Dave Bevans

Dave Bevans

Copywriter, editor, and content strategist in the B2B technology space since 2015. I help you tell your story. 

Artificial Intelligence

I've covered AI from how-to-build all the way to how-to-leverage. And before you ask: nothing was written with generative AI.

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Mendix •

Building Smart Apps w/ Low-Code

With systems like ChatGPT, Bard, and DALL-E, Artificial intelligence (AI) is experiencing an unprecedented rise in popularity, becoming the topic of conversation from the dining room to the board room. While undoubtedly rich in possibility,  those in enterprise know that AI is far more than just ChatGPT. In fact, within B2B technology, AI has been increasingly infused into business applications for some time already and is yielding compelling benefits. AI can come with challenges, however, espe...
Mendix •

How AI is Shaping the Future of the Software Development Lifecycle

Before we look at how AI can impact the entire SDLC, we need to see how AI affects developer productivity. While most assume it’s about speed of project completion, GitHub dug into this claim. They discovered that developer productivity is not only about speed. “The ability to stay focused on the task at hand, make meaningful progress, and feel good at the end of a day’s work” is how developers define productivity. Or as GitHub describes it: the flow. A survey by McKinsey reiterates the import...
Mendix •

AI-Assisted Development in Action with Mendix

AI-assisted development is the use of machine learning to assist developers by providing recommendations in real-time and enforcing best practices throughout the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC). AI has the ability to provide guidance, assistance, and generation throughout the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC). AI gives guidance by enabling developers to ask the IDE development-related questions. In turn, the IDE gives immediate, insightful responses with access to the s...
Mendix •

What is the Future of Generative AI in the Enterprise?

Outside of the analyst realm, however, the world is seeing a cycle of artificial intelligence (AI) hype spinning up again with the buzz around ChatGPT and generative AI more broadly. I won’t attempt to predict the future and tell you where AI will be in ten years. What I can tell you is that AI’s use in the enterprise will continue to grow and evolve—ChatGPT or no ChatGPT—and you need to harness it so you can reap its benefits for years to come. In the past, the difficulties around designing ar...

Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is elusive for a lot of companies. I write about that plus and everything that falls under the digitalization umbrella.

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Mendix •

Digital Maturity Assessment

You have set your digital transformation goals but achieving them is another story. Use this tool to get a preliminary digital maturity score of your organization's change readiness for digital transformation. Leveraging the proven Mendix Digital Execution Practice (DEP) methodology, you'll be asked to rate yourself by answering 15 questions around the five pillars: Portfolio, People, Platform, Process, and Promotion. You have set your digital transformation goals but achieving them is anot...
Mendix •

Overcome the Challenges of Digital Transformation with Vision Setting

The best tool to counteract these challenges is a vision. Because of that, it’s crucial to understand how to create a vision, know what goes into that vision, and how to set it (and reset it). Imagine that a group of people are told to travel to Japan. Each person in that group plans differently, is given a different set of directions, and packs their bags differently. One person arrives in Hokkaido in two weeks. Another arrives in Tokyo three months later. One person doesn’t manage to get ther...
Mendix •

How Digitalization Impacts Workflow Automation

Gartner says digitalization is “the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities; it is the process of moving to a digital business.” Digital transformation, in contrast, is a “broad term that can encompass anything “from IT modernization (for example, cloud computing), to digital optimization, to the invention of new digital business models.” Organizations that choose to digitalize additional aspects of their business will li...
Mendix •

Digital Transformation Manager: Who's in Charge of Your Digital Transformation?

Foundry’s 2021 Digital Business Study can tell you a lot about what digital transformation managers need to focus on for success. A digital transformation program is expensive and expansive. The survey finds that organizations are spending an average of $16.5M on digital initiatives. It also requires someone to oversee it all. Every aspect of such a large undertaking needs to be considered: What’s the reason, what’s the scope, and how do you measure success? The person that owns your company’s...
Mendix •

5 Digital Transformation Trends for Growth in 2023

Organizations are organisms, able to evolve. Those in charge would do well to bear that in mind, especially when it comes to 2023 digital transformation trends and goals: You need to become a change-ready organization. This starts with the way in which you structure and equip your organization to deliver technology that allows you to adapt to challenges and opportunities in your market. Here are the five things you need to focus on for your digital transformation in 2023 and help your business...
Mendix •

Digital Maturity: Taking Your Digital Transformation Next Steps

If digital transformation doesn’t have a finish line, then you need to shift your organization’s mindset to one where digital transformation is about staying competitive and remaining relevant as an organization. This is why digitalization within your four walls isn’t sufficient. Here’s how to re-plot your digital transformation strategy: Let’s walk through a scenario with a composite organization, Lato, an electronic bike rental company that produces e-bikes for customers to rent. Lato was de...
Mendix •

What's Your Definition of Digital Transformation?

