Low-Code Platforms: The X Factor to Boost Your Digital Transformation Journey
By Expeed Software
Digital transformation has emerged as a real game-changer in the realm of technology and corporate markets. Urging businesses to adapt innovative technologies, thereby bidding bye to legacy systems, it has emerged as a transformative force in the face of information technology. While adopting digital transformation techniques greatly benefits businesses, stakeholders sometimes encounter a multitude of challenges. One of the major challenges is managing workforces.
Transforming your core functionalities from a traditional scenario to a digitally enhanced one requires a larger workforce and a higher level of expertise. This can often result in financial challenges for businesses. The importance of low-code platforms emerges at this point.
What is digital transformation?
Unimaginable speed propels the world towards a digital future. This is yet another reason why businesses must adapt to digital transformation techniques within their structure to withstand the market and anticipate future trends. What exactly is digital transformation? It is more than just digitally integrating a company’s core functions into a digitally powered environment.
Digital transformation strategies comprise required actions to digitize all levels of your company’s functions and not just the core functionalities. This leads to a significant transformation of your business strategies, enabling them to adapt to the modern market and outperform your competitors through enhanced performance efficiency.
The Need for Digital Transformation
The need for digital transformation has surged due to the significant changes in data consumption and usage in recent times. As the world is getting more digitally aware day by day, it is essential for businesses to consider switching to a digital nature when it comes to overall functioning. Implementing innovative technology and focusing on the latest trends will help an organization to constantly stay ahead of the curve. This not only entails providing your customers with what they desire, but also enhances the overall security of your organization, protecting both your internal and customer data. Not to mention, digital transformation can benefit an organization by enabling them to market their products and services online, thereby reaching out to a vast customer pool worldwide.
One of the primary reasons for an organization to transition to digital transformation is the potential for service enhancements. The better service you provide, the better chance you have to thrive in the industry. This will directly impact your overall income, leading to a higher return on investment. Digital transformation enables the effective integration of business functionalities and IT teams. This will free up time for your skilled developers to concentrate on coding tasks that require a human touch. Apart from this, low-code application development is a fantastic way to make your digital transformation process smooth.
How Low Code Accelerates Digital Transformation
Low-code platforms effectively fill in the ‘skill gap’ that arises during the digital transformation process within an organization. This inadvertently leads to a significant expenditure on technical skills, necessitating the hiring of a larger workforce to meet the required skill sets. This, in turn, prompts businesses to reconsider their decision to adopt digital transformation, thereby incurring additional expenses. This is where low-code platforms come into the picture.
Low-code platforms simplify development, enabling resources with minimal skill sets to tackle complex projects. However, recent surveys suggest that while companies understand the strategic value of utilizing low-code platforms, they are still hesitant to implement them. Forrester Research predicts that the low-code market will reach a value of $80 billion by 2028. This furthermore underlines the importance as well as the profitability linked with the technology.
The Significance of Low-Code Platforms
Low-code platforms come with multiple benefits that predominantly urge companies to adopt digital transformation. Here are a few perks of low-code platforms that boost a hassle-free development process:
Reduced Development Costs: Organizations using low-code can save as much as 90 percent in application development and maintenance. Low-code tools can also reduce the overall cost of building, supporting, and owning apps by 10—40 percent.
Empowering Developers: Low-code platforms empower businesses or developers to quickly develop applications of varied complexities, demanding less to no use of skilled developers—the costlier and often scarcest resources.
Increased Productivity: According to Gartner, over 50 percent of medium to large enterprises are using low-code application platforms to improve operational efficiency and increase productivity. According to a 2022 large-scale survey by KPMG, EMA companies experienced a 44 percent increase in process efficiency and a 39 percent increase in employee productivity.
Higher-quality code: Estimates suggest a 25–50% reduction in fixing app defects and maintaining apps in working order after deployment.
The potential for incorporating AI into low-code platforms enhances their capabilities to produce superior outcomes and consequently guarantee customer satisfaction. Businesses now widely see the integration of chatbots like ChatGPT into low-code platforms, giving them an advantage when developing applications primarily using prompts.
The Future of Low-Code Platforms
The era of low-code platforms is nowhere near its conclusion. Further advancements in AI and ML are making the platforms not only more robust but also more intuitive and adaptive to numerous business needs. The future would be hyper-automated, combining AI and automation tools—a future that is set to revolutionize the ways businesses would operate.
The seamless integration of low-code platforms with modern technologies like IoT, blockchain, and edge computing will elevate the potential of low-code platforms, making them an integral part of the digital transformation strategies for forward-thinking organizations.
With industries adopting a more data-driven and customer-centric approach, low-code platforms will lead the way in simplifying complex processes, boosting collaboration between IT and business teams, and fostering innovation at unprecedented speeds.
Conclusion
Low-code platforms have emerged as indispensable tools in the journey to digital transformation. They offer companies the all-needed agility and efficiency to succeed in an increasingly competitive, fast-paced digital landscape. By addressing skill gaps, and reducing development costs, these platforms help organizations overcome traditional barriers to innovation. They also enable teams with different skill sets to develop and deploy applications together, ensuring faster delivery and greater return on investment.
Integrating advanced technologies such as AI, machine learning and automation further enhances the power of low-code platforms, turning them into powerful engines for innovation. As the world shifts towards data-driven decision-making and customer-centric approaches, the urgency for businesses to embrace low-code platforms has never been greater. Organizations investing in these platforms today are equipping themselves with the tools to anticipate market demands, scale operations, and remain resilient in the face of disruption.
Embracing low-code is no longer an option but a necessity for businesses aiming to lead in the digital-first future.