Gartner estimates by 2023, over 50% of medium to large enterprises will have adopted a Low-Code platform as one of their strategic application development platforms. In this blog, we will decipher this statement made by Gartner and try to get to the bottom of the what, why and how of "Low-Code".
Current challenges for IT
Today’s challenges of a CIO/CTO (to name a few):
Technology challenges on legacy platforms and security; there is an increasing need for speed to meet the demands of the businesses to innovate and transform in order to stay competitive. Hence, agility is considered a competitive advantage in an increasingly digital world.
Balancing the need to find resources with the right skills and budget constraints; IT departments have limited bandwidth to keep up with ever-changing business needs and a rapidly growing backlog of requests. To address these challenges, we need to look at the problem from different angles. Firstly, automation - doing things smarter, more effectively and more efficiently is key to reduce the pressure on IT departments. Secondly, citizen developers - when looking more closely to business needs, one can separate requests that are simple and straightforward in nature and the more complex ones. Expanding an application development team with citizen developers is a great way to get e.g. savvy business analysts involved in solving some of their own problems and allowing your IT department to focus on complex and more pressing technical issues.
The pandemic has sadly aggravated the above even more. Finding resources was already hard before Covid-19, now with the closure of the Australian borders, the shortage of skilled developers has become even more difficult. Also, the pandemic has been a catalyst driving the need of digital transformation. With whole departments working from home, effective use of collaboration tools has become paramount for success. With system inefficiencies under a magnifying glass, companies are forced to excel their digital transformation journey and adopt at a faster rate. According to Fortune, 85% of C-suite executives report a significant acceleration of digitalisation and automation during the pandemic.
Low-Code offers solutions for the above challenges. So what is Low-Code exactly? Let's start with understanding the core principles of Low-Code.
Introduction to the core principles of a Low-Code platform
The core principles of a Low-Code platform are abstraction and automation.
Abstraction is effectively achieved through visual modelling. In this way, people without a coding background can work on the application. Expanding your team with these citizen developers enhances collaboration across the teams and user experience.
Automation is an essential part of a Low-Code platform, automating workflows, allowing automated processes of debugging, testing, and deploying. It is the main reason why Low-Code platforms are on the rise. For the (near) future, Artificial Intelligence (AI) will play an incrementally more important role as it augments what the developer can do on a Low-Code platform.
Low-Code platforms
Low-Code platforms use visualized drag-and-drop tools to build applications by automating the process of coding, debugging, testing, and deployment. Instead of coding every line, integrating with databases and programming network integrations, Low-Code platforms visually construct application models with default containers that initiate the logical processes and data storage abilities they require. The platform provides workflows and features to automatically debug, test, and deploy software applications in the cloud or on-premises. Once deployed, the software runs and is managed by the platform itself. Conexxia has partnered with two global Low Code software solutions that are considered leaders in the Gartner Magic Quadrant: Mendix (part of Siemens Digital Industries Software) and Appian.
Low-Code benefits
Deliver business value
Knowledge and ideas can be shared across business and IT and transformed into applications that deliver business value with unlimited scalability. You can efficiently scale your software application to cater to the growing business needs and industry trends. Low-Code delivers flexibility and extensibility using an agnostic enterprise application development platform to remove limitations on what can be built. This tackles the challenge to rapidly meet the growing demand of businesses to innovate to keep the competitive advantage.
Speed of development
Do you know why Low-Code is also called Rapid Application Development (RAD)? Because Low-Code is all about speed. Low-code platforms can reduce the overall software development and delivery time, i.e. Mendix creates enterprise apps 10x faster on SAP Cloud Platform and with the Appian Guarantee, Appian signs up for the first project delivery in just 8 weeks (for new Appian customers deploying in the Appian Cloud).
Operational benefits
Low-Code provides better risk management as regulations change constantly, enterprises can adapt quickly in case of a Low-Code approach to stay compliant. In addition, better security is given as security upgrades will be installed automatically instead of manually. Low-Code platforms use the cloud to enable the ease and speed of application deployment that customers demand.
Lower costs
“Low-Code” is cost-efficient. Instead of needing to hand-code everything by experienced and expensive developers, developers can use low code’s visual models and drag-and-drop interfaces to save time and costs. In addition, software maintenance becomes easy too. The overall coding quality improves as coding interface objects from scratch takes time and varies in quality. Pressure of faster software delivery often leads to bad quality of code that eventually affects the usability, reliability, availability, and performance of software. Low-Code platforms come with pre-designed objects that can be easily configured and updated.
Agility and collaboration
Low-code embraces the agile way of working through the full enterprise application development lifecycle; empower small teams, build for any cloud, deploy swiftly and frequently. It also leverages a shared visual language to support the interchange of knowledge and ideas between business domain experts and developers. It provides a common language to enhance collaboration between teams.
Enhance user experience
Low-Code platforms automate multiple operations that are crucial to customer experience. The agility in application development and strong business process features help in building much better apps, thus improving the overall customer experience.
Contact us to learn more
Has this blog triggered your interest in how your organisation can benefit from Low-Code or are you interested in a customized demo of a Low-Code platform for your organisation? Contact us today and we are happy to have further discussions with you.