Prasanna Rajendran, Vice President – EMEA, Kissflow, explains how low-code design methods are accelerating application software development and thus lifting up both citizen and professional IT developers in this exclusive article.
Across the Middle East and Africa (MEA), governments and industries are busily equipping themselves for the digital future. IDC estimates that as much as 12% of business units’ budgets is being allocated to digital business initiatives as organisations work to create compelling experiences for the employees and customers that demand them. To counter the threat to competition, shareholder pressure, regulatory requirements, shadow IT and more, they must do so at speed and scale. And because the regional IT talent shortage is a reality impacting organisations across the spectrum, many are now turning to low-code and no-code development platforms to maximise their existing resources beyond the IT department
Low-code, high value
To understand this shift better, we spoke to CIOs in the enterprise and shared what we learned in our Citizen Development Trends report. We found that a majority (62%) of organisations around the world believe citizen development programs can accelerate digital transformation. At the time of surveying, 86% of respondents had citizen development programs in place, with almost half (45%) having been in operation for more than a year. In MEA, earlier Kissflow research showed that a third (33%) of organisations were trying to address resource constraints in custom app development and faced the prospect of having to turn to expensive third-party developers. Some 80% of regional tech leaders see the refinement of the software development process as vital for effective digital transformation.
To make citizen development programs work, business and IT teams must collaborate. This goes beyond just sharing updates—they have to work together as one team right from planning to execution. To bring shadow IT into the light, non-technical employees must find themselves in a permissive and supportive culture where IT is democratised, and upskilling is incentivised. Low-code brings this situation to reality by clearly highlighting the responsibilities and boundaries. All the business-oriented initiatives that technical staff find trivial can be handed over to business-trained employees to implement. Under the right governance, domain experts can skip requirements gathering and analysis and go straight to design. Since a lot of code is automatically generated, implementation times are reduced, and testing runs more smoothly.
Through low-code, software development becomes much faster, going from timescales in months or years to weeks or days. Business innovators no longer need to join a queue. They can start building under the ever-watchful eye of the platform, which corrects errors, enforces governance standards, and suggests areas for improvement. Employees and customers receive enhancements to their experiences more frequently, leading to increased satisfaction levels among both groups.
Bigger, better, faster
When it comes to the regional skills gap, organisations that adopt low code solve three problems at once. First, they acquire the skills they need more quickly. Second, they increase talent retention rates by meaningfully fleshing out the daily routines of tech-savvy employees. And third, they increase the success rate of digital transformation because requirements are no longer lost in translation during the use-case analysis stages.
Development backlogs are drastically reduced under low-code programs. When citizen developers are in play, bigger projects can still monopolise IT’s attention, but with small windows dedicated to code reviews of citizens’ work. Over time, reviews will become easier and faster, as signed-off solutions become reusable templates. Citizen developers will gradually build up libraries of these templates and create more ambitious applications as their experience grows.
Not overnight, but certainly quite quickly, the business becomes scalable. Low-code tools are adaptable, so citizen developers can use them to manage changing requirements and demands. And as the business reaches new levels of scalability it also becomes more agile. That is important in MEA markets, which are home to youthful, tech-savvy populations hungry for the next digital experience. As the citizen developer experience-pool fills, low-code platforms offer the right functions to take the citizen vision further, but they also help IT teams work on larger projects. Many built-in features and integrations allow seasoned software professionals to accelerate their work. So, a single investment in the right low-code platform can benefit both citizen developers and IT.
From A to Z
It is not often one can point at a digital investment that benefits IT, DevOps, finance, human resources, warehousing, logistics, R&D, and everything in between. From the straightforward building of a self-service HR application to the integration of AI for predictive analytics in fraud prevention, low-code no-code development has something for every stakeholder.
Image Credit: Kissflow
