Low-code platforms are gaining popularity in the software development industry as they allow developers to create software applications with minimal coding requirements. These platforms provide a visual interface that enables developers to drag and drop components to create applications, reducing the time and effort required to develop software applications. However, choosing the right low-code platform can be a challenging task for organizations. In this essay, we will discuss how to navigate low-code platform project fit.
The first step in navigating low-code platform project fit is to define the requirements of the project. This involves identifying the business needs, technical requirements, and user expectations. The requirements should be clearly defined and documented to ensure that the low-code platform can meet the project’s needs. The project requirements will determine the type of low-code platform that is required, such as a platform for web or mobile applications, or a platform that can integrate with other systems.
The second step is to evaluate the low-code platforms available in the market. This involves researching the features and capabilities of the platforms, such as the ease of use, scalability, security, integrations, and customization options. It is important to evaluate the platforms based on the requirements of the project, as not all platforms may be suitable for all projects.
The third step is to test the low-code platforms. This involves creating prototypes or proof-of-concepts using the low-code platforms to determine how well they meet the project requirements. Testing the platforms allows developers to identify any limitations or issues with the platform, such as the inability to integrate with other systems or limited customization options. Testing also provides an opportunity to evaluate the user interface and determine if it is user-friendly and intuitive.
The fourth step is to consider the cost of the low-code platform. This includes the licensing costs, implementation costs, and ongoing maintenance costs. It is important to evaluate the costs of the platform in relation to the benefits it provides, such as reduced development time and increased productivity. It is also important to consider the scalability of the platform and whether it can support future growth and expansion of the project.
The fifth step is to consider the support and training provided by the low-code platform vendor. This includes the availability of technical support, training resources, and community forums. The level of support and training provided can impact the success of the project, as it ensures that developers have the resources and assistance they need to use the platform effectively.
In conclusion, navigating low-code platform project fit requires a thorough understanding of the project requirements, evaluation of the available platforms, testing of the platforms, consideration of the cost and support provided by the vendor. By following these steps, organizations can choose the right low-code platform that meets their project requirements and delivers value to their business.
Low-code development platforms have become increasingly popular in recent years as a way for organizations to develop software more quickly and efficiently. Low-code platforms allow developers to create applications using visual interfaces and pre-built components, rather than writing code from scratch. This approach promises to save time and money, but how can organizations measure the return on investment (ROI) of low-code?
Reduced Development Time
One of the primary benefits of low-code development is the reduced development time. By using pre-built components and visual interfaces, developers can create applications much faster than if they had to write code from scratch. This reduced development time translates into cost savings, as developers can create more applications in less time. Organizations can measure the ROI of low-code by comparing the development time and associated costs of a low-code project to a traditional development project.
Improved Time to Market
Another benefit of low-code development is the improved time to market. Because low-code development is faster than traditional development, organizations can get their applications to market sooner. This can be especially important in industries where speed is critical, such as in the financial sector or in healthcare. Organizations can measure the ROI of low-code by comparing the time to market of a low-code project to a traditional development project.
Reduced Maintenance Costs
Low-code platforms can also help reduce maintenance costs over time. Because low-code applications are built using pre-built components, there is less code to maintain. Additionally, low-code platforms often include automated testing and monitoring tools, which can help identify and fix issues more quickly. Organizations can measure the ROI of low-code by comparing the maintenance costs of a low-code application to a traditional application over time.
Increased Flexibility
Another benefit of low-code development is the increased flexibility it provides. Low-code platforms make it easier to modify applications as requirements change, because developers can simply drag and drop new components or make changes to existing ones. This can be especially important in industries where requirements are constantly evolving, such as in the technology sector. Organizations can measure the ROI of low-code by comparing the costs and time associated with making changes to a low-code application versus a traditional application.
Conclusion
In conclusion, low-code development can provide significant ROI benefits for organizations. By reducing development time, improving time to market, reducing maintenance costs, and increasing flexibility, low-code platforms can help organizations save time and money. To measure the ROI of low-code, organizations should compare the costs and time associated with a low-code project to a traditional development project. By doing so, organizations can determine whether low-code development is the right approach for their needs.