Your digital transformation framework—the means through which you’ll reach your digital transformation strategy–stems from how you define your organization’s digital transformation. There are so many variables from organization to organization, employee to employee, industry to industry, that using a framework that’s based on a vague definition is likely to land you among the 70% of organizations that fail at digital transformation. What’s the secret to the success of getting your framework out...
Mendix •

How to Execute a Digital Transformation: 9 Factors for Success

A successful digital transformation strategy is made up of three different levels: strategic, programmatic, and application. Executing each level successfully will help you reach your overall goal. The strategic level is all about establishing a vision. It involves: Once you have a vision of a digital transformation initiative, it’s time to figure out how to execute it. The program level focuses on the implementation of the strategy, from achieving and proving the ROI of such a big undertaking...
Mendix •

A Digital Transformation Framework: Start, Structure, Scale

If digital transformation is the process of incorporating digital technologies that can help a business succeed, a digital transformation framework is the roadmap to success. According to eWeek, a digital transformation framework is “a step-by-step plan for successfully implementing a digital transformation strategy.” The framework follows three phases: Start, Structure, Scale. The Start phase is all about beginning small and gaining broader support for your digital execution program by proving...
Mendix •

Build a Digital-first Workplace with Citizen Development

At Mendix World 2020, we had the distinct pleasure of hosting John Bratincevic, Senior Analyst for Application Development and Delivery at Forrester, to talk how exactly enterprises can alleviate the pressures that the rising global demand for software has placed on IT. His research has led him to an accelerating trend: citizen development. Citizen development is a software development approach that allows line of business employees—those who often are closest to the product and users and there...

Customer Experience

Created and executed a six-month marketing campaign centered around customer experience. 

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Mendix •

How to Deliver Amazing Customer Experience: A Guide

The Customer-first Era has arrived. Organizations need ways to deliver a seamless, engaging customer experience (CX). It’s up to you and your IT team to lead the way into this new age of customer centricity. Amazing CX means that it’s always adapting. This means your development methods need to always be evolving. But there are customer experiences challenges that make it difficult to deliver the right CX: outdated processes, traditional software development, and a lack of resources. But you c...
Mendix •

7 Strategies for Better Customer Experience

No matter the industry or the persona, your customers expect consistent, engaging experiences whether they’re on your website, mobile app, web portal, etc. In fact, 65% of customers say a positive experience is more influential than great advertising. Download our eBook to discover 7 digital customer experience strategies that can help your enterprise delight and retain customers, optimize processes, and improve the lives of employees. What’s inside? No matter the industry or the persona, your...
Mendix •

Improve Digital Employee Experience with a Low-Code Leader

If you can augment work through digitization and automation, you’re one step closer to running and operating at the levels customers and employees expect from organizations these days. While the apps that you create to improve digital employee experience are vital to any digitalization effort, it’s the people who build these applications–the people who make up your organization and use these solutions–who are often considered the most important aspect of any digital transformation effort. It be...
Mendix •

Hyper-Personalization vs. Personalization: Hyper-Personalizing the Customer Experience

And that’s what your audiences want: To feel special, distinct, personally catered to, seen and heard, and recognized. Personalization has been a great step in customer experience. To create a diverse, inclusive, innately distinct feeling in your product, however, you need to level up. These days, it’s no longer a question of personalized or not. It’s now a matter of personalization vs hyper-personalization. In a world where seemingly everyone is doing personalization, hyper-personalized, dive...
Mendix •

Research Shows How Employee Experience Impacts Customer Experience

Because consumer applications have made our lives so much more convenient, employees expect similar quality from the applications they use at work. This trend toward the consumerization of IT began long before the pandemic, but it has significantly accelerated during the past year. Employees aren’t wrong for having high expectations of the tech tools they use on the job. After all, they were promised that technology would help them be productive. As these expectations meet the reality of technic...
Mendix •

