As a society, we use apps to manage, connect and augment our day-to-day lives. So, it’s understandable that when we go to work, we expect to have the same. Apps can help organisations modernise processes, create new innovations and uncover opportunities.

According to the IDC, this growing demand for digital solutions means that 500 million new applications will be built in the next five years. And with a shortfall of 4 million developers predicted by 2025, most organisations don’t have enough developers to create the apps they need. We call this the App Gap Challenge:

The gap between the number of software developers you have today and the number of software developers you need to build the next generation of apps.

So how can organisations solve this? Low/no code platforms like Microsoft Power Apps can help speed up app development and democratise it across the organisation.

Empower developers to innovate with low/no code

Low/no code solutions allows the rapid building of solutions that automate and streamline routine tasks. This allows developers to focus on more high-value, complex work. According to The Total Economic Impact™ Of Power Apps commissioned study by Forrester Consulting, Power Apps can reduce app development and costs by 74 percent.

It can also help organisations drive a growth mindset culture in development teams. They can use Power Apps to quickly prototype a new idea and deploy this capability rapidly.

Take, for example, AstraZeneca’s HealthyMind app. The biopharmaceutical company wanted to ensure their employees had convenient, secure access to mental health resources. It took the developer team just four months to build the solution on Power Apps.

“Key to the choice [of Power Apps] was its ease of use. It is low code, so it is quick to develop and deploy. This all meant that we were able to design and build HealthyMind very quickly,” says Matt O’Halloran, Head of Workplace and Enterprise Services at AstraZeneca.

A platform like Power Apps can also connect to hundreds of different data sources including Microsoft Dataverse. This brings all your business data together into a single source of truth. Your developers can easily customise and extend capabilities in Azure and leverage business data from your systems of record such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Surface through Microsoft 365.

“[HealthyMind’s] natural integration with the broader suite that we use enabled us to deliver the application within the context of Teams, which was another game-changing factor,” says O’Halloran.

Drive digitisation with citizen development

With low/no code, development is democratised throughout your organisation. It allows anyone to solve business problems themselves.

At Centrica, citizen developers have built over 1,000 apps.

“We’ve really embraced this technology in Centrica. We’ve made an effort to be on the front foot and use the latest technology first, rather than waiting for it to be embedded and then acting,” says James Boswell, Director, Design and Engineering at Centrica. “It was a conscious risk but it’s worked really well – it’s giving us some great benefits and rewards and we’re well on the way to ensuring all our employees are digital employees.” 

For the energy services and solutions company, Power Apps has changed perceptions and steered to business-led development. Take, their finance team for example, in a couple of months they built an app that simplified and automated coordinating tax returns across different regimes. 

Build fusion teams to digitise and innovate faster

What happens when you combine your pro developers and citizen developers? You build fusion teams and unlock the true value of low/no code. According to Gartner, 84 percent of companies already have a fusion team.

By bringing together people with different experiences and knowledge into a multi-disciplinary team, you’ll build more innovative, inclusive apps, faster.

In a fusion team, citizen developers, with the support of pro developers, can rapidly build more complex applications. Citizen developers can focus on the UI, whilst pro developers can create and manage the APIs needed to enrich the application with key data sources. This accelerates time-to-delivery. Fusion teams can deploy solutions up to two and a half times faster than traditional siloed teams.

Centrica used a fusion team to develop an app that matches Centrica volunteers with people from the Trussell Trust charity.

“We’ve got people from all over the business working together. Some are working on the development work, some on the UI, some acting as scrum masters to manage the project. It’s all being done by people who came to the clinics and volunteered. And it will be a huge help to the Trussell Trust,” says Roy Young, Global Head of Office 365.

Build a fusion team

1. Find your use case

Pick a relevant problem that needs solving quickly and when solved, provides a considerable impact.

• Assemble your team

Have a mixture of proactive employees from across many lines of business, such as customer service, developers, team leaders, business leads.

• Plan your roadmap

Determine how much time it’ll take to create, implement, and produce results. Make sure you have time to troubleshoot and determine which solutions work best.

• Accept mistakes along the way

By working in an agile environment, your team will constantly be testing and may have to be ready to pivot when necessary.

Drive digitalisation and innovation

Power Apps helps organisations increase agility by giving everyone the ability to rapidly build low-code apps that drive innovation, modernise processes and solve tough challenges.

Cara Barratt, Workplace Transformation Lead at AstraZeneca agrees, “…we’re really looking at how we can empower our colleagues across AstraZeneca so those that have great ideas can develop their own use cases.”

Find out more

Accelerate innovation with low-code

Microsoft Power Apps

Join a Power App Microsoft Training Day

Make app building easier

Take the Fusion Development Learning Path

Take a fusion development approach to building apps

About the author

As a Power Platform Technical Specialist at Microsoft, Simon takes great pride in helping companies solve their business problems and generate insight into data, providing rapid answers to business questions through use of the Power Platform (specifically Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, Dataverse and AI Builder). He enjoys working with the people in customer organisations who are helping to drive transformation using this technology and seeing the impact it has on their organisations and their careers.

The post How low/no code solutions can accelerate innovation and digitisation appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

The teams who develop and manage these solutions – developers – are at the heart of the organisation. They’re critical in enabling your organisation to respond to your customer’s needs.

And when it comes to digital innovation, speed is crucial but so is having a structured plan in place. At the same time, innovation is open to everyone. Therefore, organisations need the right tools to create a culture of innovation.

Professional developers can use Visual Studio and GitHub to modernise existing and develop new applications.

You can also empower a new stream of innovation– citizen developers. These employees understand a business process and want to improve on it but might not have the developer expertise. Now with Power Apps, they can use low/no code solutions to build what they need.

Here are six ways to build a customer-centric culture by empowering your developers.

Move to the public cloud

Innovation happens faster in the cloud. Whether you need to modernise existing applications, simplify complex environments or create new apps, you can benefit from the scalability and flexibility of Azure. Developers can build on a secure foundation in any language or foundation, from anywhere.

