An Oil & Gas company had about 5,000 applications developed over the years in various platforms and tools: VB, Excel macros, various coding languages, operating systems and more.
An experienced employee led the team to streamline the business processes and reduce the applications to fewer than 1,000. That was the first step.
The second step was to upgrade and update the applications. This proved to be a frustrating and time-consuming task. Many of the programmers had left the company. In one case, he had to track down and call a former employee who had already moved to Russia, to get a password for an important Excel macro.
This is a common problem faced by many companies, big and small. It is, ironically, a digital trap in a digital transformation journey.
What’s the solution?
Look for a way of developing applications that can be maintained and upgraded after the original author has moved on. The source material for this story, The Low-code Digital Transformation Guide, describes how low-code development helped 4,000 customers over 14 years transform their business.
If you are planning a digital transformation and want to avoid the same trap, talk to us. Our OpexDX framework starts with an assessment of your processes, systems and organisation, and our technology ecosystem includes low-code options such as Siemens Mendix.