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.

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.