Improve Digital Employee Experience with a Low-Code Leader

How do you digitally transform your organization? It doesn’t necessarily mean creating the next big thing in technology. In this era, a common goal of digital transformation is to simply operate like a technology company. Operating like a modern tech organization means:

  • Creating fluid, multimodal customer experiences
  • Modernizing legacy systems and software
  • Optimizing arcane and archaic processes that you’ve risked relying on for years, maybe decades

These may not be world-changing or newsworthy, but digital employee experience (DEX) needs to be considered when setting your digital transformation goals.

If you can augment work through digitization and automation, you’re one step closer to running and operating at the levels customers and employees expect from organizations these days.

While the apps that you create to improve digital employee experience are vital to any digitalization effort, it’s the people who build these applications–the people who make up your organization and use these solutions–who are often considered the most important aspect of any digital transformation effort. It behooves any organization to find ways to better and more quickly develop these types of back-office apps.

Quicker and more collaborative development software cycles are why many organizations are turning to low-code development. In the latest Magic Quadrant ™ for Enterprise Low Code Application Platforms, Gartner has listed Back Office Applications with Collaboration of Professional and Citizen Developers as one of its critical capabilities when evaluating a low-code application development platform. Mendix just happens to be a Leader in the Magic Quadrant and has scored a 4.1 out of 5 in the back-office applications category.

What is digital employee experience?

Digital employee experience encapsulates how your employees interact with your organization’s technology. This includes devices, apps, and UIs, but also considers quality, ease of use, performance and reliability as well as accessibility. Back office applications are often the software where digital employee experiences should be considered.

Exceptional digital employee experience is good for business

What is a back office application? It’s a solution that augments work by making processes easier and faster and data quality stronger. Why is improving digital employee experience important? The less time that employees spend mired in time-consuming processes or stuck finding the right data, the more time they’re allowed to work on more value-adding tasks.

What shape can back office applications take? The use cases are many and the business value they bring can be instrumental. Such solutions replace common tasks done previously in Excel or email (for example). Sunray Construction & Interior, built an application with the Mendix low-code Platform that automated a reporting process that cuts down the time it takes to compile reports from two days to just two hours—a 96% time reduction.

Building digital employee experiences the right way

Building out DEX applications that are multimodal, require a lot of system integrations, or are automated can be incredibly difficult for modern enterprises.

This is especially true for organizations who still rely on traditional development methods and struggle to keep up with business demands. Such methods can create a bottleneck of requirements, because, in that model, only professional developers can build the solutions that employees request. This means that requests pile up and backlogs are constantly re-prioritized. Solutions may never see the light of day and if they do, it’s unlikely they meet the new set of rapidly incoming requirements.

Gartner suggests that fusion teams – multidisciplinary teams consisting of professional developers and business leaders that come together under one common goal – are important to quickly building these back office applications. Because fusion teams are focused on one goal, there’s a common language between IT and the business. When requests come in, the business knows what to ask for, and IT understands how these applications can help the organization succeed.

With fusion teams, both sides of the software solution coin are now part of the application development process.

83% of business technologists believe that collaborating with IT helps create technologies that are more innovative, reliable, and affordable.

The Mendix Platform is a collaborative development platform that focuses on helping organizations create that common language. Professional and non-professional developers alike can track requirements, set sprints, and proffer feedback all within the Mendix Platform.

A platform like Mendix is desirable: According to the 2021 Gartner Reimagining Technology Work Survey, 83% of business technologists—employees who report outside of IT yet create technology for internal or external use—believe that collaborating with IT helps create technologies that are more innovative, reliable, and affordable. 84% believe IT collaboration results in solutions being produced faster.

Using Mendix’s visual modeling, employees outside of IT can even start applications themselves and then go to IT for more specialized development needs such as integrations. The Mendix Platform is highly extensible. Developers can create extensions in Java and JavaScript to develop bespoke functions for their organization.

The Mendix Platform also gives organizations the ability to create libraries of reusable components. This way, developers can build application functions once and use and configure across different applications. Build a module for single sign-on, and that can be re-used across any application. Such development makes the assembling of applications quicker and welcomes business developers further into the software development fold.

Of course, building those digital employee experiences and deploying the applications requires a good amount of governance, quality assurance, and strong version control.

To ensure proper governance, Mendix provides quality assurance tools and a strong version control along with functional testing and one-click cloud deployment making deployment easy and controlled. In addition, Mendix provides users Control Center, where designated admins can monitor and report on applications and their performance.

Accelerating digitalization means improving digital employee experience

Developing backoffice applications that shore up digital employee experience is a surefire way to ensure that you’re operating like a modern technology company.

Creating teams made up of professional developers and tech-minded business developers is a clear path to great DEX. In fact, we’re already seeing this happen. The 2022 Gartner View from the Board of Directors Survey shows that “40% of boards of directors have moved digital business-related budgets to the business unit to accelerate digitalization.” With Mendix, you can put that budget to good use and empower those teams to accelerate your organization’s digitalization.