RECOMMENDATIONS FOR LOW- AND NO-CODE
A low- and no-code approach needs to be closely linked to ongoing and projected business requirements. “Carefully think through your requirements,” said Shah. “Select the right platform that accounts for usability, scalability, data safety, and system integration. Invest in training for those using the new system because understanding its capabilities is vital. Encourage collaboration among team members throughout application creation.”
Collaboration between business users and IT departments is the key. “The challenge remains that solutions that meet an IT team’s needs with regard to flexibility and extensibility processes lack the usability that business users seek, and vice versa,” said Ladha. “Only through collaboration between business and IT, coupled with a thoughtful automation strategy and CoE, can organizations truly succeed in the long run. With that in place, we know for a fact that solutions can be accelerated, which could help mitigate talent shortages. In short, to accelerate automation initiatives, organizations find themselves needing to empower more people to work on them.
Strategies that help unlock domain expertise across the organization or can help reduce dependencies on a small team of skilled developers.”
In many ways, low- and no-code serves as a bridge between developers and business users. “Business users are experts on the business and their operations, in addition to having greater insight into the real needs of an application,” said Ross. “Instead of slowly ferrying feedback back and forth between developers and business users, bring business users in early so they can give input on ideas as they take shape before their eyes. Prototypes and in-progress builds give users something concrete to react to, accelerating the design process by ensuring fast feedback and allowing the development team to show value throughout the process rather than all at the end.”
This also means a transformation for IT departments and the way organizations view IT. Musa urged companies to “commit to transforming IT rather than replacing the current way IT organizations run. Think of low-/no-code as complementing the development talent, not replacing highly paid developers.” This also includes a need to “plan and design your application ecosystem,” she continued. “Commit to leveraging low- and no-code on projects that make sense for your use cases. There’s no universal formula, as every business is different, but establishing a project plan will allow you to adapt as your business needs evolve.”
Low- and no-code should also be part of a comprehensive automation strategy, said Bachenheimer. “If anything, IT departments typically have more repetitive work that can use the assistance of automation. A no-code automation solution should also take advantage of the best-advanced automation technologies—including robotic process automation, machine learning, artificial intelligence, etc. Such technologies can help mine processes for automation and pre-build some of the automation, saving on average 40% of the development time. They can also test automation, and monitor and help maintain the processes once they’re up and running.”
To move forward, IT leaders need to “embrace and support the low- and no-code tooling because it will decrease the dependency on your resources and gives you more focus on what really matters: security, governance, and stability of the digital landscape,” said Rappelet. “For business leaders, give the power to your teams to build applications with the tooling they prefer so they can improve their business service and day-to-day operations.”