Why low-code is key to digital modernization

Low-code application development is increasingly on IT’s radar as application development and delivery (AD&D) leaders and product teams, who are under pressure to support their organizations’ digital modernization initiatives, look for ways to get new applications into production faster. But low-code isn’t just about "time-to-market." It’s about the agility and innovation that a low-code development paradigm can deliver.

Low-code application development platforms provide a drag­-and-drop interface to allow programmers -- or even non-programmers with very little training -- to rapidly create applications, saving time during both development and testing. They are mostly offered as cloud native platforms.

Today’s low-code platforms support the creation of most of an application’s features and interface; however, depending on the use case, some additional small-scale coding may be necessary for specific requirements, such as connecting the applications to other enterprise systems and APIs.

Despite this, low-code application development platforms are very appealing to citizen developers and are increasingly being used by software developers and programmers for significant portions of their complex application development. This trend will continue.

According to Gartner, by 2020, at least 50 percent of all new business applications will be created with high-productivity toolsets, such as low-code and no-code application development platforms.

Low-code and digital modernization

Key part of digital modernization is about application modernization -- moving applications to the cloud, whether with pure-cloud applications or hybrid applications that connect cloud and legacy on-premises applications. Low-code development is being used for a variety of these applications, including process automation, database apps, mobile apps, web-based apps and general purpose apps -- for both back-office operations and customer and partner interaction.

Of these, perhaps the most exciting area is process automation, where organizations are creating end-to-end business workflows that connect multiple enterprise systems, including customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), human capital management (HCM), content management (CM) and many more.

Consider the following workflows, all rapidly implemented using a low-code application development platform that orchestrates processes within different silos:

• An insurer created a car accident claims process that allows drivers to submit an accident report, which automatically launches an approval process. The process includes contacting an agent, finding a repair facility and tracking the entire timeline. All delivered as a mobile app to the insurer.
• A mortgage provider created an end-to-end mortgage loan process that coordinates activities across multiple teams and systems, including approvals, real-time data editing, and automatic notifications. This could be for internal tracking of the process by the provider, or also in the form of a low-code developed workflow delivered embedded within provider portal
• A stakeholder created an automated order-to-cash process that lets sales reps start a provisioning process using a new mobile app. The process pulls information from a CRM such as Salesforce, initiates a confirmation text to the customer, and populates the customer information in an ERP such as NetSuite (with the help of a cloud-based integration service).

The benefits of low-code

If low-code application development simply enabled an incremental decrease in development time, it would be a useful advance but not an exciting story. But because low-code eliminates most writing of code, it has major significance for developers and the organizations they support. First, development is orders of magnitude faster, measured in hours and days instead of weeks and months, increasing productivity, providing a competitive edge, and, within many organizations, transforming the perception of IT from "bottleneck" to "hero."

Second, because low-code development platforms require far less experience and training, businesses can reduce their reliance on highly experienced and expensive software developers, who are often in short supply. At the same time, rapid development means that the experienced developers a company has on its staff can spend their time on much more creative and strategic endeavors.

Over the long-term, the greatest benefit of low-code development may be in the area of innovation. Low-code development can accelerate the time-to-failure, so bad ideas can be discarded before huge amounts of time and money have been invested. Even better, rapid prototyping gives organizations an opportunity to experiment with ideas that in the past would have been deemed too risky or expensive.

Low-code development can unlock creativity across organizations as any interesting idea can be quickly mapped, prototyped, and tested. Whether you’re considering a mobile app to complement your SaaS solution, trying to figure out how you can create a workflow between a cloud application to an on-premises system, or connect and orchestrate data between IoT sensors and devices, and their digital twins, the possible scenarios are simply unlimited.

The promise

Low-code development platforms will continue to evolve, becoming more sophisticated and incorporating enterprise features, such as increased scalability and security, as well as built-in support for advanced analytics and IoT sensor and edge devices. They will also become more developer-friendly by having advanced debugging capabilities, closing the gap that now exists between these platforms and today’s Integrated Developer Environments (IDEs). As these advances appear, the adoption of low-code by the entire developer community will skyrocket.

For digital modernization projects in general, the agility, innovation and time-to-value benefits of low-code development platforms are already beginning to disrupt traditional vendors. And in the near future, businesses that are racing to transform their infrastructures will begin testing these environments to see if they can replace, in whole or in part, their existing Java and .Net-based development environments and IDEs.

When the answer to this question is "yes" -- and as the low-code approach extends further into enterprises and research and academia -- one thing is certain. The disruption will be epic.

Manoj Gujarathi is a senior product manager at Dell Boomi.

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