Why culture is the key to successful low-code initiatives

PEX Network caught up with Dimitris Papanikolopoulos, service technology leader at the global service center of multinational company 3M, ahead of his participation during the opening panel of the upcoming PEX Live: Low-Code Automation 2022 event, taking place online on 25-26 January 2022. Alongside experts from Nestlé and AstraZeneca, Papanikolopoulos will share insights on improving agility during the pandemic by embracing low-code.

PEX Network: What has your experience with low-code technology taught you?

Dimitris Papanikolopoulos: I believe low-code is the future of technology and is an essential part of progressing in the digital era. One of the biggest pain points companies experience is the huge demand from the business side toward the developers, who are usually limited.

One of the biggest successes we have experienced at 3M is the implementation of the citizen development model by creating a framework called Automation Power Users (APU). We are educating our operations employees on low-code and no-code technologies to enable them to develop their own solutions and experiment. We want to empower our operations teams to deliver low and medium complexity initiatives and utilize the global developer pipeline only for complicated and global initiatives. Through citizen development we can achieve substantial automation to help operations automate their processes and perform better.

PEX Network: Could you explain how the low-code model works at 3M?

DP: On one hand we have an automation team called the intelligent automation solutions (IAS). They are expert developers and take complicated project and work with robotic process automation (RPA) and more complex technologies like C++.

On the other hand, the automation conducted by employees uses only low-code and no-code platforms. We have an academy that trains employees on them and have established governance.

Our closest partner within this citizen development framework is the APU Coach, a dedicated expert developer and coach who teaches employees and reviews the solutions to make sure their quality is according to 3M IT standards, while at the same time ensuring governance. This is for day-to-day low to mid complexity projects only, as expert developers deal with much more complicated projects on the global scale.

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PEX Network: What are your objectives when it comes to low-code?

DP: The biggest objective I have in 2022 and beyond is to make our citizen developer program even more robust and popular across the organization, enabling more people to start delivering low-code and no-code solutions.

Even if some employees are not experts in low-code and no-code, I am aiming to have them at least understand how they can work to be able to speak the language and find opportunities through the technologies within daily processes.

PEX Network: What business objectives are you trying to achieve with low-code?

DP: It really depends on the operational needs of the business and can be anything from reporting to creating forms. This is another point regarding low-code and no-code we aim for, the democratization of technology. You are not doing key initiatives and imposing them on the operations, rather you enable the operations to work on their own needs and priorities.

PEX Network: What advice would you give to organizations looking to automate processes with low-code?

DP: When companies see low-code and no-code, they want to automate everything. Instead, the focus should always be on the culture. The top advice I would give is to create a culture around low-code and no-code as a priority, making people interested and providing them with the tools to go further with the technology. There also needs to be efforts to create an environment that keeps people interested, makes them curious and shares the message that low-code and no-code is the future.

At 3M, our sponsor for the culture management is the global manager for automation, so the citizen development program is sanctioned and sponsored by him. In GSC Poland I am responsible for the implementation and adoption of the framework and I have several counterparts across regions, all collaborating on a global level with weekly meetings discussing the initiative. This global view of the initiative helps reinforcing the message that it is an initiative for everyone.

PEX Network: What developments do you foresee in the low-code space over the next couple of years?

DP: I expect more functionalities coming into the low-code and no-code platforms we currently have, making them more accessible to people and more integrated within the ecosystem of the companies.

I also see data analytics playing a big part in low-code and no-code technologies. People who are experts at their jobs would make perfect candidate to being part of this merged citizen developer and data analyst role.

Join us at PEX Live: Low-Code Automation 2022 to learn more about Papanikolopoulos’ work with low-code, along with insights from experts at Nestlé and AstraZeneca.