Simplify complex and distributed environments across multiple clouds and edge environments with Azure Hybrid cloud solutions. Bring Azure management to your entire IT estate and run Azure services anywhere.

As the UK’s leading omnichannel payments business, PayPoint needs to maintain business as usual while managing increasing demand for its services. With Azure, they were able to respond with agility and even develop and deploy new functionality without downtime to customers.

Shorten time-to-market

According to a Gartner survey study, positive customer experiences drive more revenue, higher employee satisfaction and greater customer retention.

Organisations have a strong sense of urgency in going digital. This is driving demand for tools and services that shorten time-to-market and drive those positive customer experiences.

With tools like Azure DevOps and Visual Studio Code, with automation through DevOps Pipelines, GitHub Actions, the ability to streamline business processes with Power Automate and more increases the efficiency of your developer teams. They can then focus on innovating the customer experience.

Reassess investments

Customers increasingly expect products and services that factor in what they care about – be that macro topics like climate impact, or micro impacts such as their experience interacting with your products.

To meet these demands, organisations must find new ways to deliver service at scale. They need to focus on and connect with the customer experience – no matter how many business units, systems, supply chains and processes that customer journey may span. And do this all while reducing costs.

This requires a new way of thinking.

Many organisations are starting by setting a strategic approach and thinking of themselves as a software company first. Then, they’re leveraging digital technology to deliver on their vision.

Solutions built using the Azure platform offer near-instant provisioning of resources. This lowers innovation costs and enables a faster time-to-market. In fact, Forrester found the average cost to develop an application is 74 percent less with Power Apps.

Empower developers

According to McKinsey & Company, organisations with developer velocity experience four to times faster revenue growth, 60 percent higher return to shareholders, and 20 percent higher operating margin.

Unleash the creative energy of developers by leveraging Azure innovation tools. This enables them to build productively, foster secure collaboration, and remove barriers so they can scale faster innovation at lower cost.

Help them build the skills they need to bring ideas to life with certifications and training. Give developers autonomy, decision making and automate back-end processes so they can focus on bringing innovation.

Drive citizen development

Over 86 percent of organisations already struggle to hire developers. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2023, there will be four times as many end-user or citizen developers, compared to experienced developers in enterprises.

Empower the people closest to the problem to become citizen developers and solve problems themselves. With low/no code solutions like Power Apps anyone, regardless of their technical capability, can work together on the same platform to create solutions with a high level of agility.

Heathrow Airport employees have eliminated 75,000 pages of paperwork and reduced data entry by nearly 1,000 hours through the low-code development of 30 apps, helping the airport reduce its costs.

Infuse intelligence

The applications that both developers and citizen developers are building are powering important customer centric business processes. By applying AI and machine learning, organisations can infuse intelligence with real-time personalisation and serve up customised algorithms.

Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, uses Azure’s integrated platform with AI to build an algorithm that predicts bed space utilisation. The data is then available on Power BI so healthcare employees can quickly and simply understand the insights.

Empower developers to build a customer-centric culture

By unleashing the full potential of developers and citizen developers, organisations will enable growth, solve a wide range of business problems, and drive digital modernisation.

According to McKinsey, organisations with a developer mindset have 4 to 5 times higher revenue growth and 55 percent higher innovation.

Build a growth mindset culture where developers can drive innovation from anywhere, powered by a comprehensive portfolio of technology that complements your business needs.

We are the only company that has that full stack that spans across the breadth of both tech adoption and tech capability to build, and ultimately increase your chance of succeeding.

Find out more

Resources for leaders:

Watch the webinar: Unleash your developers to innovate

Take the Developer Velocity Assessment

Imagine digital innovation that makes a difference

Deliver a seamless experience with real impact

Build a growth mindset

Make app building easier

Resources for developer teams:

Explore the Dev Hub

Watch Microsoft Build on demand

Get certified

About the author

Denise leads the the digital and app innovation team, working directly with customers to uncover new opportunities. She has over 20 years’ experience in transformation leadership and business change delivery. With a proven ability to drive growth, innovation and performance turnaround across complex organisations, she has delivered new cloud services, automated processes and ways of working across the largest banking system in the UK.

The post The developer-customer connection: Why dev-centred cultures are customer-centric cultures appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Data can help an organisation identify new opportunities and uncover hidden efficiencies. The business world is no stranger to disruptions and changes, and when you extract as much value from data as possible, your organisation will be able to move with speed and gain competitive advantage.

Data maturity helps empower employees to collaborate, gain new insights and take action to deliver operational efficiencies. It can help teams be more innovative with their product development. Ultimately, this leads to delivering a better customer experience.

95% _{of surveyed organisations have deployed big data initiatives on a department or enterprise level}

To drive tangible outcomes, leaders should build a solid data foundation to start maximising opportunities. By fusing the power of Azure data and AI with Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, organisations can start to unlock new insights and more critically – take action.

But what stage are you on in your journey? And how do you leverage the right tools to stay agile and deliver the results you need and drive innovation?

_{Data-driven organisations are growing at an average of} 30% _{or more annually}

What stage is your organisation in your data journey?

1. Good
   • Better understand your customers, employees and use data to drive collaboration.
2. Better
   • Identify needs and trends, and adapt quickly to new business models, drive efficiencies and reduce costs.
3. Best
   • Empower employees with insights and drive meaningful change.

Step 1: Good

Customers have high expectations of brands. They want to be heard, understood and have personal, meaningful experiences.

73% _{of customers will consider switching to a competitive brand after one bad experience.}

How can leaders meet these goals in an ever-changing world?

• Make customer experience an organisation-wide priority.
• Be agile enough to respond to customer needs quickly.
• Respond honestly and authentically.
• Meet customers in the channels they expect.

When you unify and centralise your customer experience technology, you’ll gain insights to build deeper customer relationships.

Royal Enfield offers a frictionless experience to both its potential and existing customers at different touchpoints, ensuring they can access their data on the spot instead of starting anew each time.

75% _{of organisations have proved that customer satisfaction leads to revenue growth through increased retention or lifetime value.}

These insights will help employees deliver a more personalised experiences to customers. They will also be able to make decisions faster and with greater confidence, to deliver insights to the right stakeholders and the right time.

