A specialist article by Steffen Schaar, Member of the Board of Management at The Quality Group GmbH. The full version of this article has been published in DiALOG - Magazine for Enterprise Information Management, issue March 2017.

Agile and digital work will challenge us more than ever before, whether we are a "digital immigrant" or a "digi-tal native". Being "Digital" is IN, being part of it is everything, because we have a smartphone! Printing, fax-ing, scanning, storing, talking, meeting was yesterday. Today, we are mobile, digital, virtual and in the cha-troom, ready to be active on social media around the clock. Everyone? More than 50% of us see digitization as meaning simply sending emails. "Digital transformation" - what is that and do I want it? Yes, very much, but what will it all mean for me? Fears and expectations also come as part of the package and free of charge. Digital work is changing our processes, our attitudes, and, in the coming years, it will require one thing above all: the building of trust in the virtual world. Our work tools will also continue to change. Screens, information dashboards and tablets are growing ever larger in size, data sets are subject to exponential growth rates, and yet our decisions are still supposed to be agile, online and mobile.

For years now, the "functionality craze" in the world software products and solutions has already been long gone and the magical wizardry of software has vanished. Today, we complain about every click too many, are annoyed about every second we have to wait while information is being loaded on our screen. If the wireless network connection is down and the app is so no longer usable, then we almost completely lose it. And why is the button not here, but there?

The focus is on creating trust in the digital world through transparency and commitment, as well as integrat-ing and modelling human, intuitive behavior in digital processes. The new IT buzzword is "businessApp platform".

A platform contains role-based, configurable desktops, so-called business apps, where the user can work efficiently and as easily as possible in their task area. The administrator/user can define or develop the smart app building blocks themselves. They do not have to master a programming language, but can use a 3-step smart model to define the business app in a purely visual configuration.

The "artificial intelligence" of this methodology is to define the agile organizational tasks and processes not in terms of individual persons, but in roles. This means that changes, team orientations and, above all, the individuality of the processes in departments or between departments can be reacted to quickly and easily. In a businessApp platform such as SmartLCM, the advantages of proven standardized business solutions/modules, as well as individual process sequences using BPMN 2.0, can be used in an application for each user group (role). This way, the user-defined, cross-departmental organization and its processes are lived by means of an information hub (platform). Whether it’s applications (apps) for the approach for Legal Tech or SmartContract, M2M, compliance excellence or supplier management, no matter - IT has merely created the foundations with the businessApp platform. Now everyone is asked to experience the digital change, not only from the vision of "Office 5.0" - or paperless organization - but also to shape it. Curious? Then simply become a " Smart – in the thick of IT instead of just Digital " explorer and learn more at www.tqg.de/SmartLCM!