once a decade are now forced to re-assess annually. The new mantra of business excellence is agility – to create an enterprise that can adapt to always win in its most addressable markets.
Powering enterprise agility
Key to the drive for agility is the need to empower middle managers; people with the energy, skills and curiosity to question why processes work as they do and find new ways to distil customer value. Leaders are coming to realize that leadership at all levels of the enterprise is vital. This critical tier of ‘corporals’ demand systems and tools to understand and adapt their assets and resources to fit internal processes to the ever changing business landscape.
This is driving demand for a new tier of applications that harvest data from existing sources to create new applications that response to new situations (‘situational applications’) as they arise and align IT systems to better fit constantly evolving processes.
Releasing Innovation
Disparate silos of data across the enterprise – a known problem that has faced organizations for decades, but how do you fix it?
Services-Oriented Architecture is a term that describes the design and use of information services to support business needs; a coherent enterprise-wide method of organizing how computer systems present information to other systems so the data they manage can be accessed more easily without compromising systems performance or security. For business people, the major benefit of organizing information through SOA is the prospect that data held in disparate silos across the enterprise can be re-used to create new applications that produce smarter processes.
To consume Web Services requires applications able to bring data together while fashioning new data structures, web portals and forms-based applications to view, edit and update data.
Demand for these new applications increasingly comes from communities of workers that, while small in number, are essential to process innovation and creativity – things that create competitive advantage in the 21st century business world.
The conceived wisdom of building large lumbering enterprise applications for the majority at the expense of the few, no longer fits the reality of what these critical communities of information workers either need or expect. The high quality of software people now use in their homes and on their mobile phones has raised the bar of what business users expect. The digital native generation dismisses applications that require a manual or that ask them to live with inhospitable reporting tools.
To meet the demands of this new ‘consumerized’ user community, the only viable solution is to produce applications at a faster pace and at lower risk; getting new applications to market faster, at lower cost. This demand has led to the innovations found in the Agile Codeless methodology.
“Middle managers spend more than a quarter of their time searching for information necessary to their jobs, and when they do find it, it is often wrong.”
Source: AIMS survey on information management, 2007
Delivering as Services Oriented Architecture
Services-Oriented Architecture is a term that describes the design and use of information services to support business needs; a coherent enterprise-wide method of organizing how computer systems present information to other systems so the data they manage can be accessed more easily without compromising systems performance or security.
For business people, the major benefit of organizing information through SOA is the prospect that data held in disparate silos across the enterprise can be re-used to create new applications that produce smarter processes.
To consume Web Services requires applications able to bring data together while fashioning new data structures, web portals and forms-based applications to view, edit and update data.
Demand for these new applications increasingly comes from communities of workers that, while small in number, are essential to process innovation and creativity – things that create competitive advantage in the 21st century business world.
The conceived wisdom of building large lumbering enterprise applications for the majority at the expense of the few, no longer fits the reality of what these critical communities of information workers either need or expect. The high quality of software people now use in their homes and on their mobile phones has raised the bar of what business users expect.
The digital native generation dismisses applications that require a manual or that ask them to live with inhospitable reporting tools. To meet the demands of this new consumerized user community, the only viable solution is to produce applications at a faster pace and at lower risk; getting new applications to market faster, at lower cost.
How Agile Codeless Works
Agile Codeless is a rapid method of designing and deploying situational applications for workgroups and teams. It’s codeless because applications are authored using a platform that supplies pre-formed building blocks of technology, negating the need to see or use programming code. The absence of code and script in design workshops is important because it removes the barriers between IT experts and business professionals responsible for scoping applications; probably because they are stakeholders and users of the app to be authored.
The ability to develop applications in near real-time (largely during workshops with users and stakeholders) not only makes applications ‘better-fit’ to the community of users and beneficiaries they’re intended for, but reduces the time, cost and risk of applications developments – all but removing testing, tuning and re-working costs.
Agile Codeless methods and tools dramatically reduce the skills needed for authoring applications which means that one individual can reasonably discharge the entire lifecycle. The fact that applications are authored ‘faster’ does not remove the need for quality gates or pre-qualification of the use-case, user needs and benefactor outcome expectations. Developments are by necessity heavily pre-scoped using formalized analysis methods that include:
- Outcome Driven Innovation (ODI) based job worth analysis
- Scorecarding
- SRPRS applications scoping
About Encanvas
Encanvas is an enterprise software company that specializes in helping businesses to create above and beyond customer experiences.
From Low Code to Codeless
Better than code-lite and low-code, we created the first no code (codeless) enterprise application platform to release creative minds from the torture of having to code or script applications.