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If you want to learn more about how low code can help you adopt a successful digital conversion strategy, you can contact BAYPM. However, if you are more interested in learning about the pros and cons of leading low code platforms, check out Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise low code implementation platforms.
There are a number of excellent benefits that your business can get out of building a mobile application for its needs; whether that be for internal communication, marketing to new clients, or communicating with existing ones.
The objective that the mobile app you are building is meant to fulfill will have a major impact on the type of app you are developing; particularly with reference to its architecture.
In such a situation you have a choice.
You can either build a standalone native app that must be downloaded from an app store and take advantage of the features of a user’s device; or you can opt to build a simpler, more cost-effective and less resource-intensive progressive web app.
In this article, we will explore the differences, benefits and drawbacks of each of these.
This should give you a better idea of which framework would best meet the objectives of your business, no matter what reason you are developing an app for.
Native Apps
Native apps make use of a specific codebase and are developed to be compatible with certain devices that use that framework.
For instance, if a native app needs to be released for both Android and iOS systems, the app will need to be developed for each of those frameworks separately.
This allows the app to take advantage of the hardware and features of that specific device, and also enables it to stand alone as a functional application.
This gives them a number of unique advantages over web apps, but also means that they require specific skill sets to develop, and as such, generally come at a much higher cost than the other two.
Still, if you need to develop an app that is fast, highly functional and complicated, the native approach is generally the best bet thanks to the way they excel in terms of intuitiveness and functionality.
Benefits
From the above description, a few of the top benefits of native apps should start to show themselves.
Let’s take a look at some of the top advantages of choosing native development. These include superior performance, app store support, an enhanced user experience, the ability to use features on the device using the app, as well as higher levels of trust between potential users.
Best Performance
Out of the three approaches mentioned in this article, native apps provide some of the best levels of performance. These builds are generally more stable, reliable and efficient in the way that they use device resources.
This, in turn, creates a more pleasant experience for users but also provides the only viable option for particularly complicated or functional apps.
App Store Support & Discoverability
Because native apps are generally only downloaded from recognised app stores, they are also given more comprehensive support from platforms like the Google Play and iOS App Store.
On top of this, having a presence in these app stores also makes native mobile apps more discoverable than other types, which means that there is a much higher chance of users finding and using it, as opposed to other types that are not hosted on stores, and therefore may need additional marketing to get them into the hands of your potential users.
Smooth & Intuitive User Experience
Because native apps are built using compatible code for specific devices, they are built within a framework that accentuates best-practice guidelines for that specific device.
This means that navigation, usability and functionality all come with a sense of recognisability for users, who will find using the app an intuitive and natural experience without much of a learning curve.
By allowing for a framework that is familiar to your users, these types of apps make them more accessible to users, regardless of the devices they were developed for.
Make Use of Device Features
One of the top advantages to native mobile apps is that in being built with code that is compatible with specific devices, these types of apps are able to make use of the features and hardware on that specific device.
Consider the way Google Maps uses your location through GPS, how Apple Music can send you a notification when your favorite artist releases a new album, or how Instagram can make use of your phone’s camera and apply filters to it.
All of these are examples of how native apps use the functions of a device to provide a unique and seamless experience for users.
App Store Approval Raises Trust
As media consumers, we are all quite a picky lot. If we smell a rat, we are likely to keep our distance. Having native apps listed in the various app stores requires them to first be approved by the stores themselves.
This means that by simply being listed, there is an added layer of trust between the app and its potential users, which means a greater chance of users confidently downloading it.
Drawbacks of Native Apps
Of course, if native apps were just a list of benefits there would be no need for web-based ones. So, let’s have a look at a few of the disadvantages of building native apps.
Requires Experienced Developers
Because each platform that a native app is being developed for differs completely in their coding and frameworks, native apps need to be developed separately for each operating system it is released on.
This means that different developers will need to be used for each platform since each will specialise in a specific coding language.
Even when finding a developer that works across a few Operating Systems (such as Android and iOS), the app will still need to be built independently for each different OS, which can raise the price and time of development substantially.
