Digital transformation has rewritten the processes and activities that support the modern organization. Many of these changes have improved the employee experience, but perhaps none so much as the move from monolithic applications to microapps.
Now employees can utilize precisely the functionality that they need, without the encumbrance of the unnecessary elements of the monolithic application. Getting things done becomes faster and simpler, and there’s much less software “friction.”
Citrix is taking a leadership position in delivering microapps with the Digital Workspace Solution to enhance the employee experience. This is an important benefit to business, as 81% of senior management teams are currently somewhat, or extensively discussing the employee experience based on a study by the Economist.
How Microapps Empower the Modern Workforce
Requiring that employees become proficient in complex, monolithic, legacy apps was an approach that could work in the 1990s and 2000s, but not now, after fundamental changes in the composition of the workforce. Modern businesses’ workforces often comprise contractors, temporary help, and third parties. Forcing those workers to learn old-style apps creates a problem. A non-traditional worker may have multiple employers and use your systems for only a day or two per week—and then simply disappear, because turnover of non-traditional employees is quite high. Then, you must start the learning process all over again with the next non-traditional employee to take their place. Learning microapps is far easier for workers, and that makes it easier for you to draw value out of the time those non-traditional employees are with you.
Microapps also empower workers by reducing the need to learn and become facile with elements of the application that are not needed to get the task facing them done. For example, with microapps provided in a digital workspace, there is no need to remember individual app credentials. And the entire file creation, saving, and updating process can be removed.
Collaboration benefits are also substantial. Microapps supported in a mesh app and service architecture (MASA) will share data and information without a lot of manual intervention. Information and data are easily shared and routed to those who need it. The manual posting and forwarding process is obviated.
Microapps also improve the employee experience. The digital environment is a huge component of the overall employee experience and improving how apps are delivered and used is central to enhancing that experience. More than half the respondents in the Economist study strongly agree that digital technology is essential to improving the employee experience. Microapps offer key benefits, including:
- Lower barriers to getting work done—When workers can focus on only what they need to use to complete the task, they have fewer barriers to doing that. They feel much more productive.
- Reduced frustration—Sometimes workers get sidetracked trying to understand app functions that they don’t realize aren’t essential to the task at hand. Being streamlined, microapps don’t pose that problem.
- A more consumer-like experience—Consumerization of the workplace, with work tools expected by workers to mimic the online experiences they have as consumers, is by now a known and accepted phenomenon. Microapps are much more like the apps and services that workers commonly see on their smartphones, and so they are more readily and easily mastered.
- Instant integration into the workflow—Microapps are designed and delivered as part of a cohesive whole.
The benefits listed above also improve the overall speed of the organization. Eliminating the learning curve for monolithic apps means work gets done faster. This is particularly important for optimizing non-traditional worker productivity. From an organizational perspective, it now becomes possible to quickly roll out fixes and improvements to business processes with microapps. Organizations can optimize business processes more quickly, since there is no need to wait for a major release to add new functionality as there is with legacy apps.
Citrix recognizes that microapps solve many existing problems and provide a platform for massive improvement of the employee experience and employees’ productivity. Microapps will fundamentally change how workers interact with digital systems. It is a new paradigm for how software supports the discrete tasks that make up the workday. More importantly, microapps make work processes more seamless. As one of the first fundamental changes in how employees interact with digital systems, it is a profound change that has tremendous competitive advantage for those organizations that adopt microapps quickly.
