Major waves of computing technology have emerged over the decades and will no doubt continue far into the future. Room-sized mainframe computers eventually yielded to the personal computer which was made ever more valuable by connecting people together over the internet. Advances in chip and user-interfaces eventually begat the smartphone becoming the bane of parents and teachers alike in corralling teenagers to concentrate on their schoolwork.
Software evolution kept pace with mainframe applications designed to serve large enterprises giving way (somewhat) to lower cost client server applications. The modern web browser served as a great leap forward to increase distribution and grow user bases while driving costs even lower. And in a less than a few years the smartphone app market became a multi-billion dollar industry.
Underpinning these are hundreds of software programming languages, toolsets, databases, frameworks, methodologies and hosting platforms that have matured over the years into sophisticated technologies for delivering applications faster than ever before. However, as any business executive will attest, today's fast is not fast enough.
Enter the low-code/no-code platforms as the next generation of enterprise computing technology. These modern platforms enable IT to more quickly respond to business need by configuring new applications instead of building them from the ground up. This new wave removes the burden of writing, compiling and testing code and shifts effort towards the much more valuable activity of delivering the underlying business workflow and customer experience.
At Digital Forge, we see platforms as a key agent of digital transformation. Custom built applications will always play a central role in organizations, especially for core market differentiating products, but to achieve speed, platforms are becoming as critical as electricity.
Platform center of excellence
Organizations get the most platform value, and therefore higher digital transformation maturity, by instituting a well-designed governance and lifecycle management function to aid in promoting their use, ensuring architecture and development standards, enabling the workforce, prioritizing programs and designing for well-intentioned reuse. This function is best carried out through aPlatform Center of Excellence comprised of a dedicated staff bringing together the business, product and IT.
At Digital Forge, we have developed a PlatformCenter of Excellence offering comprised of the key activities and work-streams needed to successfully deliver applications needed to digitally transform your business.
Strategy and Planning
Define the approach for how low-code/no-code platforms will support your organization's overall digital transformation vision and plan for the center of excellence.
Market and Vendor Research
Maintain currency in understanding the platform technology landscape, latest trends and emerging feature sets
Governance Design and Implementation
Design and implement rules, activities and processes working with stakeholder organizations to identify and agree on relevant roles and responsibilities
Business Architecture
Align a clear set of business functional categories with out of the box platform capabilities and newly developed applications to rationalize the IT application portfolio
Use Case Discovery and Analytics
Find, analyze, prioritize and plan application development efforts to address the identified digital strategy
Training and Enablement
Prepare your workforce to analyze and implement platform technologies through vendor and 3rd party technical training and customized enablement for your specific organization
Platform Fit and Evaluation
Apply the DigitalForge Platform Rubric and Functional Capability Matrix to determine which applications are a fit for a platform and if so, the best vendor technology
Value Monitoring
Design and implement a systematic approach for measuring and reporting on the value of the platforms against your digital transformation imperatives to ensure an optimum program
deliver application platforms
Our teams of highly experienced technologists with a range of vendor technology certifications are ready to help you deliver your digital transformation applications.
Solution Architecture
Design the enterprise's platform architecture in relation to existing systems, hosting preferences, security requirements and business unit needs.
Configuration and Development
Utilizing key platform functional features, design and implement applications that meet the business needs for digital transformation
User Interface Design
Employ today's best design practices in conjunction with the platform's user interface configuration tools to deliver compelling, accessible and easy to use applications
Validation and Testing
Ensure applications address requirements through a combination of manual and automated approaches to enable continuous delivery of high-quality solutions
operate application platforms
Our teams of highly experienced technologists with a range of vendor technology certifications are ready to help you operate and support your digital transformation applications.
Administration
Manage platform and application, configurations, user groups, users, permissions and system interfaces enabling IT, business users and end customers
Infrastructure Management
Manage underlying platform server configurations, software upgrades, security patches, capacity, failover, network integration and application performance.
DevOps
Support rapid incident assessment, resolution and fixes to minimize platform downtime
Operations
Staff platform application specialty skills such as security, incident management, release management, etc. in support of ongoing enterprise business operations