Live Wireframe
Use Encanvas in your software development lifecycle to remove the barrier between IT and the business. Coding and scripting is the biggest reason why software development has been traditionally unpredictable, costly and unable to produce best-fit software results. Encanvas uniquely automates coding and scripting. Our live wireframing approach means that business analysts can create the apps you need in workshops, working across the desk with users and stakeholders.
AppFabric
When it comes to creating apps to create a data culture and orchestrate your business model, there’s no simpler way to instal and operate your enterprise software platform than AppFabric. Every application you create on AppFabric adds yet more data to your single-version-of-the-truth data insights. That’s because, we’ve designed AppFabric to create awesome enterprise apps that use a common data management substrate, so you can architect and implement an enterprise master data management plan.
Customer Data Platform
Encanvas supplies a private-cloud Customer Data Platform that equips businesses with the means to harvest their customer and commercial data from all sources, cleanse and organize it, and provide tooling to leverage its fullest value in a secure, regulated way. We provide a retrofittable solution that bridges across existing data repositories and cleanses and organizes data to present a useful data source. Then it goes on to make data available 24×7 in a regulated way to authorized internal stakeholders and third parties to ensure adherence to data protection and FCA regulatory standards.
Encanvas Secure&Live
Encanvas Secure and Live (‘Secure&Live’) is a High-Productivity application Platform-as-a-Service. It’s an enterprise applications software platform that equips businesses with the tools they need to design, deploy applications at low cost. It achieves this by removing coding and scripting tasks and the overheads of programming applications. Unlike its rivals, Encanvas Secure&Live is completely codeless (not just Low-Code), so it removes the barriers between IT and the business. Today, you just need to know that it’s the fastest (and safest) way to design, deploy and operate enterprise applications.
Learn more by visiting www.encanvas.com.
The Author
Ian Tomlin is a management consultant and strategist specializing in helping organizational leadership teams to grow by telling their story, designing and orchestrating their business models, and making conversation with customers and communities. He serves on the management team of Encanvas and works as a virtual CMO and board adviser for tech companies in Europe, America and Canada. He can be contacted via his LinkedIn profile or follow him on Twitter.
Now read:
Mar 12, 2020 | Low Code Development
What is Low Code development and why is it becoming popular in enterprise software development?
What is lo-no code software?
is a short-hand description for the adoption of enterprise low-code software development methods and tools used to displace traditional manual coding and waterfall IT project management methods.
Where it has come from
Low Code development is made possible by the evolution of cloud computing and, specifically, enterprise application-Platform-as-a-Service (aPaaS) software platforms that include an abstraction layer to displace use of code.
How Low Code development works
Low Code development platforms remove the need for coding or scripting as part of the process of designing, deploying and operating enterprise software applications. This is made possible through ‘ready to configure’ building blocks automation and the use of wizards and design element property configuration tools that allow designers to specify the application design, logic and User Interface (UX) without needing to resort to programming.
Adoption drivers
Low Code software design has grown in popularity, serving the demands of citizen developers to displace spreadsheets and basic desktop apps (and documents) with secure and resilient online apps. Organizations have come to recognize the slow-pace of software development resulting from the use of manual programming of applications. Low Code sotware becoms the logical progression of the enteprise computing art.
While low-code applications reduce the amount of programming required to author an application, no-code solutions remove the need for programming completely, using data integrations to facilitate the embedding of third-party tools and data sources.
Codeless software, like Encanvas, is software that removes the need for programming AND the visibility of code or script in the authoring process. This helps users and stakeholders to participate in software developments and removes the barrier that exists between ‘IT’ and ‘the business.’
Is Low Code development a threat to the programming discipline?
Some IT industry commentators argue that low-code software represents a step towards the computer authoring of software applications and the eradication of the software programming discipline that employs thousands of people around the world. In reality, a Low Code development platform removes the tedious and mundane software development tasks (like specifying buttons or creating database forms) that generally software programmers don’t want to spend their time doing. They will normally include data integrations to allow advanced programming components (like DLLs, algorithms, Jscript data visualizations, and artificial intelligence etc.) to be embedded into the lo-no code design and operational framework.
About Encanvas
Encanvas is an enterprise software company that specializes in helping businesses to create above and beyond customer experiences.
From Low Code to Codeless
Better than code-lite and low-code, we created the first no code (codeless) enterprise application platform to release creative minds from the torture of having to code or script applications.
