Forrester Webinar: COVID-19 Exposed A Lag on Digitization- Here’s How to Move Forward
Nearly three months after the start of these coronavirus pandemic many businesses have reopened their doors to a new reality.
Now, as companies settle into this “next normal”, they need quick solutions to meet new demands and improve processes to better handle future disruption.
Companies can no longer wait months or years for digital improvements. They need solutions now.
In our latest webinar, John Rymer, Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst and Jay Jamison, Quickbase’s Chief Product and Technology Officer discuss how COVID-19 has changed how businesses operate and how critical it is for companies to adapt and build speed and agility into their operations.
“When we talk about getting back to the future of work it’s not just about responding to COVID-19, it’s about how do we get people set up safely to now use that as potential energy to fuel a whole new level of agility in the future,” Jamison said.
Low-code platforms, like Quickbase, enable organizations to build and continuously improve business software applications.
We allow organizations to move fast. Over half of the applications built on Quickbase go from conception to deployment in under two weeks. This is critical now as organizations have often been slow to ramp up their digital transformations.
Rymer said that organizations have spent the last decade working on digitization, putting a lot of investment specifically in automation. But it wasn’t fast enough, and the crisis caught us off guard.
“[COVID-19] happened so quickly and exposed all the things we hadn’t done, all of the weaknesses that we had in our automation,” he said. “Once we get through the urgent emergency situations, the most important thing to do is to start that digitization effort again with a great deal of urgency.”
Jamison seconded the need for urgency. Digital transformation projects that use to take years are no longer acceptable. It has to be now.
“One of the things we are striving to do at Quickbase … is this idea that as we take the first steps out of the crisis and as we continue to tee up and overcome challenges … to help companies and organizations think not about how to recover, but how to get leverage and get new benefits and triumph in this new reality.”
COVID-19 is the change of our lifetime. It has created a new age where software solutions can drive an age of agility.
“This idea of being able to use hand coding or implement high-code solutions, those are certainly important in the new age, but the complexity, the challenge of that, the shortage of developers will not meet the demands of speed and the demands of adaptability,” Jamison said.
The ability to create custom solutions with low-code platforms is especially crucial. Package and traditional applications are still useful and won’t go away, but custom development must always be part of the mix, Rymer said.
There are two major lessons we have learned from COVID-19. First, we can’t function without automation. Without automation, we are too fragile and too subject to breakdowns and failures.
It’s time to get back on track towards digital transformation.
“I’ve been calling it the next normal,” Rymer said. “Some people just want to make this go away, and we’re going back to the way things were, and no that’s not the way things work.”
Second, for organizations to automate, they need adaptable foundations.
“The COVID-19 crisis showed us among our weaknesses were older software platforms that were not built to be adaptable,” Rymer said.
