How Low-Code/No-Code Platforms Can Transform Your Business
The oncoming wave of low-code also suggests broader participation throughout the enterprise, as low-code opens the aperture to personas that go well beyond IT.
Low-code platforms are often evaluated based on their capacity to increase speed and efficiency in the development cycle. But there’s a more compelling case for low-code, says Ananth Avva, President and COO at Pipefy, as he explains how it helps teams improve UX while strengthening IT and business team alignment.
Low-code application development looms large in the imagination of anyone focused on the future of business. And with good reason: Gartner expects that by 2025, 70% of new applications developed by enterprises will use low-code or no-code technologies.
More than Efficiency and Speed
The prominence of low-code development is evident in projections regarding market growth. By one estimate, worldwide revenue for low-code platforms will almost quadruple between 2020 and 2025, from 12.85B to 47.31B USD. Judging from this prediction, the appetite for low-code capabilities is growing by leaps and bounds.
Numbers like these have caught the attention of business leaders and managers who want to stay ahead of the competitive curve. What leaders may be missing is precisely how low-code will transform their businesses. Let’s consider two areas of critical impact for low-code: user experience and business-IT alignment.
See more: How Low Code Platforms Can Bolster Machine Learning Projects
Low-code Helps Deliver Better UX
User experience plays a pivotal role in business strategy, and that’s true of UX for customers, employees, vendors, and other stakeholders. UX impacts a wide range of KPIs, including customer satisfaction, employee engagement, turnover rate, and response times.
Low-code platforms already play a leading role in UX optimization, and they will likely get even more screen time in the very near future. That’s due to three low-code capabilities that are especially helpful for improving UX:
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- Creating unity out of fragmentation in the existing tech stack.
- Standardizing and automating processes not currently managed by ERPs, iPaaS, RPA, or vertical apps.
- Empowering business users to use their expertise to solve problems.
Unifying fragmentation
One of the ways low-code tools optimize UX is by integrating with existing tech stack components and connecting the dots between them. Even when an iPaaS platform is present, there may be slippage between databases or other components of the existing stack and disconnects that can’t be resolved through data integration alone. Low-code mitigates this fragmentation by providing a remedy for the fractures that emerge when new apps are added, or existing apps are updated.
For example, a business team may find a gap in a process where new business requests arrive through multiple channels or with incomplete information. As a result, users may lack status visibility for their items or have to dedicate time revisiting items to correct or collect incomplete information. Low-code tools can provide secure workflow automation that standardizes business requests and automatically routes them to the appropriate reviewer.
Automating the un-automatable
The second way low-code improves UX is by addressing the inevitable long-tail processes that are too often the Achilles heel for businesses. Long-tail processes are the unique or newly discovered processes that fall outside the core of the business and therefore aren’t managed with the components of the current tech stack. Low-code provides a path to the process standardization necessary for automation and orchestration.
For instance, think of the supporting workflows and subprocesses that teams handle manually with email and spreadsheets often related to core business processes and systems (like ERP or vertical solutions). Low-code gives those users an avenue to quickly create apps, automations, integrations, and forms that reduce their workload, improve accuracy, and integrate these processes into the overall process system.
Empowering experts
The third and most crucial way low-code creates a better UX is also the most straightforward: it allows business teams and other non-technical users to solve the problems they encounter in their day-to-day work.
This is important because it means that issues with processes and workflows are being addressed by the people who know them best. Even when IT teams are well-advised on the requirements for a solution, business units may not get exactly what they need. Low-code collapses the distance between the problem and the expertise required to solve it once and for all.
Low-code Improves IT-business Alignment
Low-code helps businesses improve UX for various stakeholders, but its impact on IT and business team alignment is no less profound. Low-code changes the dynamics of this relationship by putting business teams in a co-creative role in which they can develop and deploy solutions in an IT-approved environment. Think of the emerging citizen developer movement, in which low-code tools play a pivotal role in creating and modifying new apps, workflows, and automations.
1. Casting light on shadow IT
This new equation empowers business teams while freeing developers to focus on other priorities, such as safeguarding security or coding solutions for which there isn’t a low-code alternative. This synergistic relationship casts sunlight on shadow IT by creating low-code alternatives that work as well (or better than) their unsanctioned counterparts. Like shadow IT, low-code allows business teams to solve their problems quickly, but with IT guardrails in place.
2. Standardizing processes
Process standardization is an essential component of UX optimization, but it also benefits IT teams. Consistency among processes and workflows creates stability and predictability, which make life much easier for IT teams. When departments, teams, or locations develop unique or disparate processes, IT has a more challenging time enforcing security and compliance requirements. Standardized processes reduce errors and eliminate surprises, both of which will make IT teams happy.
3. Shifting from project to product models
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of low-code for IT teams. Not only does low-code provide another tool for managing the growing shortage of developers, but it also moves development away from a project model and towards a product model. In other words, low-code shifts some development work to business users who now have the tools to take an agile, iterative approach to building and deploying their solutions.
Within this framework, business teams can adapt processes to customer feedback, competitor activity, or internal requirements in real-time, while IT teams are free to apply their skills to priorities that require a conventional project delivery framework.
See more: 5 Trends That Will Take Low Code Platforms to the Next Level in 2021
The Next Low-code Horizon
If predictions about the low-code market are accurate and current adoption trends continue, businesses should expect a surge in low-code development in the coming years. This includes many types of low-code use cases that range from application development to UX optimization and process automation. The oncoming wave of low-code also suggests broader participation throughout the enterprise, as low-code opens the aperture to personas that go well beyond IT.
And while increases in speed and efficiency are essential benefits of low-code development, it’s equally important to keep focused on low-code’s potential to optimize experiences across the board and generate closer alignment between business units and IT teams.
How do you see low-code/no-code transforming business functioning? Tell us on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. We’d love to know what you think!
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