Live Wireframe
Use Encanvas in your software development lifecycle to remove the barrier between IT and the business. Coding and scripting is the biggest reason why software development has been traditionally unpredictable, costly and unable to produce best-fit software results. Encanvas uniquely automates coding and scripting. Our live wireframing approach means that business analysts can create the apps you need in workshops, working across the desk with users and stakeholders.
AppFabric
When it comes to creating apps to create a data culture and orchestrate your business model, there’s no simpler way to instal and operate your enterprise software platform than AppFabric. Every application you create on AppFabric adds yet more data to your single-version-of-the-truth data insights. That’s because, we’ve designed AppFabric to create awesome enterprise apps that use a common data management substrate, so you can architect and implement an enterprise master data management plan.
Customer Data Platform
Encanvas supplies a private-cloud Customer Data Platform that equips businesses with the means to harvest their customer and commercial data from all sources, cleanse and organize it, and provide tooling to leverage its fullest value in a secure, regulated way. We provide a retrofittable solution that bridges across existing data repositories and cleanses and organizes data to present a useful data source. Then it goes on to make data available 24×7 in a regulated way to authorized internal stakeholders and third parties to ensure adherence to data protection and FCA regulatory standards.
Encanvas Secure&Live
Encanvas Secure and Live (‘Secure&Live’) is a High-Productivity application Platform-as-a-Service. It’s an enterprise applications software platform that equips businesses with the tools they need to design, deploy applications at low cost. It achieves this by removing coding and scripting tasks and the overheads of programming applications. Unlike its rivals, Encanvas Secure&Live is completely codeless (not just Low-Code), so it removes the barriers between IT and the business. Today, you just need to know that it’s the fastest (and safest) way to design, deploy and operate enterprise applications.
Learn more by visiting www.encanvas.com.
The Author
Ian Tomlin is a management consultant and strategist specializing in helping organizational leadership teams to grow by telling their story, designing and orchestrating their business models, and making conversation with customers and communities. He serves on the management team of Encanvas and works as a virtual CMO and board adviser for tech companies in Europe, America and Canada. He can be contacted via his LinkedIn profile or follow him on Twitter.
Further reading
Wikipedia page on Business Intelligence.
Above And Beyond Business Intelligence eBook written by Ian C. Tomlin
Beyond Business Intelligence book by Barry Devlin
Marketwatch global market report on business intelligence. Download sample report at kennethresearch.com
Gartner Market Share report, 2018
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Mar 12, 2020 | SDLC, Software Development
What is software development?
About
According to Wikipedia ‘software development’ is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. It’s a reasonable description. At Encanvas, because we use no-lo software development tools and methods, the need to program or de-bug becomes irrelevant. We therefore describe it as – ‘The process of scoping, designing, deploying, documenting, testing, and tuning software applications.’
Software development lifecycle management
Over the years there have been several popular methods of developing software. These are articulated by the lifecycle a development takes from initial conception to completion, and beyond. We summarise these here.
Waterfall
As the term suggests, with waterfall development, a series of software developers (normally using different tools) are tasked with performing blocks of development. These activities are supervised by a project leader who sets out the development plan. Often, developers will disappear for days until the next project review meeting. This approach used to be the most common, particularly when the need to use different tools (demanding the skills of different developers) meant there was no other way.
Agile / Scrum
The existence of more versatile cloud software development environments has made it possible for agile software development to happen. The underpinned principle of agile development is that small teams, meeting regularly (in a scrum), agreeing what needs to be done, sprinting to get them produced in a day, then reviewing progress speeds up software development considerably. Unfortunately, this step forward in the software development approach does little to eradicate the project overheads and risks associated with manual coding.
Agile Codeless with Live Wireframing
Use of codeless (requires developers to no longer see or use code) Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) has made it possible for software developments to be managed by one person from start to end. The key design role is performed normally by someone with business analyst skills, as appreciating what needs to be created – and why – becomes the greater risk to project failure. This has led to the ability of software development to happen in workshops, in near-real-time. At the term suggests, live wireframing focuses on rapidly developing a live wireframe ‘prototype’ of a solution and ‘failing fast.’ Through the use of an integrated development environment, it’s possible to de-risk projects by iterating designs at a very low cost.
The risks of software development
Software development is known to be a hugely wasteful process.
A Harvard Business Review article article ‘Why Your IT Project May Be Riskier Than You Think’ published in November 2011 uncovered that, followed a survey of 1,471 IT projects with an average spend of $167m:
- The average overrun was 27%
- One in six of the projects studied was a black swan, with a cost overrun of 200%.
- Almost 70% of black swan projects also overrun their schedules.
