Driven by the pandemic, demand for new business apps has never been higher. Successful firms are turning to low-code solutions to keep up, reports Emma Sheppard
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The simpler route to digital transformation
The bottom line is that businesses simply can’t afford to take that long. History is littered with businesses that took too long to adjust, from Blockbusters’ failure to see how movies by mail – and then by digital – would kill its value model, to Debenhams’ belated embrace of online retail.In other words, while most businesses moved quickly to transform during the Covid-19 crisis, inertia is not a viable option even during the recovery.
Time is of the essence
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Post lockdown, the return to the office hasn’t been as straightforward as many business leaders first predicted. After adapting to a world without commuting and hot desking, with lunches at home and meetings via video call, 77 per cent of the UK workforce say they would prefer a mix of office-based and remote working in the long term. Analysts from McKinsey & Company estimate that more than 20 per cent of the global workforce could work remotely three to five days a week as effectively as they could from an office.
The rise of hybrid working is the biggest change to the workday since the concept of nine-to-five went mainstream more than 100 years ago. Joined-up working is now one of the greatest challenges facing far-flung teams, with research by ServiceNow finding that 91 per cent of executives still have offline workflows including document approvals, security incident reports and technology support requests. And while employees appreciate the benefits of remote working, almost half (48 per cent) say they’re concerned about reduced collaboration between business units.
Developing new business apps can be a costly, complicated and time-intensive endeavour. Professional developers are in short supply, and often stuck in cycles of planning, designing, testing and deploying releases, so any new requests stay at the back of the queue for months or even years.
Low-code removes some of the barriers to building software, but it does not remove the need for good engineering and good engineers
Rather than apply “business as usual” methods to a new era, this is an opportunity for companies to rethink the status quo. “We often talk about technology as the main obstacle, but for me it’s leadership first and technology second,” says Ferrer. “Do you have the right vision and aspiration that employees will get behind? Then do you have the technology that brings people and departments together?”
By putting the right technology in the right hands at the right time, business leaders will enable employees to work more effectively together, to think more creatively and to solve problems faster.
NHS Scotland, for example, used integrated data and digital workflows to build a new vaccination management system in just six weeks, and then vaccinate 2.5 million of the nation’s highest risk citizens.
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As well as improving a company’s agility and speed to market, this approach can also empower the existing workforce. A survey by McKinsey found 87 per cent of businesses say they are either experiencing skills gaps now or expect them within a few years. Almost half (43 per cent) point to skills shortages in data analytics and one in four (26 per cent) say a lack of IT skills is a concern.
At the same time, younger, tech-savvy employees want to make a real contribution to innovation, Farquharson says. “They’re often expecting tools that allow them to build, create and contribute to a successful business. This is a way of nurturing and developing that talent.”
Non-technical staff can bring new insight to workflows compared to more expensive technical staff because they’re that much closer to the business area, says Ashish Kumar Jha, a professor from Trinity Business School. “These citizen developers can have a very good understanding of the business. So it works for cost saving, training the workforce, having quick ideas and putting them in front of the customer.”
There are also benefits for “conventional” technical staff. Research has found 56 per cent of IT professionals who know how to code still use no-code tools to build solutions faster. One ServiceNow customer, Academy Mortgage Corporation, used low-code development to create 40 apps to automate its finance and business processes. Three developers and 50 employees who have been trained on the platform have halved the amount of manual effort it takes to roll out new applications, which now happens in days rather than weeks.
At the other end of the scale, Desjardins Group in Quebec used ServiceNow’s low-code tools to consolidate 3,500 apps, which were running on expensive legacy systems, to a few hundred shared applications. Its developers now deliver applications three times faster than before and can leave simpler tasks to citizen developers while they focus on more complicated requests.
Increasingly, that timeline isn’t viable for organisations looking to compete in a climate of accelerating digital transformation. The International Data Corporation expects businesses to deploy 500 million software apps and services over the next two years. By 2023, it predicts more than half of all GDP worldwide will be driven by products and services from digitally transformed enterprises, while more than 50 per cent of all IT spending will go towards digital transformation and innovation. To keep up, more businesses are exploring low-code solutions.
It’s a shift that’s been accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, according to Stuart Farquharson, creator workflow solution sales manager at ServiceNow. “Changes had to be made faster on a lesser budget,” he says. “Low-code platforms provide the ability for people with non-technical skills and backgrounds to create workflow applications.”
Research backs up the need for change. Tech consulting firm Gartner predicts that in the next three years, 80 per cent of technology products and services will be built by people outside of IT, with low-code accounting for more than 65 per cent of all new applications by 2024. These new “citizen developers” can simply move icons and graphics around to visualise the process they want to automate, while the program automatically generates the underlying code. It’s an ideal approach for internal workflows, booking systems and dashboards, and for front-end tools, such as chatbots or customer portals.
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But Matthew Skelton, co-author of Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow, warns that businesses must still be mindful of software development principles, whatever platforms they use. “Organisations need to be able to adapt at speed, so if you can do some of that innovation while using a low-code platform, then that makes sense,” he says.
“But it’s still a software system. Software is fundamentally about encoding business decisions and that requires skill, understanding and empathy irrespective of the language in use. Low-code removes some of the barriers to building software, but it does not remove the need for good engineering and good engineers.
“We need to understand how these apps are actually working at scale, otherwise business processes will fall apart.”
Farquharson agrees the two must work in tandem. “This is about inclusion,” he says. “You’re not alienating the developer community – these people still remain hugely important. They can sanity check what’s being built, to make sure things flow and work properly. And as new applications are built, there will be an element of process control – what looks good, what works well, what workflows can be repeated to save time. That is all part of the learning journey.”
His advice to organisations is to start by focusing on one workflow before rolling out into other areas. “It’s important to have clear visibility on how you see that workflow working. Start small and grow big. If you put the right plans, access control and security measures in place, then this is a powerful tool to help the business flow and work even better. The sky’s the limit.”
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