Higher Cost of Development
Because of the reason mentioned above, and also because of the specialised skill set needed to develop native apps in various forms, these types of apps come at an extra cost to other types.
But when you consider their added functionality and superior performance, this extra cost is worthwhile for apps that need to take advantage of native development.
Not Ideal for Simple Apps
Because of the monetary and time costs of developing native apps, and because they work within a complicated framework of specific coding languages, they are not ideally used for simple apps with limited functionality.
While they can be used for more simplistic apps, the approach isn’t always practical, especially when web apps can facilitate them at less of a cost, and with less time in development.
Web Apps
Now let’s move to an approach on the opposite end of the spectrum, progressive web apps.
These types of apps take a much more general and simplistic approach to development, albeit one that offers far less functionality.
Still, cost-effectiveness and relative ease of development makes web apps ideal for simpler apps.
Web apps are generally used in browsers like Opera or Google Chrome. This is because they are developed using coding languages similarly used for websites like C++ and HTML.
Because of this, web apps only need to be built once. Since web architecture can be used seamlessly across multiple devices, it can be employed to be used on console, PC, Android and iOS all at once; as long as the device using it accesses the app through a browser.
In this way, the app itself is stored on a server rather than a device, from where it is accessed by users when they open the app through a browser. When changes occur on the web app, there is no need to push updates to users’ devices, since the changes will automatically be applied when they access the web app.
It does this, however, while sacrificing on the added functionality of native apps.
Benefits
The fact that they are somewhat simplified doesn’t make web apps worse than native ones. Just different. There are still a number of advantages that they can bring when used in specific situations:
Easy to Use Across Device Types
Because they are developed within a web framework, the same web app can be accessed, as is, across multiple devices, regardless of the operating systems they use.
This means two things: firstly, it means that the app only needs to be developed once, and secondly, it will be able to reach a wider perspective audience.
Less Costly to Develop
Because they are built for the web, these types of apps don’t require as specialized (and rare) a skill as native apps do.
They also only need to be developed for one platform that can be used across devices.
This results in remarkably lower development costs and times when compared to native apps.
No Need for Marketplace Approval
Since these apps behave similarly to websites, they are hosted in the same way as well.
This means that they don’t have to go through the sometimes-lengthy approval process that native mobile apps have to face. This is as true for hosting as it is for when the app needs to be updated.
Because of this, they can be made available to users in much less time than the other types of apps.
Easy to Update
When you update a native app, it needs to be done on the store. At that point, your users will be notified of the update and prompted to do it.
Progressive web apps on the other hand, only need to be updated on the host.
Since these apps are not necessarily downloaded to the device that is accessing it, updated features will show immediately when users access it.
This makes things a lot more convenient for your users, and also gives you more control over which build of the app they are using.
Drawbacks of Web-Based Apps
Limited Use of Device Features
Because web-based apps make use of a C++ framework, they do not contain any of the code that allows the app to take advantage of device-specific features. This means no camera, no GPS and no access to your contacts or storage.
Because of this, web-based apps are only really suited to very basic functions.
Difficult to Collect Usage Metrics
Collecting information on how many users are accessing your apps is straightforward enough with native apps since all of that information is readily available through the respective app store.
Since progressive web apps are hosted independently, that is, away from app stores, getting usage statistics that you can use to improve your services is a little more difficult, and not as detailed or accurate.
Poor Discoverability
Discoverability is also a concern when apps are not hosted on app stores. They will have to be marketed much in the way a website is if you want to attract in users.
This is perfectly fine and well if you are using an app to communicate with existing clients or offering them a service. But when you want your app to build its own success, native apps on stores are far more discoverable.
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If you want to learn more about how low code can help you adopt a successful digital conversion strategy, you can contact BAYPM. However, if you are more interested in learning about the pros and cons of leading low code platforms, check out Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise low code implementation platforms.
By now, we’re all too familiar with the saying “every company is a software company” but scaling and delivering quality software is — to put it simply — hard: software development complexity keeps growing, with tech stacks constantly changing and new cloud services popping up. Yet, there simply aren’t enough software engineers available in the market: IDC quantified that the shortage of full-time developers is currently 1.4 million people (2021) and that will rise to 4 million people in just 4 years.