This level of performance has changed little in the intervening period. So, why are software development projects so inconsistent in their delivery? There are a number of factors:
A lack of clarity of what needs building
Specifying how an application should work – the process it must fulfill, the aspirational needs of stakeholders, user interface, the logic rules, data integration, and processing, etc. – is complex. Working with stakeholders unsure of what they need, and struggling to visualize how it will work for them, makes it even more difficult.
A lack of surety in outcomes and RoI
Calculating a Return-on-Investment It’s hard to envision ‘how well’ a software development will work, and the level of influence the application will have in improving the process.
The complexity of the software development project process
When multiple individuals are working on the same project using different software development tools, it’s difficult to keep everyone on the same page and keep developments on-track. Even when projects manage this, the consequence of using a blend of development tools means that a small change to one aspect of development can have a big knock-on effect. For example, changes to the database structure can demand changes to front-end forms, requests for reports can expose shortcomings in data designs, etc.
The challenges of manual coding and scripting
Anyone that’s ever tried their hand at coding or scripting knows that it’s a slow and detailed process. When code is created manually, there’s always the risk that errors will be made. Worse still, there is a risk of malware being introduced or intellectual property loss. These risks demand that applications are heavily tested before they are released. This costs a lot of time and money to do. Any changes result in a new wave of developments.
When ‘customers’ change their minds
It’s not uncommon for users and stakeholders of a software development to change their minds over what’s needed. When this happens, it can significantly delay or even de-rail developments.
integration and data quality issues
Few applications function in isolation. Normally they need to take data from third-party systems or deposit it somewhere. The quality of data and the challenges of integration can take 30 to 45 percent of the project-spend. When data is poor, the RoI of projects can reduce or be completely removed. Data quality can make software developments redundant.
Platform versioning issues
When an application is used by a community of users or customers and they request changes to be made over time, this can result in development teams to have to support more than one version of their software. Unless some pre-planning goes into how platform versioning is managed, it can result in a long tail of code management overheads.
About Encanvas
Encanvas is an enterprise software company that specializes in helping businesses to create above and beyond customer experiences.
From Low Code to Codeless
Better than code-lite and low-code, we created the first no code (codeless) enteprise application platform to release creative minds from the torture of having to code or script applications.
Live Wireframe
Use Encanvas in your software development lifecycle to remove the barrier between IT and the business. Coding and scripting is the biggest reason why software development has been traditionally unpredictable, costly and unable to produce best-fit software results. Encanvas uniquely automates coding and scripting. Our live wireframing approach means that business analysts can create the apps you need in workshops, working across the desk with users and stakeholders.
AppFabric
When it comes to creating apps to create a data culture and orchestrate your business model, there’s no simpler way to instal and operate your enterprise software platform than AppFabric. Every application you create on AppFabric adds yet more data to your single-version-of-the-truth data insights. That’s because, we’ve designed AppFabric to create awesome enterprise apps that use a common data management substrate, so you can architect and implement an enterprise master data management plan.
Customer Data Platform
Encanvas supplies a private-cloud Customer Data Platform that equips businesses with the means to harvest their customer and commercial data from all sources, cleanse and organize it, and provide tooling to leverage its fullest value in a secure, regulated way. We provide a retrofittable solution that bridges across existing data repositories and cleanses and organizes data to present a useful data source. Then it goes on to make data available 24×7 in a regulated way to authorized internal stakeholders and third parties to ensure adherence to data protection and FCA regulatory standards.
Encanvas Secure&Live
Encanvas Secure and Live (‘Secure&Live’) is a High-Productivity application Platform-as-a-Service. It’s an enterprise applications software platform that equips businesses with the tools they need to design, deploy applications at low cost. It achieves this by removing coding and scripting tasks and the overheads of programming applications. Unlike its rivals, Encanvas Secure&Live is completely codeless (not just Low-Code), so it removes the barriers between IT and the business. Today, you just need to know that it’s the fastest (and safest) way to design, deploy and operate enterprise applications.
Learn more by visiting www.encanvas.com.
The Author
Mason Alexander is a senior consultant specializing in helping organizational leadership teams to grow by implementing enterprise software platforms that improve data visibility, process agility; and organizational learning – creating an enterprise that learns and adapts faster. He writes on subjects of change management, organizational design, rapid development applications software, and data science. He can be contacted via his LinkedIn profile.
Further reading
Mar 11, 2020 | SDLC, Software Development
What is System Development Life-cycle (SDLC)?
About SDLC
In systems engineering, information systems, and software engineering, the systems development lifecycle (SDLC), also referred to as the application development life-cycle, is a process for planning, creating, testing, and deploying an information system.
