Right now it is harder than ever to get good IT staff. But not just IT staff, all staff. So enterprise employers are in a battle for talent. They are competing to be the best place to work. Aside from office perks like the best hardware, amazing lunches, foosball tables, flexible hours, unlimited vacation days, a sky-high financial reward system, etc., all efforts are made to make sure the work itself is as fun as possible. How to do that? Automate everything that is tedious and non-intelligent work.
To effectively automate tedious work you need extensive workflow automation, full integrations of systems to avoid duplicate data entry, and cleverly orchestrated business rules to define when and how the automated processes are executed.
The pun: in general, you need IT staff for this. Potentially the scarcest staff around.
The IT staffing cycle
How this becomes a vicious cycle is that for those IT people to execute these tasks, they are required to do incredibly tedious work themselves. This is mostly redundant work: It is clear, and to the developer obvious, what needs to be done. It does not offer a mental challenge, it just requires execution. Some examples:
- Writing documentation
- Building complex APIs, which is mostly copying work
- Building objects for APIs
- Writing deployment and infrastructural scripts, which is a very redundant task involving – again – quite some copying work
As a result, IT staff is bored and resources are wasted.
To illustrate: we once witnessed a project where a big consultancy and dev firm spent a whopping six months on the definition and implementation of an enterprise mapping, during which the team members were basically busy copying the same code over and over again. And at the end, the client just had a basic API with a mapping, nothing that would work on its own or would deliver results.
Another example: building the objects for an HDN (the generic Dutch communication standard for mortgages) API in general takes a full week. That is, for an experienced developer with domain knowledge.
Breaking the pattern
To change this, IT needs to be facilitated with tools that eliminate that tedious work. Within modular software architecture, it is possible to use more declarative tools for defining the business, with automated API documentation, mapping, and deployment. This makes work easier, and faster, but most importantly, it frees up time for more complex, high-value, and fun tasks like
- Creative programming
- Learning new skills
- Creating innovative solutions
We are happy to show you how to eliminate the tedious work for your team. Contact us to learn more.
