By Suman Reddy, Managing Director and Country Head, Pega India
The future of work is constantly changing. Matching steps with this fast-evolving technology landscape is both challenging and expensive for companies as they must ensure their employees adjust to this new normal while remaining productive. Enterprises that have lagged in accepting this digital transformation have to catch up or risk falling behind their competitors because legacy technology creates bottlenecks that can impact customer experience, slow down business, and increase cybersecurity risks.
A fluid business-technology landscape calls for organisations to deploy a low-code platform to meet the evolving architectures and user expectations, while keeping costs under check. Low-code platforms allow enterprises to build code rapidly, get mobile apps up and running fast, and streamline processes. So, it isn’t surprising that Gartner’s forecast estimates that the worldwide low-code development technologies market will touch US$ 13.8 billion in 2021, an increase of 22.6 per cent from 2020.
Here are a few compelling reasons why every enterprise should consider having a low-code development capability.
- Bridging the app-talent gap
The demand for app development is outstripping what enterprise IT departments can supply. According to Gartner, by 2021, the app development market will outgrow its IT counterpart by at least five times. The fact that teams are short-staffed on professional programmers, is an additional challenge that needs addressing.
Low-code development platforms help to bridge this gap by giving non-programmers such as marketers, analysts, and corporates the ability to visually build app specifications, thus empowering ‘citizen developers’ to contribute to app development.
- Enhancing productivity and CX
With citizen developers entering the development process, enterprises can build an agile environment for collaboration. Business and IT can work together to rapidly build and deploy business processes, rules, and offers.
By enabling business stakeholders to provide requirements and feedback directly, an enterprise can empower its staff to take ownership of the maintenance and development of their own applications. This not only enhances productivity but also frees up skilled developers to focus on important work.
Leveraging no-code/low-code, Vodafone UK empowered its citizen developers, working collaboratively with IT resources, to create a guided assurance program for their broadband customer service group called Casper. Casper provides a structured process for service representatives to follow so they can better serve customers and provide the best resolution.
Within the first four weeks of rolling out the app, Vodafone UK noticed a 10 per cent reduction in average handling time for cases, a drop in first call resolution times by approximately five per cent, and an 18 per cent increase in their NPS score.
- Enabling Innovation
Low-code platforms allow companies to start small with perhaps just a web app, progressing to hybrid or even fully native apps as per the business needs. They can quickly build out MVPs (Minimum Viable Products), deploy them on the fly, learn and optimise, scale development cycles, and fuel unabated innovation.
With no need of writing complex code, business apps can be executed in more channels – mobile chatbots, web modules etc., providing greater flexibility by allowing enterprises to move easily between various cloud models such as hybrid or private.
- Fostering knowledge sharing
A low code platform gets every part of an enterprise to pitch in for the application development process. This is particularly useful for technology decision-makers and CIOs, as they can utilise the knowledge garnered to build better internal applications that fuel operational excellence.
Working on a low code platform, enables clarity in terms of the language, thus driving operational efficiencies internally and improving customer experience.
- Building an Agile Environment
Today’s business-technology leaders count an agile environment best to build apps iteratively and with constant collaboration and feedback. Low-code platforms act as a catalyst for an agile collaborative environment.
Low-code platforms also allow users to include their requirements directly into the app development environment. This ensures non-technical business users can get hands-on with projects and decreases reliance on developers and software engineers. Projects can then move forward in easily managed blocks rather than an all-or-nothing approach that can eventually cause delayed time to market.
6. Future-proof your innovation cycle
Low-code app development platforms with capabilities such as visual tools, process flows, and drag-and-drop objects democratise the app building process. These platforms help in not only overcoming the shortage of skilled developers but ensure the delivery of new and innovative app functionalities to disrupt the market. Organisations are gradually realising how Low-Code/No-Code can bolster their digital transformation journey. Many are already adopting this system to unlock a plethora of opportunities to succeed in a more agile and flexible environment. With these low-code benefits, organisations are better equipped to quickly adapt and respond to fast-changing business conditions. It is time to abandon expensive, ineffective, and slow, code-based development and deploy a low-code platform to transform your businesses for today and the future.