Rolls-Royce provides targeted and actionable insights at the point of need to inform business decisions, such as which factors will have the most impact on fuel performance.

How?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice

Helps you better listen to, understand and satisfy your customers. When combined with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite, it will help collect customer feedback across channels and form more authentic customer relationships.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Get a 360-degree view of customers and identify new unfound segments to support customer retention or create new revenue stream. Optimise and orchestrate real time personalised journeys to create fans improve loyalty.

Power BI

Gives every employee within the business the ability to respond in real-time with data-empowered insights on a secure platform.

Step 2: Better

To make sure your organisation continues to meet changing expectations, leaders must collaborate across business functions to align data goals and initiatives. At the same time, continued disruption, and budgeting means cost saving measures are critical.

64% _{of IT leaders say they’re using two or more analytics solutions}

When you consolidate your data, you’re creating a single source of truth for the enterprise. And by combining it onto one tool like Power BI, you’ll reduce costs.

PwC provides their clients with the data they need to on one platform. They use Azure to process the data and push it to Power BI, before shutting down (to save costs). From there, clients can view their data across customisable dashboards from anywhere.

48% _{of business goals driving data initiative investments is to improve decision making}

Power BI

Align your data across organisational silos. Employees can easily self-serve to get the data they need when they need it. Take advantage of cloud tech such as AI and automation to create cross-team reports that gain more insight. Plus, industry-leading data security capabilities help keep your insights protected.

_{The average time-to-insights is} 27% _{faster with Power BI}

Step 3: Best

Now you’ve laid the groundwork for a data-driven culture, you can use these insights to drive meaningful change and adapt at speed.

45% _{of users want real-time data aggregation and analysis}

To fully take advantage of your data, leverage automation and AI tools to process, aggregate and analyse data in one place in real-time. This, combined with user-friendly tools allows any employee to pull insights that are relevant for their role, right when they need it.

82% _{of users agree that self-service analytics is a top priority at their organisations}

This gives rise to the citizen analyst. Employees can get the answers they need while reducing the burden on IT staff. This better places your organisation to make decisions at speed.

66% _{of users say these capabilities are critical when evaluating new tools and solutions}

Data and AI can also enable predictive analytics, helping you respond quicker to upcoming changes, uncover new opportunities and better support customers. Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Commerce or Dynamics 365 Marketing can help you find new segments to market to, or drive customer retention with Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

_{Preemptive digital transformations have a} 50% _{higher ROI than reactive ones}

Identify operational inefficiencies with analytics to streamline and optimise back-end tasks, for example, monitor equipment health in manufacturing or healthcare or reduce manual tasks. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain can maximise your supply chains operations.

Analytics can also be used to amplify your organisation’s work. Take, for example, healthcare. AI is being used to analyse medical imagery, leading to quicker diagnosis and helping doctors focus on patient care.

Move forward with confidence

Making data-driven decisions with the right technology will help you make bold business moves with confidence. As a result, you’ll empower your employees, deliver better customer outcomes and stay agile in a fast-paced environment.

Find out more

Discover how to build a data strategy:

Imagine business powered by data

Learn how to put your data to work

Get data-driven insights

Get fresh perspectives on business modernisation:

Watch Microsoft Envision UK on demand

Explore data management solutions:

Power BI

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice

About the author

Chris leads the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement portfolio for Microsoft UK within the Dynamics 365 Business Group. Chris is responsible for developing and orchestrating the go-to-market strategy across this portfolio for the UK geography to generate awareness, create excitement and drive business development. The Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement portfolio is a suite of intelligent front office business applications designed to accelerate digital transformation across sales, marketing and customer service

The post KPIs and ROI: Quantifying the impact of data management in your business appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Digital modernisation is quickly becoming critical for business success in financial services. Especially in areas like customer experience and business process efficiencies. But the key to any modernisation is innovation. As a result, many financial institutions now see value in digitising and automating business processes to address three challenges:

1. How to provide more authentic and personalised customer experiences.
2. Reducing business process inefficiencies.
3. How to digitally transform and innovate whilst needing to maintain existing core and legacy systems.

With simple and effective no/low code applications such as Microsoft Power Apps, organisations are finding innovative ways to manipulate data and overcome these challenges. This makes these quick and easy-to-develop business apps a common solution across financial services. Here’s some examples of how this technology is being implemented.

Creating a more valuable customer experience

The expectation around customer experience is changing, resulting in more customers showing a lack of loyalty to financial brands. According to Gartner, “banking customers are increasingly demanding authentic human interactions.” This is a level of service that financial organisations need to provide across all channels to boost their customer engagement and loyalty.

When thinking about human interactions, automation may seem like a step in the wrong direction. But by digitising operational processes in the backend, financial institutions are finding innovative ways to free-up employees. As a result, they can focus on delivering the best customer experience.

Metro Bank for example has driven down many of its business inefficiencies by innovating with a retail experience in mind. In-store greeters now use a tablet with Power Apps to access a customer’s details the moment they walk through the door. This helps appointments feel more efficient and personal. If meetings over-run, the customer is free to leave the bank and is notified via text message when to come back for their appointment.

Another great example is how Standard Bank’s mobile application helps digitise the process for maintaining ATMs. Developed in Power Apps in just 24 hours, it allows employees to geotag and update a machine’s status during routine inspections. Automation in the backend then categorises the data and flags any issues to the appropriate department. This ensures an ATM is promptly fixed to help maintain a premium brand image for customers.

Finding and solving business inefficiencies

If business processes are negatively impacting an organisation’s performance, financial institutions should look for a solution with two aims. One, to reduce inefficiencies and two, increase profitability.

Automation can play a key role in both goals and provide a range of business benefits. It can remove paper-based processes, reduce the risk of human error and offer better access to data insights.

UK insurer William Russell has done just that by creating a Power App solution to automate its online quotations. This provides a faster, more efficient service for customers. Once a request has been raised, a sales agent is promptly alerted to call the customer, and provided with all the necessary information to have a productive conversation. As a result, they’ve been able to convert 50 percent more quotes into sales than before.

