App Farm – A digital initiative where employees learn to create their own app in just three months

In Aker Solutions, we believe that low coding will be a part of all employees’ daily life in the years to come. Since the start of 2022 several of our employees, without any IT-background, have attended a three-month program where they learn low-coding, receive tools training, get a deeper understanding of the Aker Solutions’ strategy and then build apps that can solve and simplify small everyday tasks.  

So, what can our employees solve with low coding? They can make their daily life easier by solving challenges related to automation, data visibility, system integration, reporting and more. There is also big potential in changing how we distribute information to our co-creators by minimizing the use of manual work in Powerpoint, PDF, Word or Excel.

App Farm is the start of an everyday digitalization journey to create digital awareness and skills across all levels of the organization. The obvious challenge of having the capacity to allow people to get out of their daily work to attend this program for three months  is outweighed by the advantages that are gained by the entire project or department when the employee returns.

Transformation expert and App Farm-manager, Jhon-Eirik Lien (27) started his career in Aker Solutions as an engineer working in maintenance and modification projects, but after some years he moved to digitalization and transformation. He explains the goal of App Farm like this;

- Our goal is to get many low-coding developers in different departments in Aker Solutions. They themselves know the everyday challenges best, which makes the development and implementation easier and faster. 

Meet Jhon-Eirik and learn more about App-Farm in the video below: