How CIOs can navigate the digital transformation journey and avoid the obstacles that emerge en route

Digital transformation has evolved from a boardroom buzzword to a core component of every modern company’s growth, reshaping CIOs from IT gatekeepers into strategic business leaders. The shift led analyst house Gartner to tell every CIO to “fire yourself as an IT leader and hire yourself as a digital business executive.”

Vendors have responded by selling tools and technologies that they promise will smoothly steer the digital transformation journey. Unfortunately for the CIOs that buy them, these typically complex, costly and inflexible solutions can cause their digital strategies to veer off course.

These issues have reinforced the stereotype of IT inhibiting innovation. CIOs can only overcome by adopting technologies that enable ongoing disruption.

“You don’t achieve digital transformation just by introducing technology to the workplace,” says Mike Fitzmaurice, a world-renowned expert in workflow automation who was recently appointed VP of WEBCON North America.

“Digital transformation is cultural transformation. Technology can help. But technology alone won’t create this.”

Fitzmaurice had been evangelising product-neutral best practices for business process automation (BPA) for well over a decade before he chose to work at WEBCON because he believes the WEBCON BPS, a low-code application development platform, best embodies his product design principles.

His faith is based on the platform’s process-driven approach to automation. This enables users to build custom applications that can both achieve their original objectives and easily adapt to their ever-changing business needs.

WEBCON BPS can do this at every stage of the business application cycle and is equally well-suited to linear processes, adaptive case management scenarios and data-centric apps.

This produces applications that are scalable, process-centric, low-to-no-code, equally at home online or on-premises, and offer the same experience in a browser and on mobile apps.

WEBCON BPS is also known for being highly user-friendly, but Fitzmaurice is keen to stress that this is a minimum requirement for modern business tools.

“It’s become very fashionable to tout how easy a tool is,” he says. “If someone in the first paragraph describing their product talks about drag and drop or no code needed, they’re emphasising the wrong things, and one should look at them with either great scrutiny or look elsewhere. Look for tools that think this stuff through.”

WEBCON does this by enabling the process and data requirements to determine the appearance and behavior of user interface, rather than the other way around like so many of its competitors.

This combination of flexibility, versatility, transparency and usability has helped the likes of Domino’s Pizza, Mitsubishi Electric and Siemens Finance save enormous time and money by easily building and maintaining apps that digitalise, standardise and automate their business processes.

WEBCON gives them the visibility into the impact of changes in components, suppliers and roles that allows any member of the team to adapt the solution as required.

“The number one criteria for selecting tools and for methods for building business process solutions ought to be clarity,” says Fitzmaurice. “Not technical elegance – clarity. Because if you can’t communicate what it is you’ve done to the stakeholder who can check your work and make sure it’s meeting their business needs, you’ve failed. “Clarity matters more than anything.”

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