Why SDLC matters
Creating software applications is a high-risk activity. The approach adopted by development teams has a significant impact on the likelihood of project success. The principal outcomes of an effective software development lifecycle (SDLC) model are:
On-time delivery and achieving the optimal time to market
Speed to market is a major influence on RoI when software is delivering customer value. Delivering software development projects on-time and hopefully, before time, is a major win of effective software development approaches.
Usability and quality of ‘the product’
Like any other ‘product’, the quality of the outcome, how easy it is to use, how seamlessly it integrates, all these things impact on customer experience and stakeholder perceptions. You can build software ‘well’ and you can build it WELL.
Security and retention of intellectual property
There’s always a risk that intellectual property is lost during software development, or data security is compromised when software applications are used. When these things DON’T HAPPEN, it’s a big success for software development project leaders.
Efficiency of the development capability
Imagine the people, tools, and methods used to make software applications as an engine. The performance of the ‘engine’ and its ability to produce apps might appear effective and functional, but how does its performance compare to other ‘engines’? When considering the effectiveness of methods used to create applications, it’s easy to ignore the comparative performance of solutions when most would be happy enough to just get software delivered on-time and on-budget.
RoI and on-budget performance
For most project sponsors, delivering a system development on-budget -that creates a solution to a business problem that produces the scoped Return-on-Investment (RoI) – is, well, almost an aspirational dream.
The reason the bar is generally set so low is that history is littered with software development failures. Expectations are low!
A Harvard Business Review article article ‘Why Your IT Project May Be Riskier Than You Think’ published in November 2011 uncovered that, followed a survey of 1,471 IT projects with an average spend of $167m:
- The average overrun was 27%
- One in six of the projects studied was a black swan, with a cost overrun of 200%.
- Almost 70% of black swan projects also overrun their schedules. This level of performance has changed little in the intervening period.
Summary of system development challenges that effective Software Development Lifecycles (SDLCs) can overcome
This level of performance has changed little in the intervening period. So, why are software development projects so inconsistent in their delivery? There are a number of factors:
A lack of clarity of what needs building
Specifying how an application should work – the process it must fulfill, the aspirational needs of stakeholders, user interface, the logic rules, data integration, and processing, etc. – is complex. Working with stakeholders unsure of what they need, and struggling to visualize how it will work for them, makes it even more difficult.
A lack of surety in outcomes and RoI
Calculating a Return-on-Investment It’s hard to envision ‘how well’ a software development will work, and the level of influence the application will have in improving the process.
The complexity of the software development project process
When multiple individuals are working on the same project using different software development tools, it’s difficult to keep everyone on the same page and keep developments on-track. Even when projects manage this, the consequence of using a blend of development tools means that a small change to one aspect of development can have a big knock-on effect. For example, changes to the database structure can demand changes to front-end forms, requests for reports can expose shortcomings in data designs, etc.
The challenges of manual coding and scripting
Anyone that’s ever tried their hand at coding or scripting knows that it’s a slow and detailed process. When code is created manually, there’s always the risk that errors will be made. Worse still, there is a risk of malware being introduced or intellectual property loss. These risks demand that applications are heavily tested before they are released. This costs a lot of time and money to do. Any changes result in a new wave of developments.
When ‘customers’ change their minds
It’s not uncommon for users and stakeholders of a software development to change their minds over what’s needed. When this happens, it can significantly delay or even de-rail developments.
Integration and data quality issues
Few applications function in isolation. Normally they need to take data from third-party systems or deposit it somewhere. The quality of data and the challenges of integration can take 30 to 45 percent of project-spend. When data is poor, the RoI of projects can reduce or be completely removed. Data quality can make software developments redundant.
Platform versioning issues
When an application is used by a community of users or customers and they request changes to be made over time, this can result in development teams to have to support more than one version of their software. Unless some pre-planning goes into how platform versioning is managed, it can result in a long tail of code management overheads.
Popular SDLC Methods
Over the years there have been several popular methods of developing software. These are articulated by the lifecycle a development takes from initial conception to completion, and beyond. We summarise these here.
Waterfall
As the term suggests, with waterfall development, series of software development, normally using different tools, are tasked with performing blocks of development that stream down from a project leader who lays out the plan. Often, developers will disappear for days until the next project review meeting. This approach used to be the most common, particularly when the need to use different tools (demanding the skills of different developers) means there was no other way.
Agile / Scrum
The existence of more versatile cloud software development environments has made it possible for agile software development to happen. The underpinned principle of agile development is that small teams, meeting regularly (in a scrum), agreeing what needs to be done, sprinting to get them produced in a day, then reviewing progress speeds up software development considerably. Unfortunately, this step forward in the software development approach does little to eradicate the project overheads and risks associated with manual coding.
