When you’re in the market for a technology that will help your business run better, you’re likely to hear solution and platform vendors make pitches that focus on their current features and functionality, as well as capabilities they’ve got on their innovation road maps. Impressive as these things may be, they still may not deliver the outcomes you need. When evaluating your options, it’s best to define your needs, discover where opportunities exist, be brutally honest about where the challenges lie, and then gauge the available technologies against these requirements. This is the best approach to ensure the technology you invest in meets all your needs once your developers and users get their hands on it.
A low-code application development platform may not be the first thing you think of when you’re in the early stages of your research into technology options. But, if the priorities and concerns listed below appear on your list of issues to address, low-code may be exactly what you need.
- Speed to market is critical. You operate in a highly competitive market, so the faster you can stand up new applications to meet the business’s needs, the better.
- Your organization/market requires rapid change and agility. Nowadays, this is true for just about every business and market. Operating in this kind of environment may prove to be the new normal.
- Complex business processes must be automated. Allow your staff to focus their energies on activities that will add value to your business, rather than on tasks that can be handled more easily and efficiently by technology.
- Routing and approving paths are cumbersome. Getting the necessary approvals and input must be a clearly defined and seamlessly executed process to keep the business moving forward.
- You need to minimize coding errors, reduce security vulnerabilities, and/or increase data quality. Whether you feel that your current, more manual efforts to achieve these outcomes are holding you back, or if you’re lagging in these areas and therefore putting the business at risk, automation could be the solution.
- You need to increase your developers’ productivity. Rapidly changing business needs are putting pressure on your development team. You need a way to deliver applications faster to alleviate this pressure.
- You have bottlenecks slowing down your ability to make rapid and informed decisions. If your stakeholders don’t have the data necessary to make the most informed decisions possible, there could be significant, negative impact to the business.
- Multiple data sources must be integrated without migrating data. You have data stored in a variety of systems and formats, but it is all essential to running the business and should all be accessible from a single interface.
- Your organization operates in a regulated environment that requires strict compliance. You need compliance and governance built into your technology, so there are no surprises and no options for workarounds when strict adherence to guidelines is a must.
- Your IT department has a large amount of tech debt that needs to be reduced or eliminated. Tech debt tends to create more and more backlog the longer it’s left unchecked. But there are technologies available that actually reduce it, rather than add to it.
- Your IT team is wasting time on maintenance, which means there’s less time to innovate. Your technology needs to be fast, agile, and easy to maintain, while still delivering the power you need to run your complex processes.
A low-code platform satisfies these and many other requirements and challenges. By creating code in the background, according to the highest security and standards, low-code platforms take care of the (coding) details and automatically stay up to date with the latest technology. Low-code is:
- Fast: Development can be ten times faster than traditional approaches.
- Powerful: Complete automation enables applications to easily integrate into core business systems.
- Easy to maintain: Because the vendor keeps the platform up to date with the latest security and device standards, those updates are automatically passed on to the application built on the platform.
Find out if a low-code platform is right for you. The 2021 Ultimate Low-Code Buyer’s Guide can get you started.
