The low code application development market will grow to $125 billion by 2027. But even today, many organizations are still grappling with how best to use low code application development.
What do you need to make low code successful for your business? In this blog, we look at some of the key things that organizations should know before starting with a low code strategy.
Identify The Right Use Cases
Businesses are complex by nature. As a business grows, the processes tend to evolve around the complexities and specific use cases it faces daily.
Automating many of these processes requires complex solutions and logic, an area where low code does not fit.
Low code is perfect for building:
- Brilliant customer interfaces, especially those that are cloud-native and mobile-first.
- Modernizing legacy applications
- Data analysis, integration, modeling, and visualization
- Project and workflow management applications
- Supply chain management applications
But low code may not be the right solution to automate complex logic requiring several exceptions, open ends, and loosely defined logic that can vary in different contexts.
For example, if you host several one-time events at a media company, each event might have a different set of people involved, different roles, and different processes. You cannot automate such things through a low code solution.
Anything that requires deep consultation and bargaining between stakeholders is also not a good fit for low code-based applications.
Understand That All Low Code Solutions Are Not Meant For Everyone
Low code has become a catch-all term for various platforms that have come up in the last 10-15 years. But not all the low code is the same.
Some application-specific low-code platforms such as Appian or SAP work perfectly for a particular industry or problem set.
On the other hand, full stack low code platforms can create complex applications in almost any industry or function, such as Outsystems, Mendix, and Vahana.
Industry-specific low-code platforms have evolved out of a specific need and may be so advanced that you don’t need any coding to customize them.
Such platforms usually involve many more citizen developers who you need to train to create tools that business needs.
Full stack low code applications are usually richer and can solve larger problems but often require coding and trained IT personnel to work with them.
These platforms have evolved to create tools for a wide variety of business problems and are equally complex. To understand and use the applications, you need a basic understanding of software development.
Focus on The Business Impact Rather Than Building Tech Expertise
Developers often consider low code as “basic” or “simple” tools meant to solve easier problems that even a citizen developer can make.
That is why convincing your IT team to use a low-code solution will be an uphill task. However, that’s not what low code is all about anyway. Low code works in areas like:
- Speeding up application development, reducing technical debt
- Eliminating the need for training and maintaining a huge IT team
- Helping to build world-class user interfaces that enhance your user experience
- Bringing data from multiple tools on a common platform, improving data analytics
- Modernizing legacy applications, letting you match up to agile, younger competitors
- Automating workflows, improving productivity
The low-code philosophy is not about solving complex problems. It’s not about putting together a star team of coders who can crack any problem in the world.
Low code is about creating real business impact that helps improve processes and quick gains from low-hanging fruits.
Internal Core Team Should Be Low Code Champions
It’s not enough to convince IT teams and citizen developers to start using low code. If you leave it there, nothing will come out of it.
The internal core team that drives low code strategy must champion low code. The core team needs to be vocal about the benefits of low code, champion new applications that use low code and drive user acceptance.
The core team also needs to track progress on each low code application regularly. For those applications that are already running, the core team needs to get its business impact measured. By measuring and talking about the business impact of low code applications already running, the core team can create excitement around its usage and create a ripple effect causing more and more teams to demand low code applications for themselves.
Wrap Up
Low code is not a panacea for every application development problem. It is a faster, more agile, business-oriented way of creating tools that help enhance your bottom line. So embrace low code, but make sure that your organization is ready for it.
Build a core team that champions low code, help others understand business benefits, and make sure you use it for the right use cases.
