The democratization of IT is about giving people greater power to build their own apps. In this article, we uncover how digital documents help with that ambition.
Calls to democratize IT need to be somewhat qualified. Does the man in the street harbor a desperate desire to build software applications? Perhaps, perhaps not. The audience of people that want to access simpler tools to build software applications, one could argue, falls into three categories:
- People who want to make money from creating a business around software application development.
- People who want to make a living from being capable of developing applications.
- People who want to work with and use information and need some form of tooling in order to achieve it.
While nobody would wish to put off anyone from having a stab at building a software application, one might question whether that presupposes that everyone that starts playing around with applications development tools is passionate about software development.
For many, it is the last straw, the means to an end. In a digital world, the number of people frustrated by the lack of useful tools to work with information is spiraling ever upwards. So far as most would understand, software applications development is the only answer.
The lobbyists for democratization of IT
Arguably the call for further democratization of IT comes from knowledge workers who see a shortfall in the quality and completeness of tooling they are supplied with to do what they will with information. They want to make more sense of data, leverage its value in more ways, streamline how processes are performed, tasks completed, and share data in ways that bring more value to their customers and stakeholders.
IT leaders aren’t generally attributed as the leaders of the charge towards the democratization of IT, but it would be unfair to say many don’t agree that there is a need to cascade digital tooling further across the enterprise, to equip information workers with better ways to serve themselves.
Balancing business needs with IT practicality
No question, digital transformation demands call for technologies like robotic process automation (software bots) and artificial intelligence to be delivered into the business in a more fine-grained, task-specific form. Many digital leaders accept the way to do this is to find a better balance between professional tools and information tools; to share the load in a way that represents a win: win for both sides.
Composable IT, the emerging game-changer for digital transformations
When it comes to enterprise digital transformations, the new kid on the block is composability tooling and models. Businesses know they need to be able to see market changes as an opportunity, not a threat. That means installing more fluidity into supply chains, resourcing approaches, business processes, and, most importantly, how IT is served up to information workers.
It was Gartner who first coined the term ‘composability’ (composable applications come #5 in Gartner’s top 2022 priorities.).
Gartner describes business composability as ‘…a strategy and capability to apply modularity to any business asset — people, processes, technologies, and even physical assets — so that leaders can quickly, easily, and safely recompose them and create new value in response to disruption.’
According to the Gartner report “Adopt a Composable DXP Strategy to Future-Proof Your Tech Stack,” 60% of mainstream organizations will use the composable business model as a strategic objective by 2023.
Composability is about creating information management solutions built from business-centric modular components, that make it easier to use and reuse data and code, accelerating the time to market for new information solutions while releasing enterprise value.
Read that another way, and composability is about the IT department democratizing IT by serving up the building blocks of new ways to work with information management in ways that is safe for data but offers information workers the autonomy of use that lets them get on with their jobs.