Agile Codeless with Live Wireframing
The use of codeless requires developers to no longer see or use code. Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) make it possible for software developments to be managed by one person from start to end. The key design responsibility falls on someone with business analyst skills who has a deep appreciation of what needs to be created. This has led to the ability for software developments to happen in workshops, in near-real-time. At the term suggests, live wireframing focuses on rapidly developing a live wireframe ‘prototype’ of a solution and ‘failing fast.’ Through the use of an integrated development environment, it’s possible to de-risk projects by iterating designs at a very low cost.
About Encanvas
Encanvas is an enterprise software company that specializes in helping businesses to create above and beyond customer experiences.
From Low Code to Codeless
Better than code-lite and low-code, we created the first no-code (codeless) enterprise application platform to release creative minds from the torture of having to code or script applications.
Live Wireframe
Use Encanvas in your software development lifecycle to remove the barrier between IT and the business. Coding and scripting is the biggest reason why software development has been traditionally unpredictable, costly and unable to produce best-fit software results. Encanvas uniquely automates coding and scripting. Our live wireframing approach means that business analysts can create the apps you need in workshops, working across the desk with users and stakeholders.
AppFabric
When it comes to creating apps to create a data culture and orchestrate your business model, there’s no simpler way to install and operate your enterprise software platform than AppFabric. Every application you create on AppFabric adds yet more data to your single-version-of-the-truth data insights. That’s because, we’ve designed AppFabric to create awesome enterprise apps that use a common data management substrate, so you can architect and implement an enterprise master data management plan.
Customer Data Platform
Encanvas supplies a private-cloud Customer Data Platform that equips businesses with the means to harvest their customer and commercial data from all sources, cleanse and organize it, and provide tooling to leverage its fullest value in a secure, regulated way. We provide a retrofittable solution that bridges across existing data repositories and cleanses and organizes data to present a useful data source. Then it goes on to make data available 24×7 in a regulated way to authorized internal stakeholders and third parties to ensure adherence to data protection and FCA regulatory standards.
Encanvas Secure&Live
Encanvas Secure and Live (‘Secure&Live’) is a High-Productivity application Platform-as-a-Service. It’s an enterprise applications software platform that equips businesses with the tools they need to design, deploy applications at low cost. It achieves this by removing coding and scripting tasks and the overheads of programming applications. Unlike its rivals, Encanvas Secure&Live is completely codeless (not just Low-Code), so it removes the barriers between IT and the business. Today, you just need to know that it’s the fastest (and safest) way to design, deploy and operate enterprise applications.
Learn more by visiting www.encanvas.com.
The Author
Erica Tomlin is a senior consultant specializing in helping organizational leadership teams to grow by implementing enterprise software platforms that improve data visibility, process agility; and organizational learning – creating an enterprise that learns and adapts faster. She writes on subjects of change management, organizational design, rapid development applications software, and data science. She can be contacted via her LinkedIn profile.
Further reading
Mar 11, 2020 | Low Code Development
Understand what Change Management is and how it can help your business
Introduction
Change Management Software is a category of application software used to facilitate enterprise change and improvement. It helps organizations to adapt to change by anticipating needs, modifying or displacing incumbent software applications. In the context of application software development, change management involves tracking and managing changes to artifacts, such as code and requirements as part of software development life-cycle (SDLC).
How Change Management Software Differs to Traditional ERP Software
Enterprise software created for Systems of Record use cases – such as Financial, Manufacturing Resource Planning, Human Capital Management, and Customer Relationship Management software – is designed to impose best practice approaches to commonly performed business-critical processes within the enterprise. It is unusual for Systems-of-Record applications to deliver a competitive advantage because they fundamentally install common blueprints and ways of working that all competitors in a market end up supporting. In contrast, change management software exists to stay in-tune with enterprise needs for information processing as business models evolve over time.
The digital age has seen a dramatic increase in the pace of change in business model designs. Whereas firms a decade ago wouldn’t change their business model more than once in a decade, today, organizations will review business model designs at least once every two years, if not more.