At the same time, the revolution of hybrid work and the pandemic acceleration of digital has exploded the backlogs of software dev teams in every industry. These last two disruptions may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back on the old approach for conventional development.
This new reality demands that software engineering leaders must review their 2022 assumptions and make plans to modernize their teams, practices, and tools to address the 4 core pillars of their software engineering:
Developer experience: aiming to reduce technical complexity so that teams can innovate rapidly.
Development workflow automation: removing friction and handovers among all platforms and tools from the different stages of the development lifecycle are integrated holistically.
Security and compliance: developers shift left everything that can be tested during development, and right everything that’s better tested later, making it easier for developers to write secure code.
Deployment and operations: focusing on user adoption to enhance service reliability and performance.
Based on these pillars, we predict 7 software development trends that will be key in 2022 and that software engineering leaders should consider to modernize their dev teams, practices, and tools and achieve their business goals:
DevSecOps
API-led Integrations
Low-code for Pros
Cloud-Native Platforms
DesignOps
Universal Observability
PWA-First
#1: DevSecOps
Security, unfortunately, will continue to be the #1 concern for IT executives and software engineering teams. Between an uptick in ransomware attacks, lack of clear boundaries for organizational data, and increased risk with collaborative citizen developments, the data privacy, and regulatory requirements are threatened more than ever before. This led to an increased demand for DevSecOps, where security and compliance requirements are validated at every step of the development lifecycle.
With this increasing pressure to protect development environments from supply chain security threats and harden software delivery pipelines, we’re seeing CISOs and CIOs gradually preferring to create new web&mobile apps on platforms that manage all stages of app development and delivery for each new app — instead of depending on the non-systematic nature of different people with different practices in secure development.
The ultimate goal is for dev platforms to promote and make it easy for dev teams to create secure code, assuming a Zero Trust security model, instead of relying mostly on security testing methodologies.
#2: Hybrid Integrations
According to The State of SaaS Sprawl in 2021, the average company has 254 SaaS applications but, on average, only 45% of a company’s SaaS apps are being used on a regular basis. Moreover, 56% of all these apps are shadow IT, or owned and managed outside of IT. And the crazy part is to think that goes on top of all the software packages and systems of records they already have to run the core of their business.
The recent furore by business users to deploy RPA over old tools lacking APIs was a shortcut for old systems but not ideal for the fluid nature of digital business making changes all the time. For that agile businesses are using rapid app changes with low-code dev platforms, and the leading ones include these capabilities inside.
Above all, we’re now at a stage where organizations need more than ever to connect in real-time their data management, governance, and auditability across these multiple data sources which begs for more tools in hybrid integrations. The right software dev platforms or dedicated tools allow integrating data from different SaaS and legacy systems for a data fabric used by multiple systems and apps, which is key to supporting business leaders to make data-driven decisions.
“By 2025, 70% of new applications developed by enterprises will use low-code or no-code technologies”.
Low-code doesn’t mean that developers will be replaced by business users (to understand the difference between low-code and no-code take a look at this blog post). Low-code platforms provide abstraction to remove some of that complexity that developers typically face when creating an app or system. And the best ones provide full-stack control for software engineers to have fine-grain control.
The goal is that those repetitive and boring tasks like dependency management, code validation, and automatic builds are done by the platform so that developers can focus on the extra mile that makes the difference, instead of just keeping the lights on.
#4: Cloud-Native Platforms
Still on the SaaS topic, the explosion of niche cloud applications is changing the “build vs buy” economics and timings. That’s because SaaS sprawl is not only exploding the original budgets but also becoming another form of technical debt: jumping among a dozen systems is a poor experience, with business consequences.
To recover business agility in enterprise systems used by customers, partners and employees, it demands a new type of cloud-native app development — one that is highly distributed, scalable, and enables the creation of resilient, fit-to-purpose enterprise apps that increases the agility of the organization.