The Benefits of Customer Engagement with Mendix

Secondly—on a macro-level—enterprises need technology that allows their IT departments to pivot fast, ingest, and incorporate new disruptions and innovations as they happen. Customers want to see the latest advances, and they want them elegantly integrated into their applications—that takes time, testing, and understanding. Forrester took a deep dive into Mendix’s total economic impact. The research firm attributed a $3.1 million, three-year incremental revenue benefit from improved customer en...
Mendix •

Context Is All: Gaining a Better Understanding of Your Customers

Delivering customer experiences (like, the amazing kind that attracts new customers and keeps the current ones sticking around) is hard, because CX is an ecosystem now. The modern customer experience goes beyond your product. CX is every single interaction your customer has with your business, from the start of the sales cycle to the most minute interaction within your product 5 years down the line. If the modern customer experience goes beyond their use of the product, so too should the ways...
Mendix •

Why Modern Customer Experience Requires Composability

Customer centricity—i.e., the idea of being a customer-first organization—is not just a matter of reskinning a desktop app to work on a mobile device. When it comes to how customers and employees interact with your business, they now have all the leverage. That mobile app? That customer portal? A speech-based customer service agent? It’s no longer unwarranted for users to expect these touchpoints—and that each one knows who the customer is and what they want to do. If the last couple of years h...
Mendix •

How to Reduce Customer Churn & Enhance Customer Experience

First impressions set the tone for a customer relationship. When you’re onboarding a new customer for the first time, you’re showing them what kind of customer experience you plan on giving them from that point forward. If your company doesn’t invest in a smooth onboarding process, it says a lot about how much you value customer care—and your customers will notice. Customers of all ages are paying closer attention to the customer experience than ever before, especially now that major online ret...
Mendix •

3 Digital Customer Experiences You Need to Have and 3 to Watch for

When it comes to digital customer experiences, the following three trends stand out the most. In its early days, telemedicine was used primarily to connect doctors working with patients to specialists based elsewhere, which was especially beneficial for rural populations. However, the equipment needed to conduct virtual visits remained expensive and complex for several decades until COVID-19 increased the demand for contactless appointments. That’s when we saw the rise of apps such as Doctor on...
Mendix •

Why Building the Best Customer Experience Means the Right Multi-experience

According to PWC, nearly 80% of American consumers say that “speed, convenience, knowledgeable help and friendly service are important elements of a positive customer experience.” Users aren’t expecting the bells and whistles of cutting-edge technology–not right now anyway. They just want something that works. Considering that 68% of all website visits stemmed from mobile devices and 29% were desktop, “works” means experiences that deftly move from one to the other. In other words, mobile is vi...

Customer Stories and Profiles

Some of my favorite pieces are customer stories and profiles. I love conducting interviews, finding the story, and getting it just right for the people involved. 

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Mendix •

Securex Reconnects IT and Business with Low-Code Development

When Frans Temmerman joined Securex as CIO back in 2014, he knew changes needed to be made. The IT department of the international human capital management services company was viewed as “a manager of the past,” according to Temmerman, and those on the business side were losing faith in the department. Slow development, lack of transparency, and little collaboration were cited as reasons for the business’ lowered expectations of the IT department. Recognizing that changes needed to be made, Te...
Mendix •

Yasmijn Joosten Fuels Her Passion for Logistics at Kuehne + Nagel

Today’s maker profile, we feature Yasmijn Joosten, a Mendix Solution Developer at Kuehne + Nagel, one of the world’s leading logistics companies. Yasmijn has no software development background but is using Mendix to create apps and optimize processes at one of the world’s leading logistics providers. See how she’s doing it and living out her love for logistics. I started working right after high school as a supply chain coordinator at a bedding company in the Netherlands called Beter Bed. I wa...
Mendix •

Making People's Work Easier with Back-office Automation

In today’s maker profile, we speak with Miroslav Samoylenko, Managing Technical Architect at Ingersoll-Rand. Miroslav strives to make people’s work lives better with technology. See how he’s doing that at Ingersoll-Rand and with Mendix. In 1997, back in Ukraine, I received a Ph.D. in applied mathematics. After doing some fundamental research, I switched to the ERP world. The last twenty or so years, I’ve worked for multiple consulting companies working on enterprise resource planning (ERP) appl...
Mendix •

