Digitization critical: Driving the efficiency, productivity, and agility to proactively fulfil rapidly changing customer desires

In coming out of the pandemic, a key lesson that businesses have learned is the importance of accelerating their digitization efforts. Pre-Covid, a drive towards digital transformation was already well underway – but the pandemic’s effects have now brought the acceleration to digitization sharply into focus. Digitization provides businesses with the much-needed efficiency, productivity, and agility to fulfil changing customer desires. And as companies now face an uncertain economic environment, digitization is again becoming a primary avenue for responding to a challenging landscape.

Expanding digitization efforts also means developing more next-gen IT applications. Some experts estimate that the number of applications to be created in next five years may exceed those made over the past 30 years. In essence, the demand for professionals to create them is far more than the available supply.

The code for driving digitization: Why low-code platforms are high on the agendas of market leaders

To a large extent, low-code development provides a solution to this challenge – and will be one of most important levers in driving your digitization journey. Many leading research firms are reporting that low-code development is beginning to see a sharp rise in growth and that almost 25% of new applications are currently being developed using low-code platforms. Naturally, low code is high on the agenda for most leading CIOs – thanks to the many advantages that it brings in improving the digitization journey. These advantages include:

1. Increased speed to development and shorter time to market
2. A reduced need for highly skilled developers
3. Lower cost of development
4. Heightened developer productivity with more focus on core programming issues
5. Higher involvement of business users in development and testing processes
6. Less error-prone software development.

Many organizations across different industries are leveraging low code for their faster development needs. For example, omni channel and heightened user experience initiatives within banking or solutions for quicker online interactions within e-Commerce.

While low code can bring many benefits to your digitization journey, there are concerns amongst enterprises when it comes to scalability and security-associated risks. So understandably, enterprises are still wary about leveraging low-code applications for their critical business process.

A practical strategy for enabling digitization with low-code platforms

This is why it’s crucial to take a strategic approach to low-code adoption that maximizes its strengths while minimizing its limitations within your business. A practical approach for enterprises to embrace low code should include:

1. Crafting a structured governance model for application development using low-code platforms
2. Analyzing the right low code use cases for your business
3. Prioritizing low-complexity applications with faster deployment needs
4. Identifying opportunities for utilizing low-code development to either replace or extend existing solutions
5. Focusing on digital-channel-driven applications
6. Developing applications through a “fail-fast” approach with quick prototype development
7. Starting with fewer feature and functionality-driven applications
8. Targeting applications with lower business criticality in the initial phases of low-code platform use.

Once enterprises are further along their low-code development journeys, they can then venture into more critical and complex processes that are core to their businesses.

While the last (but not least) element would be choosing the right managed service provider (MSP) to engage with. Enterprises should seek out managed service providers that can serve as long-term business partners and help with application support needs for low-code applications development. Such applications need a flexible workforce with quick ramp-up requirements. Involving the right managed service provider as your development partner with long-term application support provides the greatest potential for successfully enabling your digitization journey with low-code platforms.

To learn more about what the right managed service provider can do for you, check out this article on Low-code/no-code platforms for MSPs’ in-house, external use from TechTarget,  which features my colleague David McIntire. He expands upon how he advises clients on the selection and implementation of low-code platforms to rationalize and modernize capabilities in engineering and customer care – along with enabling employees to become citizen developers who are capable of automating the manual processes within their own jobs.

Your digitization journey and Low code/no code with ADMnext

Through our Low code/no code with ADMnext offering, we help guide you on your digitization journey and transform your applications development to innovate faster, work smarter, improve operational efficiency and TCO, meet specific business goals in less time, and enhance collaboration between your business and IT.

Low code/no code with ADMnext enables your people grow as citizen developers and helps them to maximize the value realized by low-code platforms. Essentially, you’re able to build apps faster, better leverage existing platforms, and connect silos quicker – all while implementing security, governance, and data protection – and delivering the experiences users love.

To learn more about Low code/no code and ADMnext, visit us here. And to get the ball rolling on your digitization journey, drop me a line here.