The explosive growth of the mega vendors’ web services from ~30 five years ago, up to 250 by a single IaaS provider today, is becoming a massive distraction for business developers creating cloud-native applications.
To overcome these challenges, it is key that cloud-native development platforms allow dev teams to remain focused on the value stream management for their digital products, instead of exhausting their engineering talent on infrastructure management alone.
And with tech giants winning the race for scarce specialized engineers, organizations outside that tech elite need to embrace new ways to stay innovative and competitive with their own teams. This means finding technology that allows them to abstract or remove technical complexity and allow their development teams to focus on business outcomes and innovation — like a new crop of Cloud Native Low-Code Platforms.
#5: DesignOps
DesignOps is a tight team sport with close collaboration between design teams and front-end developers (including shared repositories, tools, asset exchange) promoting collaboration across the different product teams within an organization, and ensuring consistency of the product’s experience from the first delivery.
Now, the year 2022 is the first time when IT and app development budgets already reflect the hybrid work reality since both employee and partner experience has become just as critical as the customer experience — for hyperadoption: the broad and frequent use of the applications created to gain business agility.
As organizations are pressured to launch more digital products while meeting user adoption goals, they need to manage design at scale, while minimizing technical and UX debt, bringing DesignOps practices to the center of the stage.
#6: Observability
Going hand-in-hand with DesignOps, engineering leaders should invest in observability for hyperadoption. Combined with new end-user behavior observability and supported on open standards like Open Telemetry for tracing with plans to expand their use for logs and metrics, more digital product teams will aim for user adoption levels that were historically hard to achieve.
#7: PWA-First
Progressive Web AppsPWAs combine the functions of native apps and website accessibility without involving the app stores. Like native apps, PWAs can work offline, send push notifications, and access device hardware, such as cameras or GPS. The user experiences are similar to native apps on mobile and desktop devices without downloading or updating hassles, with great benefit — they run well on top of poor connectivity.
PWAs will regain momentum in 2022 due to their connectivity resilient design and user resistance (to keep piling native apps in their devices). There were already great technical arguments to adopt a PWA-first mindset by developers and software leaders, but the great acceleration to digital experiences is accelerating this change too, because:
From an end user perspective, PWA are easy to use their mobile devices (no app store) and are lightweight.
From a dev perspective, PWAs are way faster to change than native apps, and they are easier to maintain.
For dev teams, unlike native apps, they use one codebase for all devices, they’re searchable by search engines, and they are light.
Get Ready for 2022
So overall, the top software engineering trends we see for 2022 confirm the core of our mission as a company:
“To enable every business to innovate throught software”.
We believe we can’t go wrong in delivering to our customers a platform that keeps removing complexity, addressing the developer experience gap, abstracting the complexity of cloud native development, and, ultimately, enabling our customers to grow faster.
We wish you a successful 2022!
1Breaking out the top of the analysts scale, as you can find out in the first ever “Low-Code Wave” by Forrester in 2016.
If you’re here, you’ve probably heard about “low-code” before. If you haven’t, low-code is a software development approach that abstracts and automates application development steps to reduce complexity and accelerate development speed.
As the pressure on IT to deliver more and faster increases, many organizations are turning to low-code development to surpass the barriers imposed by the developer shortage and traditional development tools (you can read more about the pros of low-code in Top 5 Benefits of Low-Code). But, what can you really build with low-code? And what are its limits?
What our experience has taught us is that pure low-code platforms might be okay for building a form on top of a database or putting together a simple web or mobile app, but for more complex use cases, pure low-code tools fall short. For that reason, and based on our customers’ feedback over the last two decades, we’ve been evolving our platform to ensure it meets enterprise requirements and needs.
That said, next, I’ll review the use cases proposed by Gartner and share our vision on what you can deliver with low-code and when you should consider a more complete, modern application development platform like OutSystems.
Can Low-Code Support a Citizen Development Strategy?
Many low-code tools have no-code features embedded to allow citizen developers (non-professional developers with little to no app dev experience) to build simple, B2E applications almost exclusively using prebuilt templates, connectors, APIs, and logic.