UK's Largest Poultry Supplier Uses Low-code and RPA to Automate

A company’s success is often determined by its efficiency and productivity, the tricky balancing of value-added and non-value added work. To reduce the latter, the shared services center of the 2 Sisters Food Group, the UK’s largest supplier of poultry, started out on a journey to automate their processes. This was no small feat: 2 Sisters is an organization that has grown through multiple acquisitions and employs 23,000 workers distributed over 42 sites across the UK. Now, 2 years into its au...
Mendix •

Adopt Agile Development to Modernize Business Processes

11 applications delivered with Mendix 12 weeks to deliver Electronic Capital Request (eCR) 10,000 users globally w/ eCR application Just 12 years after Benz patented the first modern car and 10 years before Ford’s Model T hit the streets, Continental was manufacturing the air-filled tire and were the first company ever to make grooved vehicle tires. Continental is a global leader in automotive technology. Their 241,000+ global employees drive €44.5 billion in annual sales across tire, electr...
Mendix •

Zurich Doubles Down on DevOps with Low-code Development

Global insurance provider, Zurich, recently found itself in a complicated situation: managing digital disruption while increasing market share and strengthening its position. For a company of over 6,000 UK employees serving over 4 million UK customers, this was the business equivalent of turning an aircraft carrier. Zurich needed to move faster and with more agility to build software solutions that drove their business forward and, ultimately, helped their customers. So they developed a digita...
Mendix •

Knowsley Council Delivers Digital Resident Services with Low-code

Since the British central government instituted austerity in 2010, the local government of Knowsley has seen a significant reduction in central government funding with an associated impact on service delivery, especially within non-statutory services. Knowsley has one of the hardest-hit local authorities in the U.K. in terms of central government funding cuts, compelling the Council to consider stopping or reducing services, as well as the way it delivers those services. The IT Service teamed...
Mendix •

How Digital Banking with Low-Code Enhances Customer Experience

Oil and water. That’s often the visual that comes to mind with most IT departments when thinking about innovating customer experience and compliance. The two concepts go together like oil and water. ABN AMRO and Rabobank, two European banks, had very different needs when they began using Mendix. Their goals, however, were similar: Both banks used low-code development to address regulations while focusing on their customer experiences, thereby setting themselves and their customers up for succe...
Mendix •

National Parcel and Logistics Companies Deliver Digital Transformation with Low-Code

The founders of Canada Post and PostNL, two parcel delivery and postal service companies, built their organizations over 200 years ago to do one thing: connect people through delivering mail. In recent years, however, mail has begun to decline, prompting these two logistics enterprises to shift away from what they’ve done for centuries and move into the parcel delivery market. The move meant changing the technology they use, transforming the way they work, and altering the mindset with which th...
Mendix •

Enexis Tackles the Changing Demands of the Energy Industry

“Change is hard,” my coworker bemoans as she tries to access our new expense system. With any change to a new system or way of working – no matter how small — difficulties arise, and processes and people get disrupted. As with my coworker (she figured the new system out with aplomb, by the way), changing the way you work is difficult for any business. But consider the changes Enexis, an energy grid maintenance company that manages one-third of the Netherlands’ energy, made to their application...
Mendix •

Food for Thought: Laurens Steffers Builds Mendix Apps to Feed the World

In today’s maker profile, we talk with Laurens Steffers, a Mendix-certified Rapid Developer and SAP Consultant at itelligence. Laurens uses Mendix to develop apps that support the Netherlands’ food and agriculture industry. See how Laurens embraces change and looks to low-code technology to sustainably feed the world. I studied computer science back in 1997. That was the time Java and object-oriented programming became popular. After I graduated, I immediately went to an SAP implementation part...
Mendix •

Freek Brinkhuis Builds IoT Apps with Mendix

In this maker profile, we feature Freek Brinkhuis, Senior Mendix Consultant at TimeSeries, The Smart App company. Freek creates solutions for clients using the Mendix Platform. Freek also designs custom solutions for the Mendix Platform with Javascript and React. See the many applications Freek has built with Mendix, including a building management system for Van Dorp Installations that integrates with Internet of Things technologies. I started my studies in computer science back in 2011, with...
Mendix •

See How Rene Van Hofwegen Caters Mendix Training to Meet Your Needs

In today’s maker profile, we feature Rene Van Hofwegen, training manager at Mansystems. Rene trains a range of students from business developer to technical developers on how to use Mendix. We sat with Rene to get his thoughts on the Mendix Platform and to see the reception he gets from his students. I trained as an airplane mechanic and worked as one for several years before becoming a high school teacher for seven years. After a couple of detours and some other jobs, I ended up at Mendix as a...