Advantages of Change Management Software
Change Management Software equips individuals or departments charged with business improvement – and command over the change management process within an enterprise – with the necessary tools to evolve information systems and to support the change process itself. It brings the following benefits to adopting businesses:
- Faster pace of change
- Lower cost transformations in IT systems
- Less organizational friction
- Greater democratization of IT
- More adaptive IT
- Improvement competitiveness through faster-time-to-market of new customer value propositions, together with lower operating costs through more efficient systems and processes (and less manual processing)
Moving Application Platforms to the Cloud
Since 2007, the enterprise computing industry has been progressively leveraging cloud computing technologies to make applications more accessible and available to user communities. The use of cloud hosting applications has made it possible for applications to serve markets and users 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. One of the challenges of porting applications to the cloud has been the risk of data loss. Data security has become an increasing concern to organizations because of their greater reliance on data to continue business operations. Additionally, the increased compliance risks of processing personally identifiable information (PII) have made organizations more concerned about the security risks of cloud-deployed applications. Nevertheless, most application platforms today are deployed on cloud computing platforms as an applications-Platform-as-a-Service ([aPaaS]).
About Encanvas
Encanvas is an enterprise software company that specializes in helping businesses to create above and beyond customer experiences.
From Low Code to Codeless
Better than code-lite and low-code, we created the first no code (codeless) enterprise application platform to release creative minds from the torture of having to code or script applications.
Live Wireframe
Use Encanvas in your software development lifecycle to remove the barrier between IT and the business. Coding and scripting is the biggest reason why software development has been traditionally unpredictable, costly and unable to produce best-fit software results. Encanvas uniquely automates coding and scripting. Our live wireframing approach means that business analysts can create the apps you need in workshops, working across the desk with users and stakeholders.
AppFabric
When it comes to creating apps to create a data culture and orchestrate your business model, there’s no simpler way to instal and operate your enterprise software platform than AppFabric. Every application you create on AppFabric adds yet more data to your single-version-of-the-truth data insights. That’s because, we’ve designed AppFabric to create awesome enterprise apps that use a common data management substrate, so you can architect and implement an enterprise master data management plan.
Customer Data Platform
Encanvas supplies a private-cloud Customer Data Platform that equips businesses with the means to harvest their customer and commercial data from all sources, cleanse and organize it, and provide tooling to leverage its fullest value in a secure, regulated way. We provide a retrofittable solution that bridges across existing data repositories and cleanses and organizes data to present a useful data source. Then it goes on to make data available 24×7 in a regulated way to authorized internal stakeholders and third parties to ensure adherence to data protection and FCA regulatory standards.
Encanvas Secure&Live
Encanvas Secure and Live (‘Secure&Live’) is a High-Productivity application Platform-as-a-Service. It’s an enterprise applications software platform that equips businesses with the tools they need to design, deploy applications at low cost. It achieves this by removing coding and scripting tasks and the overheads of programming applications. Unlike its rivals, Encanvas Secure&Live is completely codeless (not just Low-Code), so it removes the barriers between IT and the business. Today, you just need to know that it’s the fastest (and safest) way to design, deploy and operate enterprise applications.
Learn more by visiting www.encanvas.com.
The Author
Mason Alexander is a senior consultant specializing in helping organizational leadership teams to grow by implementing enterprise software platforms that improve data visibility, process agility; and organizational learning – creating an enterprise that learns and adapts faster. He writes on subjects of change management, organizational design, rapid development applications software, and data science. He can be contacted via his LinkedIn profile.
May 23, 2019 | Digital Ecosystem, Digital Transformation, Digital Transformation Platform, Digital Transformation Software, Low Code Development, Uncategorized
It’s no secret that creating digital platforms and ecosystems demands a faster paced-IT capability. But is moving to a two-speed IT model the best way to go?
IT leaders are challenged to keep innovating while over 60% of IT budgets remain focused on keeping the lights on. Consumers and workers alike expect apps that ‘just work’. They expect IT innovators to rapidly source always-on, powerful, and instantly intuitive solutions to capture, access, manage, and share information.
To keep pace with the need for near-constant digital re-invention, a new kind of IT rapid DevOps team is needed and a ‘fail-fast’ prototyping approach that in itself requires a high-productivity applications platform to support it.
Management teams recognize that they can’t ignore the importance of digital technologies and their influence on markets and business models. Organizations have a stark choice; to embrace digital, or die.
Buy or Build
In this new digital market reality, enterprises are faced with the option to buy an existing digital platform and ecosystem to support their business model orchestration, or build their own. In most cases, the only way for organizations to achieve a competitive edge is to do the latter. Recognition of this change makes IT an intrinsic core competency of any business, not a support department only there to keep the lights on.
McKinsey & Co. suggest companies with digital platforms enjoyed an annual boost in earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) of 1.4 percent, compared with the 0.3 percent gains of non-players. They go on to state that performance effects are cumulative, with EBIT improvements adding to early-year gains, so over a five- year period, platform players may capture an additional 10 percent in EBIT growth—a company’s 2 percent EBIT growth, for example, would increase to 2.2 percent in year five.