Removing legacy barriers to digital innovation

On average, financial institutions can spend up to 70 percent of their IT budgets on maintaining and servicing core systems and legacy applications. But by allocating resources this way, organisations reduce their time and ability to consider new innovations. At the same time, they risk delivering a poor customer experience with outdated systems.

This is a digital modernisation barrier that no/low code application and automation platforms can help address in two key ways:

• Create modern user interfaces or mobile applications that seamlessly integrate with any existing business applications, workflows and processes to change how employees interact with legacy systems.
• Extend and innovate legacy systems with Robotic Process Automation to help get more value out of a core infrastructure and ensure it can integrate with other modern applications.

The importance of innovation for financial services

Innovation is fundamental for any business growth. Whether you’re considering how to deliver more personalised customer engagement, reduce inefficiencies or implement new solutions. So if you’re considering how to begin innovating with no/low code, here’s some things to keep in mind.

Firstly, pinpoint any of your current business processes that aren’t operating as well as you’d like or delivering the right level of insights. This will help you consider what use cases could drive your transformation to improve these inefficiencies and allow you to match the technology to the best approach before investing in a solution upfront.

Innovation can come from any part of an organisation. Always get input from a mix of IT and business teams when doing this research. This ensures you understand what pain points and inefficiencies exist within your organisation. It will also help ensure any new technology you bring in will work alongside the people use it day-to-day.

If you’re not sure where to start, see how implementing common use cases such as improving manual or paper-based tasks and reducing repetitive or data-heavy processes can improve your efficiencies. Then once you’ve got the ball rolling, it’ll be easier to identify other inefficient processes that could be improved through digitalisation.

There’s a wealth of potential for no/low applications in financial services. With tools like Microsoft Power Platform, you can have a solution up-and-running in a matter of days and weeks rather than months and years.

Find out more

Discover the Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Power Automate

Watch on demand: Intelligent Operations in Financial Services: Transforming with Power Platform

Boosting the innovation of banking business models

Innovation blog (tba)

About the author

Lucy leads the financial services industry team within Business Applications at Microsoft. She is passionate about helping financial services organisations transform, delivering improved ways of working and amazing experiences for their customers and employees. She has spent her entire career in technology, mainly in the enterprise business applications space. Prior to joining Microsoft, Lucy was an early member of the Salesforce UK business. Here she spent 15 years in a variety of roles – gaining a deep understanding in how to help organisations radically transform their customer experience.   

The post How financial institutions can digitise and automate business processes with no/low code appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

When innovation becomes culture, we can solve old challenges and create new opportunities. Discover how to build strategies for your organisation that connect people, tools, and intelligence to bring ideas to life.

Tools to build an innovative culture

Power Apps

Build apps in hours, that easily connect to data with more than 400+ out of the box connectors. Use Excel-like expressions to add logic, drag and drop functionality for the UI, and run on the web, iOS, and Android devices.

Power Automate

Automate workflows and integrate them directly in your apps with a low-code approach that connects to hundreds of popular apps and services.

5 benefits of low-code and no-code apps for your business

1. Improve agility to respond to business needs

Rapidly build innovative web and mobile applications that meet the unique, evolving needs of your business.

• Infuse apps and processes with AI for deeper insights.
• Build apps in hours or days instead of months.

Connect to your data across your digital estate.

2. Empower your people to achieve more

Democratise app development across your organisation. Create opportunities for individuals and organisations alike to transform the way they work.

• Power Apps uses drag-and-drop simplicity so users can build apps quickly with no/low code.
• Use pre-built app templates to accelerate business processes.

3. Optimise budgets, time and resources to do more with less

The Forrester Total Economic Impact study for Power Apps and Power Automate, commissioned by Microsoft, concluded that organisations that adopt both technologies:

• Realise an ROI of 362 percent.
• Reduce development costs by 70 percent.
• Increase business process efficiency by 15 percent.
• Recoup their investment in only three months.

4. Automate time consuming processes

Power Apps and Power Automate integrate across the core apps you already use. Automate mundane, time-consuming business processes into streamlined workflows.

• Digitise paper-based processes and reduce errors and cost while saving time.
• Use AI to quickly process information, approvals and get smarter insights.

5. Maintain security and customer trust

The solutions you create are secure because they exist within the compliant Microsoft environment.

Get started building your no/low code apps

Now you understand how Power Apps and Power Automate can drive innovation in your organisation, the next step is to get started! You can empower everyone in your organisation to turn ideas into solutions that solve business challenges. Productivity can be boosted by automating manual processes, so employees can have more time to do value-adding work.

Low-code Power Platform lets more people in your organisation build apps and processes required to transform. Whether working solo, or delivering in partnership with professional developers in Fusion Teams, you can combine the best of both to help scale the impact of pro developers in delivering business value together.

We’re sharing a handy checklist on how your people can get started building their apps today:

Find out more

Digital Innovation that delivers a seamless experience with real impact

Join a Power Platform Virtual Training Day

About the author

Matt heads up the Digital Transformation and App Innovation team within Microsoft UK’s Solutions business. He leads a team of innovation and development-centred Specialists focussed on helping customers understand, plan for, and adopt some of the most cutting-edge services in Microsoft’s arsenal – from GitHub for developer productivity, managed container offerings such as Azure Kubernetes Services, PaaS and serverless with Azure Functions and Logic Apps, Integration Services, Event Grid, and more, through to engaging wider stakeholder audiences in the development process through adoption of low-code development with Power Apps.  

Matt’s background is firmly in engineering for innovation. With a master’s in computing and over two decades of experience from hands on ecommerce, payment and billing systems development in the late ‘90s and early 2000’s, to leading a global consulting team designing and rolling out bespoke Budgeting, Planning and Forecasting products for FTSE 10 integrated energy companies, and on to launching an IoT Pet Tracking start-up, founding, building, and selling a Digital Transformation consultancy before joining Microsoft in 2018. 

Consistent to all of Matt’s endeavors is an understanding of what is possible, how it aligns to solving real world business challenges, and always starting with the “Why”.  

