Digital transformation is delivering dramatic results to businesses in all industries. Your company, too, can embrace it to achieve dramatically increased efficiency, new capabilities, and rapid growth in your customer base and profit margins.
Prioritizing digital transformation is not just a great idea—it’s fast becoming a business imperative, because your competitors are likely adopting these new technologies to become more responsive and cost-efficient, and start-ups are using them to disrupt your industry.
Low code software development doesn’t mean you’re looking for ways to replace your experienced developers. Instead, it enables professional coders to do their jobs more quickly and efficiently, so that your business can respond to changing market conditions more effectively.
According to a study on development trends by MarketsandMarkets, the low-code development market size is expected to grow from USD 13.2 billion in 2020 to USD 45.5 billion by 2025, at a compound annual growth rate of 28.1 percent during the forecast period.
However, companies often have misconceptions about low-code methodology and what it can do for them. Here are some of the most common myths about low-code development.
Myth 1: Low-code is for “citizen developers."
Listen to the buzz about low-code platforms and you might get the idea that the latest low code tools will enable your business analysts to become “citizen developers,” building applications that exactly fit your needs. In this scenario, you can drive digital transformation without having to wait for scarce expert development resources. Unfortunately, this just isn’t true.
Sure, some low code platforms enable business users to build simple applications. But the applications that support digital transformation are not simple. Additionally, many applications are being used for business process management (BPM), in hopes of streamlining operations and building more effective processes. These are high-visibility, enterprise-wide and enterprise-grade applications that need to be built rapidly and integrated with the enterprise information systems—by expert developers.
That said, a good low-code platform can provide capabilities that help business experts and developers collaborate on BPM application requirements and interfaces, so that together they can build an application that meets all the business’ needs for functionality and usability. They also allow developers to use their own tooling to code and test when they extend the platform.
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Myth 2: Low-code is only for simple BPM applications.
This myth is partly true, because you can indeed use low-code platforms to build simple business process management applications. But you can do so much more than that.
Low-code platforms are also ideal for highly scalable applications that support complex logic—the kind of custom applications that support digital transformation of your business.
You’ll need a team with excellent coding skills to do it, but by the end of the project they’ll be telling you how the low-code platforms made it easy for them to build robust, unique, and intricate applications more quickly than conventional development tools.
For example:
- BBVA—a multinational banking group—used a low-code application platform to integrate their IT systems through more than 40 applications.
- The University of Sydney developed a high-availability solution—used by more than 10,000 people simultaneously—on a low-code platform.
Myth 3: Low-code development means no collaboration or reusability.
This myth started because a low-code platform enables various technical teams across the enterprise to start building their own BPM solutions independently. This allows scattered teams to start being productive sooner, but raises concerns about efficiency and collaboration. Ultimately, each team will need to connect to existing corporate systems, and without collaboration or reuse, each team would need to develop its own extension to do this.
But low-code platforms can support efficiency through reusable components and collaboration. For example, with a completely modular low-code architecture, a developer can write a connector to integrate an internal CRM solution and easily share it with all other teams through a version control system.
Myth 4: Low-code means no programming.
Low-code platforms offer visual development tooling so business experts and developers can collaborate and rapidly design applications that meet the business’ needs.
Drag-and-drop capabilities and templates cover common use cases, accelerating development and freeing the technical team to focus on the customization that makes their applications unique.
This no-programming interface is so appealing—and so powerful—that some people think that’s all there is to a low-code platform.
But that’s just the start. Low-code platforms let you go beyond their visual design capabilities, so you can easily extend any part of an application you build with them. The best of them will let you seamlessly mix pages designed with a UI builder with pages you build using custom code.
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There is more than one way to look at what “low code” is about. Focusing only on how low code solutions are useful to “citizen developers” is too narrow, leading to misunderstandings and myths on what low code can do for automation projects and application development in general, by professional developers and the technical team. Low code solutions for developers allows them to create, support and continuously improve business applications and give them flexibility to code or not, as they prefer or as needed. Low code tools for developers can even allow them to create templates and other tools specific to their business needs that are, in turn, even more useful customized low code tools for the non-developers on the project team.
3 ways to learn more:
- Build highly personalized, process-based applications today, for free, with our open source Bonita Community Edition
- See how you can reinvent your BPM with Bonita Platform Demos.
- Interested in full project lifecycle support and services from development to operations? Try unlocking the power of Bonita Subscription Edition. Contact us to learn more
Digital Transformation Starts with Powerful Business Process Automation
