Empowering Change Agents and Bringing New Ideas to Life

A Change Agent is an individual with the will, imagination, and capability to bring transformative ideas to life. Change Agents are often passionate business leaders who know how to create buzz, inertia, and collaboration in order to foster action.

‍

Change Agents help organizations to function more efficiently and they help to create opportunities that help organizations grow. They therefore must be supported and empowered.

‍

One way to assess your organization's ability to support these Agents of Change is to consider the barriers that stand in their way.

‍

‍

Complexity Kills Innovation

For example, a Change Agent may wish to jump on the Artificial Intelligence bandwagon with the idea that a smarter way for users to search and interact with data could save countless hours of manual effort. On paper this sounds amazing but in reality, the Change Agent's idea could be far removed from a production-ready capability. The Change Agent will need to sell the idea internally and the amount of selling will determine the leap of faith that will need to be made.

‍

A "Leap of Faith" is all about the assumption of risk and so the Agent of Change will also need to have demonstrated success. It becomes a chicken-and-egg scenario.

‍

Let's help this leap.

‍

A quick audit of the people, tools and platforms that the Change Agent would have to engage with this can be eye-opening. How quickly can these people, processes, and systems adapt to meet the change that is being sought?

‍

People/Skills Required:

•  Solution Architects
•  Data Engineers
•  JavaScript Developers
•  Database Administrators
•  Workflow / PowerApps Specialists
•  Application Specialists

Tools Required:

•  Spreadsheets
•  BI Visualizations
•  Data Transformation
•  Workflow / PowerApps
•  ETL Tools

Platform Integrations:

•  Enterprise Data Warehouse
•  Data Lakes
•  Data Marts
•  SaaS (ServiceNow, Salesforce, Workday, etc.)

Even the smallest change often requires multiple teams to be engaged and systems to be modified.  This represents a HUGE barrier for Change Agents to overcome.

‍

Given this, the path of least resistance for the Change Agent is to turn to:

•     Spreadsheets  
•     Or, custom development  

‍

This should be a big concern for the organization because brilliant ideas often hang on the success of a spreadsheet or a JavaScript developer. There is a lot of risk in this equation. Spreadsheets were not designed to be production-ready applications and custom development can be painfully slow and not deliver value for a very long time. The Change Agent is likely risking a great deal of personal clout and political capital and to do so in this manner is a sign of either desperation or an incomplete vision.

‍

Why Organizations Need A Rapid Application Development Environment

Imagine empowering a Change Agent with the ability to create production-ready applications that can scale to meet the needs of 1,000s of users.

Imagine empowering these Change Agents with a platform that is purpose-built to solve the spreadsheet/custom development problem.

Imagine a rapid prototyping capability that can help Change Agents sell the "art-of-the-possible" and allow them to bring new ideas to life very quickly.

To achieve this, a Rapid Application Development (RAD) environment must offer a solution that goes beyond the concept of a low-code capability. It must also encompass or support:

•     Bi-Directional Application Integration    - the ability to push and pull data as needed
•     Workflow and Forms    - the ability to collect information and human knowledge
•     Alerting and Escalation    - the ability to push data to users and prompt them to act
•     Data Visualization and Interactivity    - the ability to summarize data in a variety of ways to help users make informed, data-driven decisions
•     An Integrated Data Store    - a flexible platform that can be used to house data using various structures and one that can adapt and evolve as needs change

‍

By combining these capabilities into a single platform, many of the moving parts otherwise needed suddenly play a secondary role. This means that the Change Agent can bring new ideas to life faster and with less impact on internal systems. The RAD capability removes the barriers to innovation and empowers Change Agents to deliver transformative change.

‍

To learn more about how we can help bring your ideas to life, please get on our calendar for a quick conversation. We are happy to help!

Let's Talk!

‍