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Low-code is now essential for businesses wanting to keep pace with competitors. Market disruption and increased customer expectations call for businesses to respond quickly or risk getting left behind. When you consider that organizations face increased pressure on IT resources and stagnant IT budgets it’s no surprise that low-code is growing in popularity.
Adopting a low-code platform allows organizations to build, test and deploy enterprise applications faster, along with a host of other benefits. In this article we will explore seven benefits in more detail.
The biggest benefit of bringing low-code into a business is speed. It’s the ability to move digital transformation projects along faster. There are numerous reasons why low-code is a faster approach, many of them are discussed below.
For a start, visual development (i.e. development driven around a model/process diagram) is much faster than building requirements documents and then creating code that supports each of those requirements. Importantly, low-code platforms bring out-of-the-box integrations and testing tools that accelerate the speed at which organizations can bring new applications and features to market. Independent fund administration firm, Stone Coast, deployed their first application in just 6 weeks.
Low-code platforms enable you to get more of your existing staff involved in projects to digitize and modernize operations. Enabling business users (a.k.a citizen developers) to develop applications with much less support from IT significantly boosts productivity. Along with mission-critical applications, this approach allows teams to take on projects that might be considered too low priority for IT resources to be dedicated to them at that time. IT teams are simply too busy, and a lot of business transformation opportunities are not acted on.
Printer manufacturer Kyocera used Bizagi’s low-code platform to create a process application to automate their previously paper-based Special Pricing Approval (SPA) process and reduced the average process time from 10 days to just 1.5 days.
Additionally, IT departments benefit by reducing the number of projects they need to manage, enabling them to decrease their backlog and concentrate on the most critical ones instead.
Visual, intuitive features like drag-and-drop interfaces and one-click deployment make low-code platforms easy to learn regardless of users’ technical knowledge. That doesn’t mean that there is no learning curve, but by being easy enough to learn, low-code tools allow a more collaborative approach to app development between business and IT.
For IT teams using a low-code platform, ease of use is one of the key things that enables faster development. It’s a great way for IT to get more done without hiring more developers.
But importantly low-code enables the business experts who really know the processes best to be more closely involved and provide continuous feedback. This minimizes reworking and ensures that the end result meets the business requirements.
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The speed at which applications can be deployed using low-code enables organizations to develop and update applications quickly. This capability is crucial for responding quickly to market developments and changing customer needs, ensuring that businesses remain responsive and competitive. Driven by the shift to remote working, UK insurer SCOR, deployed an application to automate the handling of their claims assessment process in just 6 weeks.
In addition, low-code platforms also bring the ability to change your applications much faster. New step in the business process? Or need to take a step out to boost efficiency? These changes and more can be easily updated in a model-driven application, often with little to no support from IT. This removes the significant delays that often take place when a need for change is established, but that work needs to be added to an IT backlog. The impact of the ability to make changes is that you boost the capability for continuous improvement and the efficiency that brings.
Enabling business users to build with low-code on an approved platform reduces the number of unauthorized solutions created (shadow IT). This approach ensures that all business applications meet quality and performance standards and adhere to the organization's security and compliance requirements. This is crucial to making sure that applications are running without interruption and protects the business from security threats, and more headaches that the IT team doesn’t need.
The reason that low-code platforms ensure best practices is that many elements of good application development are baked right into the way the platform works. These are often the kind of principles that it would be impossible or incredibly time-consuming to any non-developer as it simply isn’t their background or education.
Organizations right now are often sitting on a mountain of technical debt. Whether its outdated code, legacy applications or heavily customized software, these all create headaches and a barrier to transformation. What the IT team certainly doesn’t need is any more technical debt.
Low-code technology can be used to modernize and replace a lot of the legacy systems that create this technical debt. But importantly, low-code platforms are designed with re-usability in mind so that they do not end up contributing to technical debt as time goes on. Low-code platforms offer a library of pre-built, reusable components that guarantee consistent quality and functionality across applications. This composability reduces the chance of ad-hoc coding, minimizing mistakes and inconsistencies that can require rework. Integrating other business systems is also made simple with low-code, ensuring technologies used across the organization are kept up to date.
Low-code platforms cut costs in three ways: 1. Enabling citizen developers without prior coding experience to build solutions negates the need to hire costly developers reducing labor costs. 2. Using low-code to extend or replace legacy systems reduces the associated licensing and maintenance costs. 3. Speeding up development cycles lowers overall project costs and the decrease in time-to-market sees businesses realize cost savings associated with the implementation of new technology faster.
Looking for a low-code platform that will equip you with everything you need to deliver on all of the above benefits? Check out our guide to choosing the one for you.
