Vaughn Thurman
HighGear is the leading no-code platform for business analysts to rapidly build enterprise-grade workflow applications.
Addressing the Challenges of a Remote Workforce. More than half of all American workers worked remotely at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and many still are.
This sudden shift caused difficulties ranging from over-stretched IT systems to communication challenges to employees struggling to work while homeschooling children. If organizations want to maintain and/or create additional competitive advantage, It is vital to address these challenges. The immediate need is to help teams be effective during the temporary changes caused by COVID-19, but these issues must also be solved as more teams move toward remote work in the long term. How Swift Systems used HighGear to pass their audits. Technical teams and compliance experts must do a lot of work to define their policies and implement procedures to enforce those policies.
But they often overlook the effort required to track activity and prove compliance, which makes the auditor’s visit one of the most dreaded and painful experiences of the year. To avoid this pain, Swift Systems had to build a process management system that would track their IT work with less overhead, making it easier to prove compliance at audit time. Naturally, they turned to HighGear.
At the end of the first audit, the auditor reported “Our examination team was very impressed by the deployment of Swift’s customer hardware and infrastructure in relation to their managed services, and particularly the functionality and reporting capabilities of the HighGear application. We felt that the attestation process was aided and simplified by the user-friendly nature of the system.”
Backups Electronic and physical access control Change management. Easily integrate HighGear with other apps using Zapier. HighGear version 8.6 brings exciting new capabilities to business analysts that empower them to integrate HighGear with other systems more easily and in more sophisticated ways.
The first of these capabilities is a versatile new REST API. Representational State Transfer, or REST, is the industry standard best practice for web-based APIs and improves the integration experience over other approaches such as SOAP. Clients writing custom code to integrate their HighGear instance with other systems they use, such as an ERP system, will find REST easier to learn and simpler to work with. REST also has better support in a wider variety of languages and is a more prevalent software development skill. In addition to the new REST API, HighGear 8.6 also deeply integrates with Zapier, a powerful, no-code cloud integration platform. Crossing the digital transformation divide: overcoming embedded manual processes. At your place of work, does it feel like your workflow processes are working for you, or are you working for them?
If workflows require extra steps because of counter-intuitive manual systems, then the answer might be that you are working for your processes, not the other way around. Duct taping broken processes The extreme example of someone working for a broken manual process, rather than the process working for them, is an employee whose entire job is what many in the business world call ‘duct-taping’. Crossing the digital transformation divide: building the right tools with no-code platforms. In our last article we talked about how manual processes can become embedded in an organization, causing huge yet unseen losses through wasted time and energy.
In this article we’ll talk about how to fix all of that by enabling people to build the right tools on their own. In our custom commissioned study from Forrester, we discovered that 67% of analysts and managers have tools that are supposed to help them manage their workflows, but they’re too hard to get started with. If these tools were actually the right tools for the job, it would not be challenging for a company’s embedded innovators to get started with them, especially because they’re motivated by how much time and effort these manual processes are costing them.
The right solution does not require coding Programmers are not usually the ones doing the work they’re programming software for, and that disconnect can often leave gaps in software functionality. Put yourself in the shoes of a small business administrator. Crossing the digital transformation divide: freeing up resources to make organizational change. When you ask the question, ‘what is stopping digital transformation at my company?’
, you might be surprised by the answer. In many cases, it is those who are supposed to provide the ‘resources’ that are actually stopping progress from happening. In our commissioned study from Forrester, we found some interesting facts around this topic. Are you discriminating against your digital workers? Security Process for Open Source Components. What is FOSS?
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software that is distributed with a license that allows users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it freely. Often, a particular piece of software is available open-source at no cost, but the company that maintains it charges a fee for support or for more advanced features that are not open-source. Some FOSS is a complete application that can be installed and run on its own. But many sub-components are released as FOSS, and are embedded in other applications. For example, many web applications use a framework like AngularJS to streamline their user interface code, or a database like PostgreSQL to store their users’ data. Using FOSS components can accelerate the development of new products, and can also make software more secure and robust by increasing the number of people contributing to each component.
How HighGear Uses FOSS. The Soft Cost of Broken Processes. Most of us know about broken processes because we’ve lived them.
It doesn’t feel good to fill out that extra form with the same information you already put in the last form or wait 8 days for approval from someone on vacation…but beyond annoyance, what do these broken processes cost? To answer this question, we’re going to borrow a term from the construction industry. The ‘soft costs’ of doing business In construction, costs are divided into two categories: soft costs and hard costs. Hard costs are the costs of actually getting the work done, mainly labor and materials.
How Financial Services Companies Can Overcome Their Unique Digital Struggles. Financial services firms deal with certain issues and demands more than nearly any other industry.
