Digitization is an important part of any modern enterprise. It helps in providing greater efficiency and cost savings. However, traditional software development approaches require significant technical expertise and come with serious costs, both in terms of development time and money. Not all businesses have the budget or the team required for full software development projects.
Thankfully, there is another option: no-code solutions. By using intuitive drag-and-drop tools, non-technical users can replicate complex databases quickly without writing a single line of code. With no-code solutions, businesses can increase their speed of digitization without having to invest heavily in resources.
In this article, we look at how no-code platforms can help amplify the speed of digitization for enterprises.
Why is Rapid Digitization Challenging?
For businesses to survive in today’s world, rapid digital transformation is no longer an option. Given the pace at which technology is changing, it is important to keep up with competitors on this front.
Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Businesses (especially legacy ones) often find the following walls in the path of digitization:
- The complexity involved in overhauling legacy code
- Costs of buying new software or hiring new teams
- Difficulty in integrating across multiple applications
- Finding scalable solutions
- Ensuring IT governance and security as the company transforms
- Lack of experience in managing
In the next section, we look at how no-code platforms help to address some of these problems.
How No-Code Helps To Accelerate Digitalization
COTS vs. Custom vs. Low Code
Often, rapid digitization needs businesses to change their current IT infrastructure and setup. Both hardware and software require a rapid and major overhaul. This is especially true for legacy businesses such as banks or financial institutions, which often work on outdated technology backends.
Implementing such a large-scale change becomes a COTS vs. custom debate: Should you buy an off-the-shelf solution or let the internal IT team do the job? Both options have pros and cons, but none fits perfectly. Off-the-shelf products are hard to modify and customize basis individual requirements. Building internally can be a long and arduous task. It also requires hiring and managing a big IT team.
No code app development offers a refreshingly different option. It lets you build on the existing infrastructure instead of destroying it to build anew. No code software can build a quick and easy-to-use modern interface layer connected with legacy architecture to give you the best of both worlds. It does so quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively as well.
Enabling Shadow IT
Shadow IT is often thought of as a bad thing. But it can be a force for good. Often, shadow IT is maligned for creating unauthorized, poorly designed, buggy applications that do not integrate well with the company’s other systems.
But when enabled with the right tools and framework, their input can be game-changing. No code apps enable such teams through easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interfaces. It builds a sandbox around their creations by using reusable modules of pre-programmed and tested code.
Moreover, it frees up the time of the internal IT teams as well. They can focus on larger transformation projects, while business users can build day-to-day small apps for their own use.
Integrating Legacy Applications
An important part of rapid digitization is to create single window interfaces that make work faster. In most cases, legacy applications are built in silos and can’t communicate with one another. But no code makes it very easy to bring them all together.
The library of API connectors that no code platforms use allows for quick integrations across multiple databases. This helps to build a simple but powerful unified view of business data and helps increase digitization across the firm.
Rapid Scalability
No code applications are simpler to build, test and deploy. Since the coding work is done at the back end, application developers do not have to spend time on mundane tasks. They can quickly build basic infrastructure and then scale it up as needed.
Moreover, testing is very easy because simple prototypes can be built on the fly. This significantly reduces the app development life cycle, which makes it very easy to scale quickly.
Again, no-code platforms are usually designed to build mobile-ready and cloud-native apps. They do not need to be customized for each user interface separately, making rapid rollout much easier.
Lower Costs
Nearly 10-20% of IT budgets end up servicing technical debt. These are losses created due to bad application design. In large part, it happens because coders are always being rushed to deliver business apps quickly.
It is easy to build mock-ups and demonstrate flow and design before releasing the final application with no code. Hence bad design becomes a thing of the past.
Improved UI/UX
No-code platforms are a boon to UX designers. They offer faster design, custom styling, easier prototyping, and multi-platform capabilities. No-code also allows for instant user feedback, enabling UI/UX professionals to make rapid changes and get real-time feedback in the process.
With no code tools, UX designers don’t need to learn to code and can focus solely on the aesthetic and logical aspects of their work. All of this helps to deliver faster and better UI/UX, which helps improve the pace of digitization.
Improved IT Governance
By bringing shadow IT into mainstream application development, no code helps to make governance stronger. Typically, shadow IT is a hard-to-tame beast because each team uses its own technology, user design, and protocols.
No code helps to bring everyone to the same standard and makes it easier for central IT to control application development. They can implement policies and organization-wide standards without cutting down the pace of development.
Conclusion
No-code applications are an easy choice for anyone who wants to transform their business through digitization quickly. They are cost-effective, fast, and versatile. These applications also help to retain custom logic built through decades of business expertise while updating it for a new avatar.