How do you adjust quickly to the post-pandemic world? Digital transformation plays a role, but the rush to build, test and deploy new business systems has put enormous pressure on IT and DevOps teams.
Instead, many businesses are turning to low-code tools to widen the pool of available developer resources. By doing so, they hope to increase automation, streamline processes, and build apps that better serve customers whose online behavior has changed dramatically over the past 18 months.
But for all the potential benefits, many myths still surround the low-code revolution. In this article we look at four such misunderstandings – and one important fact for your business.
Myth 1: Low-Code Tools Create Technical Debt
Cautious CIOs worry that an explosion in citizen developers will lead to chaos. How does the business monitor, manage and integrate dozens of micro-apps built using low-code platforms?
There are ways to retain control, while taking advantage of the flexibility of the low-code model. Robust API management, for example, ensures that data is persistent in source applications, while also offering consistent business processes to stakeholders. Taken to its logical conclusion, this approach can help break down data silos and therefore make it simpler for IT to oversee the growth in apps without blocking business results.
Myth 2: You Can Replace DevOps With Citizen Developers
Not so. Low-code offers a spectrum of business outcomes that range from building a simple app to enterprise scale solutions that require integration with other business systems. The expertise of a professional developer is indispensable in extending low-code capabilities to create more complex and novel solutions.
Another important consequence is that low-code frees developers from more tedious activities such as data entry or reporting by making it simple to create dashboards for these activities. Instead, they can focus on innovation and solving business problems.
The phrase “citizen developer” is also overused, and sometimes unhelpful. While they may not code in the true sense of the term, such employees include financial professionals with advanced spreadsheet skills, project managers using workflow tools, and marketers who use automated platforms to run campaigns. All of these roles and more will feel at home with low-code development interfaces.
Myth 3: Low-Code is the Enemy of Collaboration
Following the pandemic, most organizations have changed their guidelines for remote working. Many employees are taking advantage of new rules to spend more time in their home office. How do you maintain a culture of collaboration and ensure that people feel engaged when the workplace is so fragmented?
Far from increasing isolation, low-code is a highly collaborative method that brings people together. It delivers the excitement of software development to a wider employee audience, while making them co-reliant on their teammates, including those in IT. When non-technical people are part of the process, they accelerate projects by bringing operational know-how to the team. In fact, low-code unites people from diverse areas of the business and encourages them to work towards a common goal.
Myth 4: Low-Code Tools Prevent Customization
Flexibility is everything. While drag-and-drop methods can deliver quick wins, there are always business problems that are best solved with code.
The best low-code platforms, including Boomi Flow, offer an API-driven custom component feature and other resources including macros, libraries, and scripting options. This gives developers the ability to code their own custom UI and other components, and add those to a workflow that was otherwise built with low-code drag-and-drop techniques.
Fact: Low-Code is the Key to Unlocking Digital Transformation
While cloud computing and agile methodologies are key to digital transformation projects, low-code is the fuel that powers these undertakings and reduces the time and budget associated with traditional development.
This matters more than ever at a time where organizations must respond at speed to social and commercial landscapes transformed by the coronavirus pandemic. Examples include overhauling systems such as company onboarding, order provisioning, and field services (including site survey or customer service cases) without the need for major hardware and software upgrades.
Low-code is also ideally suited to customer-facing applications – offering a better user experience without compromising security or needing to update large legacy systems immediately.
As more and more activities go online, from healthcare to retail and entertainment, low-code is the key that unlocks the door to customers by offering fresh, digital experiences that stand out from the competition.
To find out more about how low-code can work for your business, try Boomi’s low-code integration tool, Flow!