So, does low-code support a citizen development strategy? Yes, it does. However, keep in mind that in its pure, drag-and-drop format, citizen development exclusively sponsored by no-code capabilities may lead to a scenario of shadow IT, where you end up with separate business applications that IT is not aware of and has no governance over them. Another problem is that you can end up with a proliferation of applications, many of which might be duplicates, that can slow performance or drive up cloud costs. Without this control, a violation of the organization’s requirements for control, documentation, security, and reliability is a possibility. You can also end up with app sprawl that is difficult, if not impossible, to rein in.
How Is a Modern Application Platform Different?
A modern application development platform also provides the visual, model-based development features associated with low-code. The difference is the apps you build with a modern application platform like OutSystems are not the simple ones churned out by someone who wants to put a form on top of a spreadsheet or create a vacation approval app. Instead, with OutSystems, you deliver powerful enterprise apps and app portfolios that run your business and what make you unique.
With OutSystems governance and impact analysis capabilities, for example, IT knows what every application developed with the platform does. Plus, if IT wants to work on top of the apps created by business users, OutSystems provides the necessary tools to unite IT and business to expand the project.
Can Low-Code Deliver Web and Mobile Business Unit Apps?
In the Speed of Change report, the majority of IT leaders inquired said it took their development teams 3-6 months to deliver an application. That’s a lifetime, and even more so in the COVID-19 era. The biggest value proposition of low-code is the development speed it provides. With low-code, development teams can build new web and mobile apps that involve data, business logic, and external services, such as SaaS services, in less than three months.
The problem comes when you need to deliver a second or third version of that app. Pure low-code tools help you build a prototype or version 1 of an app really fast, but when you need to make a change to meet customer feedback, or integrate to another system that has just popped up, they don’t offer an easy path. Think of it like running a marathon: if you start your run sprinting, you won’t have enough energy to finish the race. The same goes with pure low-code tools: to give you the speed to deliver apps super fast, they tend to sacrifice app quality.
How Is a Modern Application Platform Different?
A modern app development platform goes beyond low-code to give you the capabilities to build apps not only fast, but also right and for the future. Besides a low-code development approach and AI-assisted development, the OutSystems platform also provides services and security checks to ensure scalability, governance, protection from threats, and compliance.
In addition to that, its AI capabilities also find and solve issues early, eliminating design errors and duplication of effort and identifying anything that needs to be corrected or optimized. Unlike low-code tools, OutSystems was designed to help manage change and future-proof your apps. OutSystems platform services, AI, and visual tools enable the continuous introduction of features and capabilities. This way, developers can evolve apps every bit as quickly as the business changes and new technologies are introduced.
Can Low-Code Build Enterprise IT Business Process Applications?
Low-code gives organizations the capabilities needed to access, use, and share back-end data, logic, and processes, and thus the ability to automate and change business processes, workflows, and case management applications. In fact, many low-code vendors featured in LCAP Magic Quadrant were originally traditional BPM software vendors that reinvented themselves.
So, with low-code you can indeed build business process applications but, for some platforms, if you need to integrate those apps to other systems on-premise, you’ll need to do a lot of hand-coding. Plus, pure low-code tools fail at building more complex, enterprise-grade apps because you don’t have access to a full architecture view nor an easy way to debug them.
How Is a Modern Application Platform Different?
OutSystems allows you to design and manage your business processes and integrate them into your applications using its Business Process Technology methodology. In addition to that, OutSystems provides Architecture Dashboard and TrueChange to check and identify any architecture errors.
The Architecture Dashboard allows developers and architects to visualize complex cross-portfolio architectures and identify and fix problems while following best practices and avoiding common pitfalls. The TrueChange engine, on the other hand, combines the power of automation, AI and analytics checks for architecture errors and dependencies to provide team and architecture governance and monitor the performance in real-time.
Can Low-Code Develop Fusion Team-Developed Composite Applications?
Fusion teams are multidisciplinary teams that bring together business and IT to collaborate on cross-functional projects. Visual tools like low-code play a crucial role in promoting this collaboration, as it allows business people with no coding experience to tap into their subject matter expertise and create the application workflows they need.
