A Crash Course in Low-Code Software: What it is, What it Does, Why it Matters

By Karen Astley, Vice President Asia-Pacific, Appian

Karen Astley, Vice President Asia-Pacific, Appian

With old-school custom coding, speed to business value was limited. Low-code gives Asian businesses the capability to turn great ideas into business apps up to 20 times faster than banging out code. Which enables you to do everything from on-boarding customers faster and speeding time to revenue, quickly take advantage of fast-moving business opportunities, to giving employees access to the information they need, anytime, anywhere, on any device. It also allows you to streamline processes across multiple customer touch points in your organization, to create a consistent customer experience across web, social, mobile, and more.

By favoring visual composition over writing code, low-code breaks down barriers that hamper collaboration between business and IT. It allows businesses to open the door to anyone within the organization, within any department, who wants to take part in digital transformation.

Unleash Innovation across Your Organization

The alternative is to have a handful of people on your IT team do all of the innovation for your organization, which can result in a bottleneck, that ties them up from having time to work on overall organizational IT strategy.

The better approach is to adopt a low-code path that allows non-developers to design, build, and test new ideas with customers and stakeholders. This could have a huge impact on your organization.

Three Big Barriers to Operating at Digital Speed

Working at digital speed is incredibly difficult. It’s even harder when legacy systems, and a focus on custom apps, are holding you back, and can result in the following situations:

Extended App Development Cycles: Custom apps have emerged as key points of competitive differentiation for businesses. But traditional coding means long development cycles. All requirements must be known and locked down because coding is inflexible, and making changes at a later stage could mean costly delays. Writing large amounts of code with limited resources is hard and can leave you constantly playing catch-up to keep up with app demand.

If you want to stay on top in the age of digital transformation, low-code development is a necessity

Rigid App Architectures: The complexity of custom apps makes it difficult to alter them once they are finally completed. Small tweaks to the underlying code must be thoroughly tested and brought carefully into production. This limits operational flexibility as rigid app architectures are challenging to change.

Mobility Treated as an Afterthought: For many organizations, rebuilding traditional IT methodologies to get apps developed for different mobile operating systems and user interfaces has been an afterthought until recently. Which leaves businesses scrambling to transform operations around smartphone, tablet, and mobile users.

Low-code development eliminates these barriers by simplifying app architectures, creating solutions that work on traditional and mobile computing devices, and breaking down barriers between business and IT.

Low-code capability is unsurpassed at being hyper-responsive. From a business value standpoint, low-code offers fast, iterative delivery of business applications—which separates digital leaders from the rest of the pack.

Seven Warning Signs You Need Low-Code:

1. All those systems you installed five, ten, twenty years ago can’t keep up with ever-changing customer expectations. That makes it so much tougher to win new customers, let alone keep the ones you already have.

2. You need to capitalize on new business opportunities, but you can’t build apps fast enough to take advantage of them.

3. You urgently need top-notch software developers. But it’s getting increasingly difficult to find and retain them.

4. You call the shots on business operations, but you’re too busy tracking down data from every corner of your organization to step back and see the big picture. And your employees? They spend what seems like more time looking or finding than actually doing.

5. As a business process leader, your job is to deliver cohesive, mobile, omni-channel user experiences, but you worry about the fractured customer experiences created by your legacy systems.

6. You operate in a heavily regulated industry. And you’re struggling to stay on top of fast-changing, complex regulations. This constantly puts your compliance at risk.

7. Your IT organization is constantly slammed with business demand, meaning staff and resources are limited.

Staying on Top in the Digital Age

The agility of low-code platforms makes it extremely useful for Asian CIOs looking to inject agile development processes into their organizations. It’s a fast and easy way to expand and scale apps across your organization. And since they are governed by IT, apps built with low-code can instantly become a standard piece of your enterprise architecture.

Yesterday’s software was designed for the pre-digital economy and likely based on a single dominant idea—to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. The problem is, expectations are now rising faster than anyone ever imagined, and competitive advantage can evaporate in a flash. So, if you want to stay on top in the age of digital transformation, low-code development is a necessity.