‘The right digital-platform strategy’, Insights Report, McKinsey & Co, May 2019
DevOps – The Right Approach?
Enterprises are creating DevOps teams to support and speed up their digital transformation, embracing digital innovation, enabling them to reduce operation costs. Sometimes, these teams are carved out of existing in-house resources and continue to report to the IT department, but in other cases, Chief Digital Officer (CDO) roles are appointed to ensure a new culture is stitched into the design of this key enabling team.
Which Route? Two-Speed or Integrated?
It’s only an opinion, but my experience of two-speed team structures for digital transformation hasn’t been satisfactory. There’s a risk that some great people get left in the ‘slow-speed’ IT team that end up feeling disenfranchised. Also, the leadership of the two teams can end up squabbling. creating disruption and distractions that are at best unhelpful. That said, if both teams accept that their roles are important, and the right personalities are placed in the right seats, perhaps it could work.
The Third Way
My preference is a third project structure. It’s what German companies call the ‘Organization Department’. It’s a department responsible for managing change – a continuous improvement team that includes IT, analysts, legal, HR, marketing,and program management competencies in a single unifying team that sits within the body corporate led not by IT but the CEO.
Why this structure? Because agility in business these days is a process. It has a life-cycle like any other process. Organizations must accept that change is not an intervention, it’s an always-on aspect of organizational performance.
Use Encanvas AppFabric to supercharge your Digital Transformation
Source:
1. Altimeter Group Digital Transformation Survey
2. University of Oxford
3. Gartner (2112)
4. Gartner (2112)
5. Oxford Economics and SAP (2012)
6. MIT Sloan Mgmt. Review
Tool Kits Matter
Without the right tool kit, it’s not sensible or practical to consider in-house development of the technology you’ll need to orchestrate your business model. When businesses continue to use manual coding of apps, they inevitably fall foul of its inherent weaknesses.
Encanvas software, and similar tools like Mendix, ServiceNow, and OutSystems equip businesses with the ability to design, deploy and run their own self-authored apps. Encanvas is specifically engineered to support the project process for orchestrating business models through a series of software developments modules. This way, it removes the technology obstacles of creating enterprise-scale applications, such as coding, integrating, and testing new applications.
Live Wireframing Make Fail Fast Prototyping Affordable
a fundamental principle of rapid app development is that it’s best to start small with the minimum set of requirements and get something working so it starts delivering value. The alternative to this is building a mammoth software requirements specification (SRS) document that conjures up so many ‘nice-to-have’ features that it becomes impossible to economically produce. When creating a best-fit app module, involving stakeholders (ie Customers, Partners, Users) directly in the design process always works better.
Removing code and presenting WYSIWYG results in a workshop environment is the best way to do this.
A Live Wireframe is a fully functioning application prototype (pre-UAT) that proves the red-flag issues that the project team determines as being the biggest risks to project success. The task of producing a Live-Wireframe is performed by having stakeholders work ‘across-the-desk’ with a business analyst who creates the resulting live-wireframe design in near-real-time.
As soon as line-of-business stakeholders get presented with a screen of code, they shy away from feeling they should contribute to the development process – it’s just too overwhelming. With Live Wireframes, stakeholders get to see during the design workshop, the live system they’re going to be using in all of its glory. Seeing instant results makes an enormous difference to project success, but it requires built-for-purpose development tools; a unifying design and deployment ecosystem that removes the need for IT to master a dozen different technology components before they can produce any outcome.
Two-Speed IT is unnecessary when enterprises create an Organization Department and install a culture of prototyping by employing Live Wireframes. This way digital platform design and management becomes an embedded capability of the enterprise, ensuring agility is seen as a constant (and is appropriately resourced).
How To Run Live Wireframing Projects with Encanvas >
Author
Ian Tomlin is a marketer, entrepreneur, business leader and management consultant. His passion is to help make great ideas happen. Relentlessly optimistic about the potential of technology for good, Ian’s 30+ year career has focused around the intersect of strategy, technology and marketing. He writes on subjects including enterprise computing and organizational design. He also works as a consultant and advisor to the executive teams of PrinSIX Technologies, Answer Pay and INTNT.AI, helping to rethink their marketing in order to tell their brand story.
Ian has founded a series of successful businesses including NDMC Ltd (2003), Encanvas (2006), and Newton Day Ltd (2019). He has written books, articles and guides on brand, digital transformation, enterprise applications, data science, workforce management, and organizational design. He can be reached via LinkedIn or Twitter.
