Organizations embark on digital transformations for many reasons: identify business opportunities, personalize customer experiences, streamline workflows and processes, adopt data-driven behaviors and explore emerging technologies. Typically, a digital transformation requires an organization to:
· Develop new applications, integrations, and digital capabilities
· Modernize applications for the cloud
· Optimize processes and automate workflows
· Build customer-facing mobile interfaces
To accomplish these tasks, agile teams must quickly deliver minimum viable applications and then improve them based on customer feedback. IT departments adopt microservices architectures, public cloud migrations, and DevOps automation, which is often difficult to manage given their existing backlogs and urgent requests from business users.
Understandably, traditional software development typically cannot keep up with the speed or the scale of digital transformation, and most organizations lack the staff and skills to build and support these initiatives. Low-code development practices and tools come into play to address those needs.
Low Code: The New MVP for Digital Transformation
Low-code generally aims to help practitioners -- application developers, engineers, data scientists, and system administrators -- improve their productivity and quality through tools and higher-level abstractions, compared with using traditional software development languages and tools. This could involve pre-existing containers which could be easily customized to build a data pipeline, mobile-user interface, workflow, integration, or reporting. Coding paradigms customize this experience, such as the ability to extend the platform using programming languages, or through proprietary scripting or meta-language capabilities that handle customization and configuration.
Some of the potential benefits low code would have on digital transformation include:
Speed to market- Low-code development offers several benefits, but perhaps most importantly, it brings an element of speed that organizations today desperately need to succeed at the new pace of business. This is important because there is a new requirement for businesses to be able to "meet the moment". Given the business uncertainty compounded by the raging pandemic, organizations do not have the luxury of long development cycles or heavy involvement from IT.
Understandably, organizations need a more agile solution, something they can utilize to quickly solve a problem and get it into the hands of users before the window of opportunity has closed. That’s where low code helps, by giving your organization the ability to leverage your partner’s intuitive tools to create new applications that solve business problems as they emerge. The effective use of low-code technology allows organizations to circumvent lengthy development cycles and rigid legacy systems to rapidly stand up new business applications that meet immediate business needs.
Iterate with agility – The principles of agile methodology are absolutely critical to any digital transformation success. Low-code fosters rapid development and abstracts many technical details; agile teams can demo improvements to stakeholders at sprint reviews and more quickly deliver a viable product faster. Moreover, development teams can prototype experiences in low-code platforms and spend less time developing wireframes and complex designs. End users that see a quick prototype are more likely to provide feedback on what they really want, which leads to more detailed requirements.
Develop with guardrails- Application development is more than just coding; it's the implementation of practices to ensure the reliability, performance, and security of the experience. Low-code development and associated tools abstract away some of this complexity, but only up to the point where developers embed custom code in the application.
Support and enhance without code's complexities. It's a challenge to maintain and modernize applications, especially when you have to deal with complex, undocumented code. It's often easier to understand the business logic, workflows, and data transformations through a low-code tool rather than sifting through thousands of lines of code.
Enhance Innovation capabilities- Digital transformation emphasizes improving the customer’s journey with the brand. This entails making applications and solutions available to them that enhance their interactions at every touchpoint. Low-code tools would enable users to build and roll out apps as minimum viable products, and scale them up as requirements grow. They can see how these apps perform, optimize them, and then deploy them on a larger scale. Hence, low-code fosters an environment for continuous development and innovation, enhancing the digital transformation success for an organization.
Cost-effective implementation- Lastly, low-code allow enterprises to save on the cost that traditional development of applications would have incurred. This is because they eliminate the need to employ skilled resources for app development, while also speeding up the entire process. You can also easily scale the app as requirements emerge, thus eliminating the need to build it to full capacity right from the beginning. This reduces development costs drastically, making low-code a cost-effective solution for building the applications needed to drive your business's digital transformation.
BlastAsia: The Low-Code Approach to Building Custom Software
Low code has a number of benefits that would significantly enhance digital transformation success. A report by Gartner[1] suggests that ‘digital transformation can only succeed when employees are digitally dexterous’. For most organizations, grappling with the compounding business uncertainty, staying afloat and survival would become critical rather than dedicating resources in building capabilities that further low-code development. This is where co-creating digital solutions with a strategic partner, who has expertise in dealing with low-code development, becomes relevant. Organizations thus, in order to ensure digital transformation success, are looking to build these low-code capabilities in-house (if they have the resources) or outsource them to a strategic co-creation partner who could work closely with the IT in the organization to fast-track their digital transformation success.
Organizations frequently encounter a variety of evolving business needs that could be fulfilled using technology. Consider for example an internal group that serves customers who want a mobile application, ideally inexpensively developed and supported. The impact of low code on development initiatives like these could be immense- with a shorter time to market and being easy on the pocket for the business unit. Other examples might be more strategic in nature, such as applications connected to ERP, CRM, HR, and IT systems to eliminate the need to enter data in multiple systems.
A strategic outsourcing partner like BlastAsia, with its repository of low-code containers, could help build custom applications at least 40% faster than what it might usually take any other outsourcing partner or internal development team. The various engagement models – the Dedicated developer model (focused towards ISV’s or startups) or the Packaged service model (for enterprises undergoing digital transformation) can ensure that your unique business requirements would be met
To learn more about how BlastAsia’s low-code portfolio could help build custom software to enhance your digital transformation success, connect with one of our customer success consultants here and take your first step in building a digital enterprise.
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[1] https://emtemp.gcom.cloud/ngw/globalassets/en/marketing-communications/documents/aligning-employees-with-digital-business-transformation.pdf