With a history in software development, Andrew Borthwick joined Bridgeall as an OutSystems Solution Architect earlier this year. Having worked in a variety of IT roles, later in his career he came across OutSystems. Eager to learn more, he soon discovered the platform’s capabilities and saw the huge benefits it could bring to customers.   
 
Fast forward a few years and Andy is now helping to expand OutSystems in Scotland.  In this article we do a deep dive into Andy’s career and find out why OutSystems might be the low code solution for you. 

Tell us a bit more about your early career

After graduating from Strathclyde in 2000, I joined the Procter and Gamble IT function in Newcastle. My first roles were focused around their SAP platform and global shared services organisation, where I initially helped deploy their standard banking solution.

As I progressed, I moved onto managing the full finance solution deployments for some of those, and then moved over to the logistics world, where I became a product owner to build new solutions for customs management, global track and trace, and shipment optimisation. In this role, I was hands-on with the product selection and pilot projects and then deployed through regional teams to factories and warehouses worldwide.

After this I stepped into a more operational role in the security space – with a team of 20 looking after role-based access on SAP, Siebel, and other major systems to ensure people could do their jobs in a SOX-compliant way.

I then moved over to Northern Ireland and started working as an IT Manager in Andor Technology. The manufacturing environment was familiar from my logistics role, and the scientific camera purpose was really interesting for me – think telescopes and microscopes, but not much in between! I took on a much broader role – everything IT from laptops and telephony to data centres, ERP systems and reporting solutions – and brought in some great solutions like Office365 and Qlikview, while improving and updating the existing systems.

As Andor was acquired I moved to CVS Health, who had set up a Belfast-based nearshore development centre. This was a step into the world of professional software development, managing teams and their projects around agile processes and managing a demanding US-based customer. We were early adopters of Angular and single-page apps, showing how responsive design could overcome the need for separate mobile and desktop web pages, which was exciting for the time!

From there I moved into consulting work – initially as an independent contractor and then full time as a solution architect, with Neueda and then acquired by Version 1 – and now with Bridgeall. I’ve had nearly 10 years now with a largely public sector base, and broadly helping shape and deliver stuff as diverse as education, agriculture, benefits, and infrastructure – as well as the odd telecoms or manufacturing customer from time to time.

Why OutSystems?

I first looked at OutSystems as I joined Neueda full time in 2019

With a few graduates allocated, we completed some internal projects, and it became clear that this was powerful – full scope solutions created in days and weeks rather than months, with fairly inexperienced team members learning as we went along. With so many of the non-functional requirements taken care of by the platform, we could stay focused on business logic and solutions. And with all the code in one place, we could debug end to end – a game changer for some who had been in teams with separate database, integration, back-end, and front-end technologies.

I’ve believed since then that it’s a first-class platform, and a great choice for any digital transformation program.

The unique strengths of the OutSystems platform

First up is simply developer productivity. OutSystems have been investing in accelerating development for nearly 25 years. They have been ahead of the curve at all stages, embracing agile methods, devops culture, cloud hosted and cloud native technologies, and now embracing AI tools.

Second, and perhaps undervalued in the market, is the single development context. It’s incredibly powerful in the support and extension phase of an application to be able to work top to bottom and debug, analyse, change, and test – all from the comfort of one visual development environment that covers data, logic, web, and mobile.

Last is the community – OutSystems has a growing and vocal global network of users and evangelists. From employees and partners to customers and contractors, this network manifests into an active and helpful chat forum, a huge marketplace of pre-built components to avoid rework, and an internal product team that seeks feedback to improve the product with every release.

OutSystems use cases

As a very general tool, OutSystems can lend itself to any software development project. That said, there are a few categories that pop up when talking to customers about where they have had success:

  • Customer portals and front ends – e.g. Yorkshire Bank building a new web and mobile customer experience on top of their legacy banking core systems.
  • Streamlining work processes – e.g. Liberty Seguros have brought all components of insurance applications and claims into a single integrated workflow and are able to automate and monitor the progress whilst reducing cycle time and manual effort required.
  • Legacy replacement – e.g. Western Union have built their new global money transfer systems from the ground up on OutSystems. Two main patterns – either connect, extend, and strangle – or big bang cutover with data migration where a phased approach is not possible.

Customer success stories

I’ve mostly been working with the Northern Ireland Government until now.  Some notable success has been achieved in each of the Departments that have embraced OutSystems. 

Education Authority NI (EA) – from an initial project around digital admissions applications, this has grown into the “EA Connect” platform that strives to put all of EA’s parent-facing services in one front end portal.  From an initial base of 25,000 pupils per year group moving into around 2000 pre-school, primary, and post-primary schools, the scope has grown significantly over the last few years.  It now includes applications for transport to school and college, free school meals and uniform support, annual reviews for pupils with special educational needs, and will provide consistency as back-end school systems are replaced in the coming years.  Separately, the NI Supply Teacher Register was also built on the same infrastructure. 

Dept for Agriculture, Environment, and Rural Affairs (DAERA) – with a large and well established .Net based development team that had previously developed solutions for complex topics like Common Agricultural Policy, the OutSystems license was initially bought for a program of small form that had only been ‘digitised’ as far as making an editable pdf available online.  Gradually the solutions built from fish and poultry movement declarations, to fishing and sewage permits, and then later into a full rural grants and loans program.  With many on-site existing components, the challenge here was both integration through Azure for identity and master data, and governance alongside the more established patterns.  With the growing success of the platform, delivering a 3x ROI each year and significantly outperforming other options, DAERA are expanding their OutSystems use significantly. 

Both Dept for the Economy and Dept for Communities shared an old database that was used for everything to do with job seeking, whether school leavers, adult job seekers, or unemployed.  With the separation of the departments and a need to provide more specific advanced features to control payments to training providers, several solutions were developed, and years of data migrated to its new home.  Both departments have completed several additional projects to cover discretionary loans and grants for job seekers and some internal apps to grow skills. 

Tell us more about the efforts to increase OutSystems awareness in Scotland

We’ve connected with three of the Scottish government bodies that are already active in OutSystems, and a few of the private sector companies as well.  We’re about to launch a new targeted campaign to find more local companies that can benefit and help them accelerate transformation.  And we’ll bring the community together for some events in the later stages of the year, to start to connect the islands of users and look for opportunities to grow skills and awareness within Scotland. 

Your favourite project

From a time and impact point of view, the Digital Admissions project for Education Authority was really tough, but the team achieved an incredible outcome.

With a very tight deadline and a can-do attitude, we took weeks out of the cycle time and hundreds of thousands of sheets of paper out of people’s hands, just at the time of maximum covid exposure.  Most pleasing was the feedback from parents, schools, and administrators, who universally found the system easy to use, with all of the features required, and scaling to 75,000 applications in a very tight time window that were processed successfully.

Is OutSystems right for you?

If you’re looking for a way to develop applications faster, more efficiently, and with a wider range of contributors, then OutSystems is definitely worth considering. Whether you’re a small business with limited resources or a large enterprise with complex needs, OutSystems can help you achieve your software development goals.

Getting started

OutSystems offers a free trial version, so you can experiment with the platform and see if it’s a good fit for your needs. There are also extensive resources available online, including tutorials, documentation, and a supportive community forum. You can try it out here. If you’d like to know more about OutSystems, head to our website or contact our team who can help. 

If you’d like more information on OutSystems we can help. Contact our team who will talk you through your requirements.