Digitization increases the importance of ICTs, which go from being a support element to an actor of change and contribution of value. This leads to greater user involvement, a growing demand for new solutions and an increase in changes to existing applications. The changes fundamentally affect the interaction with customers and users but also with employees, and in many cases, it is necessary to modify traditional workflows for others that improve the user experience.
In this context, Low Code, and its brother No Code (LCNC), appear as facilitators both to meet the growing demand for solutions and to implement them. In other words, its application brings organizational and strategic benefits, as well as technical and operational ones. Taking this into account, it is worth asking what situation our organizations are in: do they have plans to exploit Low Code and obtain its benefits? have they perhaps done isolated proofs of concept (PoC) and now want to scale? At a global level, the growing trend seems clear. According to the “Global Low-Code Development Platform Market Outlook” study prepared by Expert Market Research, the LCAP market will grow at a CAGR of 25.26% from 2022 to 2027, exceeding 64 billion dollars in 2026.
On a technical level, Low Code platforms are a new tool that allows building solutions with greater productivity compared to the classic development cycle with programming. This alone will already be a clear benefit in many cases. But if we add to this that Low Code allows the same “expert users” (known as Citizen Developers), who previously only validated and at most described a problem, now build the solution; we see significant progress in the development and deployment of applications. Low Code increases user involvement throughout the process, the resulting solution is possibly more appropriate to the user experience and steps have been saved in the development process.
Low Code is also a catalyst in the adoption of complex functionalities such as AI/ML in composable designs, which are supported by SaaS solutions. Indeed, by not having the possibility of developing the logic in native mode, it forces you to look for that logic in some existing component; and this, if we think about it, is clearly a positive point in the medium and long term.
Low Code increases user involvement throughout the process, the resulting solution is possibly more appropriate to the user experience
On the other hand, Low Code can be seen as the result of the maturation of technologies that built business flows or forms (quite complex and difficult to use, by the way). As the new demand is largely calling for new workflows, we found in LCNC the right tool for the current need. Furthermore, Low Code is particularly good at interconnecting systems, creating workflows, and building interactive front-ends; precisely those that digitization is now demanding.
From the perspective of high productivity (Citizen Developer apart), Low Code is being applied in those solutions that require high efficiency in time and costs. In fact, there are already use cases of Low Code application to solve, in weeks, urgent problems. For example, projects to support vaccination against Covid or management of electrical recharging of batteries; that with other technologies would have required months.
In summary, Low Code is positioned as a key element for the digitization of organizations as it can be the difference between building the solution in a timely manner or getting stuck or delayed somewhere in between.
The acceleration of innovation brought about by Low Code is causing development platforms for this technology to proliferate in the market. Which of them to work with is not a minor issue, but neither is it the aspect that we must first decide on: it will always be more important to be clear about the challenge and the objectives in each organization, with its priorities and decision criteria, and with that information take into account each case the best decision.
For this reason, having a partner that has knowledge and experience in these platforms is crucial to success.
Considering everything we have mentioned, if we think of initiatives that we have not been able to complete successfully and imagine how it would have gone with Low Code, with prototypes validated in a few days, reusing components and applying new technologies such as AI, in the worst case we would have anticipated the problem and saved time and money. In the best case, I have no doubt that we would now have an adequate solution and we would already be embarking on new challenges.
So let’s incorporate Low Code into our capabilities, make it a strategic element in how we propose new ICT solutions that allow us to lead our businesses.
By Pere Escobar, Head of Digital Business Development at T-Systems Iberia
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism