Yes, Your Enterprise Needs Low Code Now
Businesses are facing a mountain of challenges when it comes to innovation right now, consisting of a combination of a global developer shortage, pressure to keep up with market conditions and regulations, as well as the need to automate and build at a competitive pace to better serve customers.
Not to mention, with long backlogs of existing complex projects that need to be completed, IT departments are bearing the brunt of these demands and simply cannot tackle their entire to-do lists. Just like you couldn’t climb Mt. Everest without the right set of tools, guidance and preparation, the same goes for these challenges.
While yes, traditionally, organizations have turned to more experienced developers to help overcome these challenges or have applied quick fixes around older legacy processes, we now have access to technology that can relieve a lot of this pressure and do it right.
There’s a lot of hype about low-code technology in the market, and for good reason — when done right, low code can help companies scale a spectrum of development needs and empower staff at all levels to contribute to innovation that solves real-world business challenges.
By using visual tools combined with a model-driven methodology instead of traditional code-based development, organizations taking a low-code approach can demonstrate the agility and innovation needed to remain competitive.
At the same time, they can implement the right governance to remain compliant in today’s market and tackle the proverbial Everest of development challenges. Here are three challenges where low code can give organizations the successful tools they need to reach their own summit of innovation:
Demands for Innovation Are Increasing, but You Don’t Have the Talent to Support It
Large brands are managing sophisticated, complex and highly governed processes. And for many, the sub-processes that pull it all together still require labor-intensive, repetitive or manual (or, in some cases, all three) work in order to ensure their business continues to run smoothly and efficiently.
At the same time, enterprises are automating or building existing and new applications to help the organization innovate and evolve to meet changing customer and industry needs. If this sounds like a lot, it is. And with a shortage of talent to work on extensive lists of IT projects, many organizations are struggling to get it all done.
In comes the power of low code. Low code offers a pragmatic automation and digitalization environment that reduces the amount of hard coding, enabling users of all skill levels to more easily create and automate workflows, rules, and other application components.
This means that organizations can appropriately share projects with citizen developer teams who can then quickly and easily assemble and build themselves to alleviate the pressure on more experienced developers, leaving pro developers to tackle the larger, more complex challenges.
You Need More People-Built Apps, but Don’t Want to Create the Wild West of App Development
More than ever, organizations need to be working more collaboratively to move toward an innovative future. Yet somehow, IT and business departments still aren’t speaking to each other in the way they should.
What’s good for the business side should also be reflected in what’s good for IT teams, and low code can at last bridge that gap. The beauty of low code is it can give IT the ability to govern what’s being created within an organization without needing to micromanage. And it gives business users the power to create applications and automate existing ones, that can solve real problems within an organization.
To truly succeed, low code needs a collaborative culture around it to ensure alignment, so there is a true strategy behind an organization’s approach. While you’ll sometimes hear that low code enables anyone to build projects without the help of IT, this isn’t — and shouldn’t — be true.
What happens when a citizen developer builds or automates something without guidance and takes it live? Who determines viability and risk, and who supports that solution when things need updating or fixing or when compliance enforces critical changes? Proper governance is critical for preventing the wild west of low-code adoption that does the exact opposite of what it’s meant for — it’s the key differentiator between enterprise-grade low-code solutions and those that just don’t cut it. More governance and guardrails result in more successful builds.
Those building in a low-code environment — no matter what skill level — need to be speaking to each other and collaborating to ensure that what they’re building contributes to the greater progress of their organization. The democratization of software development has never been more critical for innovation. Just remember — in order to have a successful low-code strategy, governance and collaboration need to be a key part of it — and built into your low-code platform from the ground up.
You can’t predict the future, but you need to be ready for it
The challenge of innovation is you don’t always know what you need to innovate for. Your goals next year, next month or even next week could be completely different from what you initially set out to do. And that’s where the beauty of low code comes in. Because of how quickly you can build with low code, you have an innately agile environment that can change as needed.
Low code encourages innovation by tapping into the knowledge and unique skills of all users. Business users and IT managers using low code can define and apply guardrails to keep all applications compliant and updated while also managing and tracking applications to evaluate the quality of every app at every stage of development.
Infusing low code into everyday operations helps organizations work more efficiently, versus traditional coding that requires developers to spend significant time building applications from scratch, which would be fine if changes or updates never or rarely needed to be made. But when time is of the essence and a change — big or small — needed to be made yesterday, developers must go back and retrace their steps, taking time away from other mission-critical projects.
Instead, low-code offers users the possibility to both create new and update existing applications quickly. This means a new financial regulation isn’t going to send developers working for a bank into a tailspin — they can quickly and easily make the changes that are compliant so business can quickly continue as usual.
The real promise of low code means your automation and digital business solutions will last, adapt, and keep up with all future technology changes. You don’t hard code in low code to tie yourself down to a front end, a social chat medium or the environment where your apps run, for example. Low code means your digital processes can adapt fast to any change, even if you cannot predict today what changes may come tomorrow.
