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How Standardization And Automation Can Drive Your Company’s Success?

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As digital technology and modern organizational structures continue to evolve and progress at an exponential rate, many businesses must begin to look towards standardization and business process automation to facilitate and foster company success.

Business Process Automation is defined as the utilization of technology to automate various time-consuming and complex business processes. Studies have shown that 97% of IT decision-makers believe that business process automation is crucial for digital transformation.

Standardization involves developing and implementing standards for business processes as well as ensuring that all organizational functions are held to the same standards.

Therefore, your business must understand the various benefits of business process automation and standardization so that you can leverage them to drive organizational growth and long-term success.

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What Makes a Good Platform?

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With the inflow of digitalization of the current business landscape, businesses may find it challenging to find the right platform that fits their preferences and needs. Every platform must have interface flexibility and customize features to the specific business process it is intended for and versatility.

The rise of low-code, open-source platforms means that businesses can find all of these in one place without spending substantial amounts of financial resources. Moreover, low-code, open-source platforms typically consist of feature-complete software and standards-based operating systems.

This will allow your business to find the right tools to satisfy digital platform requirements and customize the platform’s source code to your business’s unique operations and management.

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Which of the Following Statements is True of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems?

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  • CRM is Expensive
  • Open-source CRM is all just old forks of SugarCRM
  • Open-source CRM doesn’t scale
  • A great CRM allows your organisation to concentrate on a customer-focused approach
  • An Open-Source Low-Code Development Platform gives your CRM more flexibility
  • The best free CRM uses standardised technology
  • A real open-source Salesforce alternative exists

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Why Are Standards In Technology Important?

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As the world simultaneously tackles health crises, social crises and economic crises, this might seem an impossible question to answer. I would argue that a major priority is to stay informed about the facts and different points of view with respect to the facts.

However, even this is hard to do when standards of reporting and journalism often seem non-existent. That word “standards” is really important. Without standards, everything becomes messy. We need to hold our governments to high standards just like we need to ensure the quality of our food and water reach hygiene standards.

In this regard, technology is no different. It too needs to be standards-centric. We also need to know that the right experts have inspected the quality of the source code. This means independent experts, not just those chosen and paid by the authors to assure the quality, security and reliability of the execution. So technology being open source helps a lot too. Read more

In celebrating “Digital Sovereignty”, we will be judged by the quality of the software we produce, not our fine words.

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Crust Technology recently had the pleasure of taking part in the Univention Summit in Bremen, Germany. The Univention Corporate Server (UCS) is a leading platform for cost-efficient operation and easy administration of server applications and entire IT infrastructures. It is both self-hosted and open source and is used by many recognisable, brand-name organisations. UCS is an excellent OS base upon which to build your Digital Sovereignty, being practical, feature complete and supportive of multi-vendor environments.

Digital Sovereignty is a complex term, implying unimpeded access to the software code (i.e. 100% open source), default support and promotion of federated architectures, control of data location and consistent cross-jurisdictional regulation. While vendors such Univention point the way at the infrastructural level, software manufacturers at the application layer must pick up the baton with equal enthusiasm and determination.

In practical terms, what might this mean for software application vendors?

  1. Be 100% open
    This means no tricks or games. Every line of code must be available to the using or hosting organisation. But it goes even further than that – application architectures must be clear, well-documented and not a source of data lock-in themselves.
  1. Easy E-Migration
    The cost of migrating away from a solution, self-hosted or otherwise, must be as low as possible. In other words, the software must be built with recognition of the principle that the using organisation has a fundamental and exclusive right to “own” all of their data and that, should they wish, this data can be moved away from the platform easily.
  2. Embrace Standards
    From security to communication to API’s, software must be standards-based and must, in so far as possible, facilitate federation with other software and services. Clouds should be capable of collaborating with eachother, irrespective of the language in which they are coded.
  3. User Experience (UX) must be excellent
    Good UX leads to strong adoption. Failing at this first hurdle is unforgiveable. It has now been proven umpteenth times that solutions with poor UX simply do not get adopted by a population of a meaningful size.

Credibility is key. Businesses and governments pushing for Digital Sovereignty must learn from history. It’s littered with defunct open source providers, who failed to deliver compelling alternatives to components of giant data-harvesting clouds and proprietary software manufacturers. To fail again would be to be laughed off the stage, while the use of data from our corporate champions, mittelstand (mid-sized economic actors) and small businesses drifts further and further from our control. The stakes are that high.

Do you want to take the first step to Digital Sovereignty? Give Univention’s UCS a try and set up Crust using their Univention App Center.

About Crust

Crust Technology Ltd, headquartered in Ireland, is the driving force behind the open-source Unified Work platform Crust, providing a flexible, self-hosted platform for your organisation to work and communicate internally while engaging with its customers, suppliers, partners and other third parties externally. Its integrated approach to identity, messaging and business logic delivers a simple-to-use yet extensible means for managing users and the applications they require every day, whether in the cloud, behind the firewall or a hybrid of the two. For more information, visit www.planetcrust.com or follow @Crusttech on Twitter.