We Need Disposable Digital Solutions

Our rapidly changing work environments and the lack of appropriate tools are forcing organizations into costly and cumbersome workarounds. The pandemia increased the pressure to go digital. Ad-hoc changes to workflows and processes triggered by new COVID regulations and their side-effects became the new normal.

And during all this we experience a chip crisis, disrupted supply chains, strong inflation and an upcoming energy crisis propelled by a European war in a dimension we haven’t seen in almost a hundred years.

Is “Agile” still the Cure?

Ten years ago, “Agile” was the magic word. Executed properly, with a well-guided approach and bunch of experienced agile coaches, organizations were able to build lean digital solutions to solve their operational challenges within, say, months if… yes, if their culture would support cross-functional teams.

Today, hit by the turmoil, organisations don’t have months. Not even weeks. A bunch of days at best.

And even if they could stop time for some weeks and get the budget to have a team of ten to twelve people work on a solution to solve - for example - a supply chain management issue, it is more than likely that either the cause of or the solution to the problem, sparks a warehouse management chaos and so forth.

We can’t solve tomorrow’s problems with today’s tools

Whatever you have in place to solve today’s problems is of little use for the challenges of tomorrow. Prior to the pandemic organizations were using spreadsheets to collect data, shared as Email-Attachments. Email is too slow for today’s demands. Real-time feedback is needed. 

So the next evolution of the same workaround is to conduct video-conferences with twenty and more participants and share their screens with the same spreadsheets discussing tasks line by line.

Thanks to the pandemic homeoffice is the new standard (remember what a pre-pandemic controversy that one was?) and everyone is online all the time. No more Email-Attachments (it’s a security issue, ha!). So far the “different way of working”.

Real-time collaboration? Yes. Increase in efficiency? Not really.

It feels a bit like in the pre-”Digital Transformation” era. “If we don’t start now, we won’t be ready in time” the advocates of digital transformation were preaching over the last couple of years. And they were right.

Any Alternative?

So if organizations don’t have weeks and months, if they don’t have or can’t afford a team of software engineers, designers, business analysts and project managers - what else could they do?

Let’s imagine a future where

• People will create their digital collaboration solutions all by themselves
• Their solutions will be simple, single-purpose tools
• Those tools will evolve and change almost daily

So-called “low-code” platforms emerging over the last 10 years already pointed in that direction - unfortunately none of them could keep the promise that anyone with no coding experience at all could deliver something of value.

Most of the results are unpleasant to use and therefore often not adopted by the users. They can’t instantly be adjusted to new requirements. Standard features, such as notifications when something important happens, are often missing. 

In fact, due to the lack of proper digital tools, a lot of teams have already started to use consumer apps for business in order to get more productive. (Means: they add WhatsApp and Trello into the spreadsheet/video-conference approach.)

A tech-savvy team can set up quite an impressive workflow for special circumstances (crisis management for example). And why not dispose the solution after the crisis and create a fresh one for the next? Instead of maintaining an unmanageable number of legacy tools.

Just like software engineers at some point re-write an application to get of the cumbersome treadmill of maintaining legacy code...

Any Enterprise-grade Alternative?

Apologize for the self-promotion. But this is what I believe in.

I devoted my last 4 years to create a platform (Atrigam) with my team - which is easier to use than any Spreadsheet-Application. Okay - maybe “as easy”, but we’re getting there. ;-)

It's for mid-sized and larger companies which still have enough flexibility and pioneering spirit to join us and our vision.

Together with my team, we help organizations to create enterprise-grade custom productivity solutions in days, even hours including a company-wide rollout to hundreds of employees.

Our goal is to provide a pleasant and seamless experience for anyone inside or outside your company to join and collaborate so teams can focus on getting stuff done.

To anyone who is interested, just join one of our 15 minute presentations!

I’d be happy to see you there!

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Image: Photo by Tiger Lily from Pexels

Note: The "Any Alternative?" part was changed based on the highly appreciated feedback from Anthony Lawton and Colin Savage.