But to maximize the power of fusion teams, the technology used should not only expand the capabilities of business people but also ensure that the apps created by non-developers follow the standard architectures and frameworks so that experienced developers can adjust and extend them without any re-architecting. Pure low-code tools, because they focus solely on simplifying the complexity of app development, lack this key part of the equation.
How Is a Modern Application Platform Different?
Modern application platforms like OutSystems give your fusion teams the simplicity of low-code development but integrated in a full-stack application development platform. This way, OutSystems gives developers the ability to extend applications that were started by non-developers with the expressiveness and flexibility of traditional coding.
In light of the research results, as BAYPM, we would love to help you with your Digital Transformation journey, give us a shout and we’ll be sure to assist you as best as we can. Currently, we are working on a project to digitize manual processes within different locations. The client opted for an incremental implementation approach based on geographical locations and the needs of their different factories.
Faster than any corporate strategy or executive initiative, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the business’ adoption of digital technologies as never seen before. Forced to adjust rapidly and find new ways to connect with customers, partners, and their whole ecosystem, organizations in all industries implemented new digital experiences and embraced new ideas and business models, accelerating the share of digitally enabled products in their portfolios by seven years.
This need for speed has raised the old but still relevant build vs. buy dilemma. I recently had a revealing conversation with John Bratincevic, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, about these exact trends (you can warp thru it at Build at the Speed of Buy webinar).
Based on trends we both saw in the past 18 months, we talked about how the “build” approach has been gaining momentum as technology evolves and new modern development approaches appear. So, where do we stand now? When should you buy and when should you build software?
Challenges of the Old “Buy + Customize” Approach
The traditional view we’ve always been told is not to reinvent the wheel; always buy software if possible, because there are very smart companies with great solutions that support “exactly what you need”—or so you wish. You should only build when your business lives in a somewhat niche area of the market poorly served by package software.
But the truth is, every resilient business is kind of like a snowflake—there are no two 100% the same, and it keeps changing. When you digitally transform your business, you turn everything about it into software, from policies and processes to procedures, data, and even its know-how.
The problem of prioritizing buying over the building is that whenever you need to change operations, that software that you bought because it was “baked” for that problem doesn’t change easily because it wasn’t architected for change and varnish customization is not enough.
Additionally, in today’s frenzy explosion of SaaS services acquired by each department to serve the majority of your software needs, you end up with several systems that don’t integrate seamlessly with each other. One nasty consequence is recurring to poor man integration with bots in what John describes as a “human API”, where users must manually copy-paste data, navigate between screens, and accruing all sorts of workarounds, like spreadsheets, to compensate for the lack of integration between the multiple solutions, all just to do what it was supposed to do!
In a surviving organization, software should be an extension of the business and express its DNA. To achieve that, companies need bespoke software solutions that may integrate all systems, and that means more development and faster delivery cadence.
Why Is “Building” Gaining Momentum?
Why is “building” the trend these past two years? What has changed in the business landscape for vanilla applications to not be enough? The answer is simple: post-pandemic of doing all customers’ operations digitally, and the quest to provide better experiences, both for customers and employees.
The philosophy of tweaking only the front-end because it’s what impacts customers directly, but keeping the back office systems slow and disconnected doesn’t work anymore. Because those operations greatly affect the customer experiences. Everything is integrated, and if something in the back office doesn’t work well, the app experience breaks fast, and adoption fails.
So, in today’s fast-changing world, even the most internal system has to change eventually to cope with unforeseen circumstances. Just imagine what the next unexpected pandemic may be! When you’re dealing with standard SaaS or COTS systems, even if they’re the best in class, they don’t change easily because they weren’t made with the peculiarities of your businesses in mind.
Redefining Build vs. Buy Assumptions
There are two critical assumptions that organizations need to realize when it comes to choosing between build or buy software approach:
Businesses are like snowflakes, and organizations shouldn’t underestimate the peculiarities of their business. So, unless your off-the-shelf application is built for change—and most of them aren’t—it’ll take more time, be more painful, and be expensive to customize to your business needs.