The post Make app building easier: The benefits of low-code and no-code appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

What happens when you combine this business agility and intelligent operations? Firstly, you can enable your operating model to derive additional value. Secondly, an agile, data-driven operating model can help you gain new capabilities and improve current ones. Thirdly, you will gain competitive advantage. In our previous blog Marina shared the changes happening in the industry and how intelligent operations could help. Here we focus on some of the use cases and tangible business outcomes of intelligent operations to help you drive competitive advantage.

“The biggest opportunity is in operations. We have vast operations departments because processes are not there, and data is incorrect. You have 1000s of people covering the cracks…Fixing this and getting it 100 percent right is the biggest opportunity. It will make our clients happy and enhance our service.”
– Head of Strategic Development, Top Tier European Bank* 

Mitigate risk and reduce data silos

End-user computing (EUC) are applications like spreadsheets, databases or reporting tools that are not often developed or maintained in a robust IT environment, but by separate teams. What this means is not only do you have operational data silos, but extra risks and increased costs. Add the lack of governance and integration with existing business applications plus data errors, security and more. All these are barriers preventing firms from being able to maximise data value.

By modernising operations with Power Platform, Power Apps and Power Automate, you can deliver operational savings and innovation. Turn EUCs into End User Solutions by providing a compliant and secure framework. It also reduces operational silos and data inconsistency and inefficiency. All those micro silos of data that are scattered across your organisation? They are now part of the larger data estate with full IT controls and management. Power Platform is built with security in mind. It has advanced encryption, rich access control, and deep integration with Azure Active Directory.

“We calculated that if anything went wrong with an Excel business critical process we had, the impact would be 100s of thousands – this made the investment in Power Platform immediate.”

Streamline workflows and processes

Power Platform combines data to create a single source of truth. From there, you can build low and no-code solutions to analyse data and automate processes. A Forrester Total Economic Impact™ Study Commissioned By Microsoft in March 2020 on Power Apps found that organisations were able to reduce app development and costs by 74 percent.

Microsoft’s Commerce Compliance Engineering (CCE) team uses Power Platform for their compliance evaluation process. By moving to Power Platform, this time-consuming costly service was completed with 53 percent less effort. They even had a 36 percent increase in scope. As a result, they saved around $500,000 compared with FY19.

With Power Platform, you can automate time-consuming manual processes with robotic process automation and digital process automation. This means employees can focus on high value tasks to improve the overall customer experience. The increased productivity can also help reduce costs. The Total Economic Impact™ of Power Automate, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, April 2020, found that over $1.40 million of worker time savings were made over three years, with a 27.4 percent reduction in error.

Leveraging the speed of developing solutions via Power Apps, South African-based Standard Bank created a prototype mobile app within 24 hours. The app enables the bank’s 100 inspectors to record faults and capture images of ATMs. On a monthly basis, Standard Bank records 5,000 to 6,000 inspection reports — a process that was previously totally paper-based.

At Illimity, Italy’s first cloud-native bank, an IT Program Manager said: “The underwriting team has been able to reduce processing times from an hour per request to just 20 minutes. Now, it can respond to requests in a matter of days rather than a full week, saving a total of 15 hours a month.”

Increase collaboration and gain new insights

Gaining insights from data helps you build competitive advantage and become more agile. Power Platform connects to Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI. Likewise, it links up with Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and Azure. This connects your workflows to hundreds of data sources thanks to a library of connectors and Microsoft Dataverse. This helps to automate workflows and processes. In addition, it also brings all your data together into a single source of truth. You gain deep new insights into your business while improving collaboration between people and teams.

At PayPal, they wanted to enhance employee collaboration and reduce data silos. By connecting their data, PayPal not only improved their data discovery, they also found that employees were collaborating more to uncover insights and new ways to innovate.

”Microsoft Teams, and its interoperability with Power BI and Power Apps, has homogenised and eased not just meetings, but overall communication here at PayPal, and we see those benefits only increasing as time goes on,” says José Buraschi, Director of Program Management at PayPal.

Drive a new innovative employee culture

Who knows best about the day-to-day running of any organisation? The employee. So, when you give them a solution that they can use to build automated workflows and processes you’re democratising the data process. Everyone has the opportunity to build efficiency within the organisation without coding knowledge.

“One of the most fundamental shifts that we’ve made as a financial services institution is to dedicate people to helping our business teams identify friction points in their working lives and then use technology to solve them. People are knocking on our door who we’ve never met, simply because of the speed to value that Power Apps provides,” says Ian Doyle, Head of Employee Experience Engineering.

You’re also creating competitive advantage by embracing digital ways of working. This means you’re more likely to acquire and retain talent who will be excited to innovate and drive your business forward.

By connecting your data and combining business agility with intelligent operations and empowered employees, you will create operational efficiencies that drive competitive advantage, help you create innovative customer experiences, and build long term business growth.

Find out how

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Learn more: Power Platform

Read the previous blog: Build intelligent operations by empowering employees and connecting data

Discover real world stories: Power Platform in organisations

Download the report: Creating a blueprint for UK competitiveness

About the author

Janet currently leads the Industry Strategy for Financial Services at Microsoft UK. She ensures that drivers of change and emerging technological trends across the sector are core to how Microsoft works with Financial Services organisations, supporting their digital transformation. Before joining Microsoft in 2018 Janet held roles within commercial banking; latterly at Lloyds Banking Group and prior to that, Barclays and RBS. She has a personal interest in cultural transformation and has also played an active role in supporting and driving the inclusion and diversity agenda during her career.

The post How to create competitive advantage with operational efficiencies appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Operations connect the back, middle and front offices. They are critical to the success of an investment organisation’s core business. However, there is an increase in regulatory requirements, daily performance returns, client reporting challenges, an increasing flow of unstructured data, and a heightened demand for data governance. This can create operational challenges, lower productivity and stagnate growth.

In a recent study by Accenture, they outline the top priorities for asset and wealth management organisations. It’s to no surprise that new revenue streams, removal of manual tasks and operations optimisations rank at the top of the list.