Governance and Security

Not the most fun topics for most, but certainly some of the most important. Which is why I approach anything on IT governance and infosec with iron-clad research and no-nonsense seriousness.

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Mendix •

What is IT Governance? And Why Does it Need to Change?

With good IT governance, organizations can effectively operate, grow, and scale. Good governance is so crucial that pundits, analysts, and tech bloggers spill gallons of digital ink on the topic every year. Moreover, the first question decision-makers often ask when considering any IT decision is “How will we apply governance to it?” Since governance is such a crucial and timeless topic, I’m going to spend the next few weeks writing a series tackling IT governance. For this post, I’ll start rig...
Mendix •

What is Low-Code Governance and Why is it Necessary?

Low-code governance is a set of guardrails that ensure you are maximizing the value of the platform, and doing so securely, throughout the entire software development cycle. Put another way, it’s the rules your organization has in place that allow citizen developers from across the organization to create apps that can contribute to your bottom line. The nature of work is evolving. Citing their recent Digital Friction Survey, Gartner states that 49% of employees in organizations consider themse...
Mendix •

Like Lock and Key: Mendix and Security Just Fit

In the world of security, you always need to stay on top of your game. At Mendix, we continuously assess our security measures ourselves and through third-party validation. It’s important; otherwise, customers like Mercury Systems wouldn’t be able to use Mendix to make accessible, mission-critical technologies for the aerospace and defense industries. Mercury Systems uses Mendix to unify disparate systems because of Mendix’s strict, cloud native architecture and governance features. Mendix allo...
Mendix •

Your Guide to Better IT Governance

I’ll never forget the day I heard those four fateful words from executive management: “What’s the governance model?” At the time, I was an application architect, new to the world of governance. That question launched me on a three-year journey of research and discovery to determine what IT governance models really were, where they came from, what they were intended to accomplish, and how to implement them. Throughout all my research, the question that kept coming up is “Why are governance mode...

TechTarget

SearchERP •

Your guide to choosing the right e-procurement software

Before e-procurement software was developed, the manual procurement process was prone to errors created by a simple typo or a misnamed file. It was a long procedure, too, as seeking out suppliers and the right costs was time-consuming. Now, manual procurement should be all but extinct, as e-procurement software has proven itself to be a crucial tool for those looking to reduce costs -- potentially saving millions of dollars -- and, consequently, increase revenue.
SearchMicroservices •

Choose the best application modernization services for your business

Having software and an application development strategy that works today doesn't mean a business can rest on its laurels. In order to keep pace with competitors and customer demand, an application modernization strategy can't simply be a nice-to-have on a CIO's wish list. Considering the time, money and resources saved, the efficiency gained in app development, and how it keeps companies relevant, application modernization services are an absolute necessity.
SearchSecurity •

Choose the right DLP tools to help execute your DLP strategy

More and more companies are dealing with sensitive, personal or valuable data, and if businesses don't have a data loss prevention (DLP) strategy or the coinciding software, they are risking that data falling into the wrong hands, or being noncompliant and potentially losing millions of dollars. Knowing the type of DLP product your company needs is crucial for your business to protect itself, its data, its employees and its customers.
SearchSoftwareQuality •

A guide to purchasing the right quality assurance software

The quality of an application or software is as vital today as it has ever been. Most times, the quality of a product is perceived through a strong user experience, and ensuring a strong user experience begins with making sure a product works and works well. You can test a product to see if it works right, but what ensures that your testing process is correct? And if it's correct, what guarantees that process is being used every time it needs to be?
SearchMicroservices •

Application integration software: A buyer's guide

In a time when information transactions, both internal and external, are becoming exponentially more complex, application integration has never been more important. The need for faster and more accurate data has become essential in the mobile-driven economy that expects immediate results. Slow or wrong information can disrupt a small business transaction, ruin a customer's experience or interrupt product development. In the end, it could drastically affect the bottom line.
SearchSoftwareQuality •

Application lifecycle management tools: A buyer's guide to ALM software

Application lifecycle management (ALM) is a comprehensive development process that has, over the past few years, grown in complexity due to the robust and rapid nature of today's desktop and mobile applications. ALM takes an app from conception to decommissioning, regardless of whether the company prefers to develop in an Agile, Waterfall, Scrum, or hybrid project management method. ALM software helps organizations through the ALM process. Some ALM software suites are browser-based. Some are on