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Editorial

This Compact edition features articles on innovative digital developments. Developments such as Digital Stack for process excellence and Citizen Development, will be addressed to offer you supporting tools for your digital journey. The global leader of Citizen Development at KPMG, Tom Koehler, sheds his light on this initiative that decentralizes and democratizes software development with low-code/no-code tools, while avoiding the disadvantages of the old-fashioned end-user computing with Excel.

For low-code software development to flourish, its governance is essential. Swatantra Kumar explains what the governance of a popular low-code solution, Microsoft’s Power Platform, entails, distinguishing proactive and reactive governance.

Next, Jill Roelofs, Karin Smorenburg and Geert Kriek describe how Design Thinking can support your digital journey. Not as a silver bullet, but as a useful instrument to identify the right issues and effective solutions and – above all – from a customer perspective.

As digital process transformation heavily depends on culture, so does the assurance on outsourced processes. Laura Ploegsma, Corine Tol and Jacco van Kleef elaborate on the role of culture and behavior and how these soft controls can strengthen hard controls, as well as the importance of assurance reports. A related subject is covered in the following article: the introduction of the ISO 37301 compliance management system and the possibility to be certified against this ethics and compliance framework. The next article covers a remarkable project on digitizing the supply chains for medicines for infectious diseases with innovative solutions, in order to increase access to these scarce pharmaceuticals in developing countries.

As we discussed the use of blockchain in the watch industry in the previous edition, in this edition, Sergio Galanti, Jan Valkovicova and Elias Evers follow up with the ESG performance of the main Swiss watch brands.

As a follow-up to the Compact 2021/2 article “Quantum computing: a myth or reality”, the same authors teamed up with Chiel van den Bergh and Stef Maree, to illustrate how quantum computing can be leveraged for solving calculation-intensive business problems.

Finally, we included another book review, namely Digital Body Language: How to Build Trust and Connection, No Matter the Distance by Erica Dhawan, in which she describes the four laws of digital body language and practical examples of the Trust & Power matrix.

We hope you will like the articles in this edition and also experience physical body language during the holidays.