Organisations are understandably frustrated with common concerns centred around data quality. These can create poor employee experiences. Disconnected silos and lack of intelligent technology makes it harder for people to do their best work. With the help of automation tools your employees can focus on the work that matters – driving innovation, wellbeing and productivity.

Reduce organisational risk and improve the employee experience

End User Computing (EUC) are applications that are not managed or developed in an environment that employs robust IT controls. They’re typically things like spreadsheets, databases or reporting tools that are created and maintained by separate business units within their individual processes.

In a recent article, End-user computing: A problem everyone has but nobody wants to own, we outlined that EUCs are prone to both risk and operational costs. From a risk perspective, there are dependencies on the users and from cost, there are often many inefficiencies with the manual effort required to extract, transform, and even enter data.

It comes as no surprise that this causes inconsistency and inefficiency within organisational silos. This can lead to costly and time-consuming daily reconciliations between systems. Lack of governance makes a bad problem worse. This can lead to increased costs, and risks such as data being deleted, the wrong data being shared and the lack of security that comes with running a spreadsheet. Lack of integration with existing business applications, misstatement of financials due to data entry or calculation errors in spreadsheets, data redundancy and fraud are all barriers preventing firms from being able to maximise the value of its data.

Low code platforms such as Power Platform, can help modernise operations and deliver innovation, turning EUCs into End User Solutions. A low code platform provides a complete server-side and client front end framework that covers areas such as data distribution, security, and permissions. It also addresses the issue of data compliance.

This helps prevent inconsistency and inefficiency, reducing operational silos and freeing your employees to spend more time on value-add work.

Set the foundation for intelligent operations with automation

As we can see from above, data is often scattered across systems and different formats. Organisations often struggle to automate processes without extensive integration efforts. It is not infrequent that an organisation can have thousands of separate dispersed licenses. This results in many solutions that do not speak to each other without a common data source. You can replace multiple tools across the organisation with a single license, template and low code app.

When it comes to inefficiency, a 2018 PwC report found there is an ongoing cost to manage and update code equal to 20 percent of the development cost. This is also reduced by 74 percent. For example, today’s largest investment banks pay between $3.5b-$4 billion in compensation costs to support a global workforce of 65,000 to 70,000.

This presents a great opportunity to revisit manual processes from a new perspective. According to Microsoft’s benchmark data, when considering reduced total cost of ownership with reduced IT effort for apps development, retiring third party applications and maintenance, increasing staff efficiency and time to market as well as reducing risk of security breach, this can result in an average of £2.5m savings back into the business.

illimity Bank, an Italian-based cloud native bank leveraged low code solutions to improve document handling. Using Power Platform, the underwriting team has been able to reduce processing times for employee loan requests from an hour per request to just 20 minutes. It can now respond to requests in a matter of days rather than a full week. They have saved a total of 15 hours a month.

“We’ve used the automation capabilities in Microsoft Power Platform to dramatically improve the efficiency of our employee loans process. The time savings have been a valuable return on our investment.”

Filipe Teixeira, Chief Information Officer, illimity Bank

Improve time to market and innovation with intelligent operations

There are four fundamental changes happening in the industry. Together, they create a compound impact that’s impossible to ignore for those who want to maintain industry leadership.

1. The workforce is changing with 75 percent of employees expected to be ‘millennials’ by 2025. This comes with high expectations for business applications at work as well as a self-service mentality.
2. The digital demand is surging. More apps are being created in the next five years than in the last 40 years.
3. There are also challenges which come with the global climate as well as a skill shortage. This creates urgency when it comes to modernisation of applications.
4. Power Platform and low code platforms reduce pressure on IT, reduce cost to change and allow organisations to move and innovate faster.

Providing data in new ways and at a faster rate than ever before have an incremental benefit compound growth rate of 1 percent. By leveraging intelligent operations, you’re on your journey to achieving sustainable growth.

Find out more

Get in touch with your business applications specialist for an Envisioning Workshop on the benefits of PowerPlatform.

Register for the webinar: Economic Impact of Power Apps

Learn more: Browse learning paths on Microsoft Learn

Read the whitepaper: PowerApps and Microsoft Flow Governance and Deployment

Discover real world stories: Power Platform in organisations

About the author

Marina Arnaout has been successfully helping businesses embrace innovative strategies that enhance digital investments. Currently, she is focused on modernising business processes and applications working within financial services organisations in UK. Marina holds a postgraduate degree from London School of Economics, with a focussed academic research on impact of automation and AI on financial services.

The post Build intelligent operations by empowering employees and connecting data appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

To rise to today’s challenges, successful businesses across architecture, engineering, construction, and facilities management are making changes at their own pace to build resilience and become future-proof. They are accelerating their digital investment plans through targeted data-driven modernisation.

By delivering a high volume of marginal gains — even lots of 1% improvements — firms can make a big change to their recovery in these uncertain times.

Are you ready for the rebound?

While the impact of COVID-19 means the future is uncertain, there is optimism that the built environment industry will rebound.

The Construction Leadership Council anticipates recovery will happen slowly but surely, with lost output requiring around two years to bounce back and most of the recovery taking place in 2021. When recovery does come, firms need to make sure they’re best positioned to capitalise on new opportunities.

The McKinsey Global Institute’s Industry Digitisation Index found construction to be among the least digitised sectors in the world, being second from the bottom – just ahead of agriculture. Low levels of digitisation are hurting built environment firms’ potential for economical growth, contributing to an annual productivity increase of just 1% over the last 20 years. Adopting digital technologies across the sector has the potential to transform productivity, with efficiencies estimated to be worth £7-15 billion per annum.

Many players have already made their move to put digital technologies to work. Arup’s CIO says COVID-19 took their thinking around cloud technology “from opportunity to necessity”, accelerating their deployment by as much as a year.

Modernisation often means playing the long game but that doesn’t mean you can’t create impact in the short term.

The way to a smarter built environment

Make transformation happen for your organisation faster and accelerate your time to value.

