(By Siva Perubotla)
The urgency around the digital transformation journey that organizations felt since late 2019 was real, but as the they continue to define their goal forward in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, this urgency now runs on steroids. Amidst lockdown, organisations are focused on transforming and introducing new applications to maintain and reach higher customer experience. The imperatives are to do more with less, work with existing resources, and respond to changing conditions with agility.
Operating with the agility and responsiveness that this contagion requires would be difficult if every emerging challenge is funneled through the technical staff or new applications need dedicated engineering resources. Low-code application development is poised to play a crucial role in recovery efforts of organizations. With enterprises across industries looking to connect to customers digitally, companies are urged to adopt these easy plugs and play platforms that enable developers as well as other employees to build complex applications quickly. It will extend the ability to create business applications beyond IT to people closest to the challenges—for example, marketing specialists and business analysts, thus enabling the rise of citizen developers. This will augment the speed at which a business can move and the number of people working on solutions can both increase considerably. As low code platforms are on the rise, developers are engaging in providing targeted apps without using traditional methods. With the current usage of tech in the year 2020, the developers using low code platforms are expected to reach more than 50% of the current rate. A recent Gartner report states that the number of active citizen developers at large enterprises will be at least four times the number of professional developers by 2023. That is a substantial growth!
Benefits of Low Code
At present, the platforms are gaining much traction in the current world & for a good reason, as this technology makes it easier on those with limited experience to build apps for both web and mobile. It is utilizing employees who sit within the company and have limited or non-existent programming skills. However, they do have the business acumen and an understanding of what their team needs to function efficiently. This translates to innovation.
Few other benefits of Low Code Deployment models to focus on:
- Development Speed – They are not only relevant for customer users but also to the professional power developers as well, it boosts the development process. Power users can build a complex application with multiple functionalities and automation practices.
- Improving IT productivity – Reduction on the dependency for native programming language and coders; thus, reducing the load on the IT dept of any company.
- Legacy Integration – With an increase in agility in developing the app, Low – code platforms are also accessible for integration in an older mainframe system. They create benefits such as faster development, more resilient solutions, and the ability to adapt to new requirements.
- The democratization of Software development – To accomplish the objectives, machine learning helps in assisting users by predicting the requirement and providing shortcuts. It grants users to access technical or business experience, such as data analysis, machine learning or app development due to a slimmer learning curve.
- Lower Maintenance Burden – Low-code development reduces the burden of software maintenance by abstracting the tedious testing work from day-to-day development. Since components are standardized, the pretested and ready-made have fewer bugs and integration issues to deal with than in the past.
Low code will undoubtedly be the new standard in 2020 and the years that follow. The upcoming low code platforms will leverage the power of AI to make the application development process more intuitive by providing recommendations. Organisations need to get away from legacy applications, which are difficult to understand and are prone to break down shortly; re-factoring it is using low code as an ideal solution. We are in a historic period of socio – economic disruption, and the future beckons – agile citizen developers.
(The author is the Associate Vice President, Digital Infrastructure, Brillio)
