ENews & Tech Are you Low-Code yet? Your competition likely is

Low-code platforms are democratising application development, providing companies with the speed and resourcing flexibility to respond with much more agility to business needs and market trends.

Software development has been growing progressively easier for decades. More powerful computers, higher-level languages, and better tools for design, development, version control, debugging, and testing have made application design and programming continually more productive. More recently, even AI has become commonplace for automating programming tasks and shortening development time.

Low-code development extends this long productivity trend while also democratising the craft of software development, enabling professionals with very little training to develop enterprise applications. Offering impressive gains in speed and staffing flexibility, low-code has become increasingly popular for good reason and is well worth considering for a broad variety of development projects.

Graphical Interfaces and Pre-Built Components

In low-code development, users with very little technical experience or training can create software applications using primarily graphical interfaces and pre-built components rather than writing individual lines of code. Low-code developers simply select data sources and applications and visually define process flows and user interfaces to create applications for cloud, on-premise, or mobile platforms. Unique requirements may require some coding, but it’s typically far less than in traditional development.

According to some estimates, low-code development can be 50% to 90% faster than a more traditional sequential approach, which generally involves detailed requirements specification prior to design and then design completion prior to development. In the past, companies might spend months or even years on requirements gathering, analysis, and design before a line of code was written. In an era where business requirements change rapidly, this traditional process of requirements gathering, architecting, developing, and testing software can feel excruciatingly slow. Because low-code development is so fast, it encourages a more agile approach. Development can progress incrementally and iteratively, allowing end users to visualise and shape the solution as it develops and helping to ensure it is well aligned with customer needs.

While highly skilled programmers and technical specialists will always be in demand for complex large-system architectures and engineering challenges, low-code projects may be easier to staff since low-code developers require relatively little formal software development training. Engaging sector or process experts with business backgrounds to create software is likely to become increasingly feasible.

Choosing Low-Code Projects and Platforms

Enterprises are adopting low-code development for a range of projects, from building customer-facing applications to prototyping, developing, maintaining, and customising internal tools and even core systems. Notably, low-code platforms were used to develop solutions within weeks to help banks process loans under the Paycheck Protection Program COVID-19 relief legislation.

A recent survey of application development and delivery professionals in eight countries shows that about one-third are using lowcode for customer-facing applications, onethird for business process and workflow, and 16% for core business applications. Increasing adoption is fuelling the low-code development platform market, which is expected to exceed $21 billion by 2022, following five years of 50% annual growth.

To realise advantages such as faster time to market and more iterative, customer-centric software delivery, CIOs who have not started on the low-code journey would do well to start now. To prepare for low-code development, evaluate the technical merits, cybersecurity profiles, and economics of the leading providers’ tools and establish a clear understanding of what kinds of solutions are best suited to a low-code approach. CIOs can consider establishing a low-code development centre of excellence to build the competency and help internal clients take advantage of the technology. Low-code will not work in every instance, so the CIO should establish “guardrails” and then let business leaders experiment, iterate, and innovate independently.

Changing What’s Valued and Expected

One of the broader implications of low-code platforms and the democratisation of software development is a shift in how value is created: from developing software to solving business challenges with software. As application development becomes more accessible to nonspecialists, coding skills will likely become relatively less valuable in the effort to create solutions, while deep sector and business process knowledge will become relatively more valuable. Internal IT organisations and technology consultants will need to excel at solving business challenges, not just developing software applications. And professionals in the business will increasingly become integral to solution development, not just application development.

Business sponsors increasingly expect faster turnaround for solutions, and with smaller technology teams. The high productivity of low-code platforms will enable such teams to deliver results that would have required larger teams in the past.

Luckily, low-code development opens up opportunities to explore more flexible—and effective—staffing models and will help usher in a new operating model for the technology function that is integrated into the businesses and products. Companies that make relatively small investments in training can draw from a larger pool of professionals who combine new low-code application development skills with expertise from various business functions such as human resources, supply chain, or finance.

***

Most organisations are on a journey to become digital. By democratising and accelerating application development, low-code approaches can help them move faster. Amid rapid change and high uncertainty, this is a benefit that should not be ignored.