Where it isn’t suitable to leverage new enterprise applications — due to budget, timescale, or business fit, firms already on a modernisation journey join up their existing technology, drive innovation from within and empower employees across their organisation with the ability to develop new capabilities. They deliver increased flexibility and innovation through incremental gains rather than big projects.

To put this smart approach into context for your firm, here we explore four quick win examples of targeted data-driven transformation. Each quick win is enabled through the Microsoft Power Platform — a drag and drop low-code development platform without limits on growth and scalability.

Quick win 1: Automate outdated manual tasks

Boost business productivity by giving everyone the ability to automate manual administrative and organisational processes, saving employee’s time and costs.

Automation can play a significant role in modernising business processes, but changing the outdated doesn’t have to be daunting. Microsoft Power Automate fast-tracks automation with templates, making streamlining repetitive tasks and turning processes paperless quick and easy.

With Power Automate, time-consuming tasks, such as contract approvals, can be automated using pre-built templates and a trigger system that sets off a chain reaction of tasks, so your employees can focus on bigger, strategic objectives.

Quick win 2: Promote a culture of innovation

Foster innovation across your organisation by empowering business users with the ability to build low cost solutions that can analyse data, build new capabilities, automate processes and create chatbots, through easy-to-build and quick to deploy applications.

Microsoft Power Apps enables your most talented and knowledgeable employees to solve your most pressing day-to-day business challenges, while reducing time to market and increasing the potential value of new digital capabilities. With the use of pre-built templates and drag-and-drop simplicity, continuous improvements can also be easily rolled out. This can help you to quickly adjust solutions to meet your business goals over time or react to changes in the wider industry, such as returning to the workplace safely under the latest regulations.

Through using Microsoft Power Apps, PCL built Job Site Insights – a construction management app to assist with the tracking of project costs, quality metrics, employee schedules and inspections. It gives site managers a valuable single-pane view of all aspects of work at a job site allowing them to spot opportunities to optimise processes and increase profitability.

Quick win 3: Enrich every customer interaction

Chatbots can engage conversationally with your clients and employees to support and empower your customer services. Improving client satisfaction will increase the potential profitability of every client interaction.

By leveraging Microsoft Power Virtual Agent chatbots, which answer questions with insights from your data, you can innovate your customer services and enable a truly personalised experience. Internal and external users can also self-serve by talking directly with the chatbots to get the answers they need fast.

Informed by sophisticated, AI-enabled Power Virtual Agents, the skills and know-how of your team will be boosted when answering a prospect’s query about a remote or little-known site, for example, to maximise the profitability of the potential opportunity.

Quick win 4:  Harness the power of data to understand your customers

Provide real-time insights, so all employees can confidently make informed decisions, faster and based on data not opinion.

Microsoft Power BI empowers people across the business by helping to surface insights hidden in your data across a disparate set of systems. Using up-to-the-minute analytics, Power BI means smarter reporting — with employees united by a common dataset to accelerate business transformation.

Laing O’Rourke used the Microsoft Power BI platform together with Internet of Things (IoT) technology, to develop an interactive, smart hard hat, with sensors and a data collection unit that monitors the user’s temperature and heart rate, plus the external temperature and humidity. The data collected provides a real time view on the environment and the user to enable quick, informed decisions, to not only react but predict outcomes, increasing the safety of workers.

The roadmap to a data-driven built environment

Choosing the way to a smarter built-environment through targeted data-driven transformation means your firm will be able to adapt and thrive in times of change. Without the advantage of having the right information at the right time, you risk not being able to compete in the future marketplace.

With Microsoft Power Platform you can initiate your focus on applications that deliver impact quickly, across the business or for specific departments, to unleash the power of citizen development in a controlled, secure and compliant framework.

Once ready, you can scale up innovation across your entire operations by connecting complementary Microsoft integrations — such as Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations together with Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Azure. Thanks to our common data model, platforms across the Microsoft environment integrate with ease. So, alongside over 350 custom-built third-party product connectors, you can build end-to-end business solutions that secure further long-term benefits for your firm, your people and your clients.

Find out more

Read the blog: How to support resilient operations in the built environment industry

Download the whitepaper: Reconciling the Irreconcilable

Explore solutions for the built environment

Discover the Microsoft Power Platform 

Discover Microsoft Dynamics 365

Join the conversation at Envision

Digital technology is changing not just how organisations operate but how leaders lead. Join us at Envision, where executives across industries come together to discuss the challenges and opportunities in this era of digital disruption. You’ll hear diverse perspectives from a worldwide audience and gain fresh insights you can apply immediately in your organisation.

Connect with leaders across industries to get relevant insights on leadership in the digital era.

About the author

A Senior Solution Specialist for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and Power Platform, with over 10 years’ experience working with organisations in the Field Service and Facilities Management sectors. Michael’s mission is to drive ever-closer alignment with our Architectural, Engineering and Construction (AEC) customers as well as Facilities Management (FM) customers and support their transition to modern, adaptable and unified business applications.

The post Four quick wins to make your built environment firm smarter appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

We’re going to be sharing a story every week for the 12 weeks of summer, showing you how healthcare organisations are using technology to transform patient outcomes and increase productivity. For the eight blog in the series, Sarah Croxford looks at how data can improve patient care. 

Imagine a data operating system that’s ready-made for the healthcare sector: a platform that reduces development times, frees up space for critical decision-making, and encourages organisations to maximise value from data.

In daily conversations with NHS FT leadership teams, I hear about their struggles to identify the right platforms, integrate methods that let them keep pace, and overcome changes in technical staff.

Vast chunks of time and money are wasted across the healthcare industry, with many making do with existing systems that aren’t fit for purpose, or attempting to create a bespoke data platform that meets every need – neither of which is desirable.

Often, trusts understandably decide the juice is not worth the squeeze, despite the impact a badly designed data management platform has on the experiences of both staff and patients.

Introducing Data Academy X-Series

A healthcare-orientated data operating system remedies this issue.

Insource has been working on the concept of the data operating system (DataOS) for many years to address the issues currently faced by healthcare chiefs, including the long-standing problem over how to introduce legacy data to a new platform – and to do so without any disruption to care-giving.

