Taking Analysis to a Whole New Level
How Microsoft PowerPlatform empowers the way we create solutions in eComindo
When we talk about analyst, especially system analyst, what comes in your mind? Let’s jump to the job description to make it easier. According to glassdoor.com, “Systems analysts implement, maintain, and support IT and information systems to meet the business needs of organizations and scale as organizations grow. They analyze and create tests, and develop specifications and requirements for developers and programmers to follow. They usually are not involved directly in software or hardware development.”. But what if those descriptions are not the only thing in it?
Microsoft has been developing a collection of platforms that are capable to analyze data, build solutions, automate processes, and create virtual agents in an easy way or we can call it low code. The meaning behind low code itself is that we can build application, automation, and even agents with little to no code at all. This enables analysts to broaden their capabilities from delivering requirements to actually get involved in the development itself.
PT. eComindo Saranacipta is a consultant firm that has been in the business of accelerating digital innovation through enterprise captive & potential market for more than 20 years. One of many remarkable things about this firm is that this firm is one of very few partner Microsoft has in Indonesia and not only a regular partner, PT. eComindo Saranacipta has access to Microsoft’s Gold Cloud Platform, Gold Application Development, and Gold Data Analytics.
Personally, I don’t think that I am good enough in coding department. When I first applied a full-time position in eComindo, I was not very confident about my skill. All of my doubts were soon answered as I received a rejection email from the HR, saying I was not qualified enough to take participation in the recruitment since I haven’t finished my school. Not long after, I got a whatsapp message from Miss Rizkia saying that eComindo is opening an internship program for System Analyst position. I was very thrilled and tried my luck one more time.
Test Stages
Technical Test
The tests consisting of several problems about marketing that I would not jump into details to respect its confidentiality. As an informatics undergraduate, I didn’t have much hope to answer all of those questions correctly. In the last stage there was some SQL questions that covered basic database which raised my hope to pass this stage a little bit.
Psychology Test
Surprisingly, I was invited to the next stage which was a psychology test. It was held online with Microsoft Teams as the platform with several other candidates. The psychology test was just like most psychology test but it was done in excel. In the end of the test we were told that we would be contacted for HR Interview if we passed the test.
HR Interview
Quite shortly, I had my invitation for HR Interview in the same day. Unlike the psychology test, the interview with HR was held privately only with the HR, Miss Nurul and me as the participants. The interview didn’t take very long to finish and once again, I was told to wait to hear the result.
User Interview
Out of all, this could be called as one interview that changed the way I saw things forever. The user was the COO of eComindo himself, Mr. Dodi and I was very nervous since I’ve heard quite a few about him at that time. Prior to the interview, I never thought that I would gain so much information for a life time but it happened.
He was very patient when he explained to me about what he is currently working on. It was the first time I hear about low code and no code system. It just blew my mind how one can create an application that is fully functional, complete with the automation, artificial intelligence, and virtual agent to back it up without having to type a single line of code. This gives me a thrill and I just knew that the future is near and if I could be a part of this ship, it would be one chance of a lifetime.
We ended the interview with the discussion of how far this low code and no code system could take the world of application development and he told me to wait for the next call.
Offering
Two days later or less, I received a video call from Mr. Veldy and he offered me a position for System Analyst. I was very thrilled and didn’t expect that I would get this far. He told me that this is a scarce opportunity to work and report daily to Mr. Dodi himself as he is a really busy person. He also mentioned that I was the only candidate that made it to the internship program.
Working Behavior
In July 2020, I started working in eComindo. Every morning I had a daily stand up with Mr. Dodi where he taught me a lot of things that I didn’t really grasp in classes like database management, entity relationship, and composing diagrams in the right way to satisfy the clients. I always thought that I was very lucky to be able to learn so much from him and I admire him ever since.
Mr. Dodi also put me in a team with Mr. Adhi as the business unit, Tirta and Amira, who is also an analyst like me but they are working full-time. We created several projects together and have a daily stand up on 11 a.m. everyday until today.
Sometime we had meeting with clients and worked with UI/UX designer and it was quite a new experience for me.
Going to App Source
At one point, Mr. Dodi assigned me to an actual project of creating recruitment system application that is linked to a website portal. I always told him that I have a passion for web development and he gave me that chance. With Miss Nurul and Miss Rizkia from the HR as the clients, I built a website for candidate application and managed the data in Microsoft’s common dataverse that is linked to a model driven application that can accessed only by the HR group.
The website was built in PowerPortal with almost drag and drop manners, however there was a few quirks that had to be settled with javascript in order for it to work better. When it usually took me 5 days or more to build a fully functional website, this website was built in less than 30 minutes for the main functionality and features to work. It certainly saved a lot of time and the back end was handled by another logic in another application that also took less than a day to create.
Most of the process was run in an automation powered by Microsoft PowerAutomate, including sending scheduling email, validation, and naming conventions. The conditions and the actions are predefined so that anyone with little to no background at coding can make a flow.
Some fields were automatically controlled by the business rules I conducted in the model driven application. The creation of this application took the meaning of simple to another world.
A report for the recruitment data was built in PowerBI, another platform created by Microsoft that managed data into a beautiful reports in easy way. The report can later be exported or embedded to another application so it can be easily read by the ones in need.
The latest update of Ecosystem Recruitment is that now we are working on uploading this solution as Ecosystem to the app source in freemium so that it can be downloaded and implemented freely to an extend by fellow developers. This was quite a leap and I am very grateful for this chance.
Microsoft Devcon 2021
The largest Microsoft Indonesia’s Developer Virtual Conference: DevCon 2021 is going to be hold in February 25'th and I am gladly informing that eComindo is taking part there with Mr. Dodi and I as the representative.
The further details regarding the Ecosystem solution such as Recruitment System and Project Monitoring is going to be drilled and demonstrated here.
This event is going to be free and open for anyone to join so please save the date and register yourself on aka.ms/DevCon21.
See you there!