Now, leveraging the scaling capacity of the Azure platform and the Azure SQL Hyperscale capability, the Insource Data Academy Data Operating System (DataOS©) X-Series enables organisations to continually unlock value from their data, providing:

• Data infrastructure development
• Blueprinted enterprise data management architecture
• Development processes with a software configuration and release management application

“I was especially keen that our data warehouse tool was not a ‘black box’, and Data Academy certainly isn’t – its processes are transparent and it’s reassuring that nothing is hidden. We can always see what’s happened to our data at every step of the way.”

Julie Ryan, Head of Information and Analysis – Bolton CCG

How Data Academy X-Series works

1. Reduce the time to delivery of a healthcare-focused data platform

Data in a modern health setting must go further than reporting and business intelligence. As such, it needs to be delivered in a fashion upon which all of a trust’s downstream data-processing needs can be based.

This requires the development of an enterprise data-processing infrastructure that does it once, but for many uses. However, this is beyond the scope of most health providers. The only way for health organisations to enjoy a truly enterprise approach to data management is to reduce the cost of production.

One of DA-X’s main draws is its low-code/no-code development environment. No need to learn coding or similar technical skills; its pick-up-and-play nature means key functions such as Data Lineage, Audit and Error Trapping, Transformation Inheritance are available straight out of the box.

As a result, delivery times are slashed by up to 90%. That gives you more time to focus on giving care to those who need it most.

“Data Academy is quicker than writing solutions from the ground up. If we didn’t have Data Academy our team would need to be at least double in size as we would need more people across the technology spectrum to achieve what we are able to achieve with Data Academy. It is brilliant and the flexibility it affords is key to our success”

Steve Chokr, Former Deputy Chief Information Officer – Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust

2. Take away the guess work of delivering a successful enterprise data platform

A development environment alone can’t ensure successful delivery of a solution.

Let’s look to the construction industry to see how healthcare organisations can ensure successful delivery of developments. How is it that large warehouses, stores, and out-of-town shopping malls are built so quickly, and appear as robust as any bricks-and-mortar building?

The answer lies in pre-fabrication and blueprinted architectures. Thinking and planning are effectively taken out of constructing large floorplan buildings.

So it is with the data operating system that includes a pre-designed generic data management architecture.

In numerous healthcare deployments, this approach is proven to let trusts build their own data management platform. The upshot is, they can leapfrog the architectural design phase of the project, removing the guesswork from trust-based bespoke builds.

By effectively removing the technical decision-making from the development process, trusts enjoy significant savings.

“I’ve found that Data Academy reduces overall development time significantly – it takes away the need to develop many of the mundane elements of the job.”

Andrew Penny, Systems Architect – Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust (Now University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust)

3. Leverage value from the latest SQL Server releases

Healthcare trusts face a big decision when embarking on a data management strategy: which version of SQL Server should they base their delivery?

Fundamentally, upgrading between versions shouldn’t involve major work. Yet, once again, we see many examples where upgrades fail or cause major disruption. That’s something no trust can afford when committing to improving the patient experience.

The Data Academy X-Series removes this difficulty. As new versions of SQL Server are released, DA-X offers a seamless migration from previous to current versions. Data Academy, the predecessor to DA-X has been achieving this since SQL Server 2005.

In addition, the design means that when new SQL Server functionality is introduced, it’s built into the DA-X low-code/no-code language. Where functionality can be automatically implemented, it will do so. Developers don’t need to know how to program it, they just need to know how they want to use it. In this way DA-X cuts the implementation time for new SQL Server releases. This maximises the value trusts enjoy from new versions with the minimal requirement for change.

4. Move to Azure cloud deployment at the appropriate time

The greatest challenge for trusts is finding a compelling reason to move their on-premise deployments to the cloud. Financially, if a trust already has infrastructure and internal support, it’s difficult to justify the cost of migration.

Applications built in the DataOS DA-X can easily be migrated to the cloud. That means trusts have full control when moving to IaaS or PaaS, enabling them to commit long-term to the Microsoft platform in the knowledge that migration to Azure will be painless.

5. Enable the productisation of data solutions

Building a data infrastructure from the ground up, even with a data operating system behind you, is still a significant project. While the DataOS DA-X can reduce development times and costs, it’s a project that must not be undertaken lightly.

But as you prepare to create your bespoke applications, there’s another consideration to be had: the productisation of data solutions.

These are, at present, nearly non-existent, not just in health but across all industries. The lack of productised solutions stems from the inability of current technology to provide a platform on which IP-protected products can be licenced and developed for other health organisations

In response, DA-X is a platform that empowers users to build solutions they can release into the market. Such solutions can be installed with a single click, are IP-protected, and provided optionally with licencing. Providers can then be assured that their investment is protected.

If your IT team creates a truly stunning application that revolutionises how staff work, that’s something that ought to be shared with everybody – just like the NHS.

“Due to its clever technology, we were able to build modules and components ourselves when we thought they were needed and ship them back to Insource. Insource would then incorporate them into the actual product that would be released back to their user community, including us.”

Paul Johnson, Former Assistant Director of Information -South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust

About the author

Sarah Croxford is Enterprise Channel Manager for Health Lead at Microsoft working within the One Commercial Partner group. Throughout her 20 years in the partner channel, 11 of those at Microsoft, she’s shown a passion for helping partners grow and succeed together with Microsoft. Sarah has extensive experience at leading blue chip companies including Microsoft, Siemens, TechData, and Ingram Micro. She’s led marketing, product marketing, and sales teams to build successful, reputable businesses, drive growth, and is well known for her channel knowledge. Her experience has won her recognition in the Women in Channel 2019 A-Listers, a finalist for the Women in Channel Sales Professional for 2018, Sales & Marketing finalist for the CRN awards, and finalist for the Real Faces of Sales for LinkedIn 2019. Sarah is also an Accessibility Advocate and a Board Director for Parenting Special Children, a charity that supports parents and children with special needs.

The post 5 ways to modernise healthcare data and deliver better patient outcomes appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.