Technologies keep changing rapidly. Today, the build shouldn’t be seen as a herculean effort, where you need a huge team to write thousands or millions lines of code, as it happened in the past. Cloud platforms have evolved dramatically over the last five years; modern development approaches like DevOps, agile, and enterprise low-code platforms have accelerated the development process, and quality checks are built-in. So, product teams don’t need to dive into the “start from scratch” development to build an application; they can take advantage of cloud services and business APIs to compose and deliver customized solutions much faster, more adaptive, and cheaper than before.
Moreover, there’s a lot of value in creating apps in platforms that allow you to reuse proven modular building blocks that include security, governance, and compliance management in the platform. This way, integrating systems and providing a seamless navigation experience becomes a reality without them needing a “human API” or repetitive RPA bots to fix what the solution was supposed to do from the beginning.
The question shouldn’t be “build versus buy” anymore, but “customize versus compose”. You either buy a standard app and spend most of the time and money customizing it and waiting on budgets and vendors to do it each cycle, OR you compose an app by reusing proven business capabilities your teams created or wrapped from the outside when using modern app development platform.
Adapting to Change with a Build Approach: Examples
Humana in the US is a great story of an organization that has invested in composing their solutions and how that allowed them to adapt faster when the pandemic hit. The insurance provider invested in a modular architecture that allowed it to reuse the same modules they had created for a Pharmacy Finder app and quickly launch a COVID-19 Testing Locator App to their customers.
Another great story is Green Cargo. The logistics company needed to modernize its core system, which was sclerotic with legacy and SAP dependencies. But replacing the whole thing at once would have taken years, during which the benefits to the business would have stood still. So the company decided to use the OutSystems app dev platform to replace functionalities one at a time. In just one year, the company launched several significant applications into production, including a mobile app, a predictive maintenance app, and a customer portal.
The building at the Speed of Buy
The build or buy dilemma has evolved over the last few years: buying off-the-shelf isn’t entirely totally off-the-shelf anymore, and the more digital we become, the less off-the-shelf it is. As for the build, the idea that developing your software is costly and inefficient is based on old development models. Modern app development technologies have changed that.
“Only the businesses that overcome these outdated ideas and take ownership of their software innovation will come out ahead in this increasingly digital age.”
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If you want to learn more about how low code can help you adopt a successful digital conversion strategy, you can contact BAYPM. However, if you are more interested in learning about the pros and cons of leading low code platforms, check out Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise low code implementation platforms.
Market confusion aside, it’s really possible to distinguish between low-code and no-code platforms. There are literally hundreds of small details and capabilities that distinguish low-code platforms from no-code solutions. Most of these are not evident at the UI level, which is where most of the confusion between the two comes from. This blog post addresses the capabilities that separate the two so you can better understand where they can fit in your organization.
What is low-code and how to use it?
Let’s start with low code. Low code is a way for developers of all skill levels to design applications with fast and minimal manual coding by dragging and dropping visual blocks of existing code into a workflow to build applications. Creating low-code software is the same as creating software any other way, and the main difference is the types of shortcuts offered. Instead of manually coding a user management system, learning the latest programming framework, or writing 10 tests before a single line of your app’s code, you go straight to creating something new and valuable.
OutSystems/ Low-Code User Experience Diagram
Experienced developers work smarter and faster with low code because they are not hampered by repeated coding or duplicate work. Instead, they focus on building 10 percent of an application that sets it apart, using their development experience and skills to design everything and leaving the grumble job to the low-code tool or platform.
Speed: with low code, you can create applications for multiple platforms at the same time and show stakeholder working samples in days or even hours.
More resources: if you are working on a large project, no longer have to wait for developers with special skills to finish a long project, which means getting things done faster and at a lower cost.
Low risk / high return on investment: with low code, robust security processes, data integration and cross-platform support are already built-in and easily customizable – which means less risk and more time to focus on your business.
One-click deployment: with low code, one click is all it takes to send your app to production. Launch day is no longer a frustrating experience.
And What Is No-Code?
No-code solutions also feature drag and drop, visual enhancement. Unlike low code, they mostly appeal to business people or others in IT who may not know real programming languages but want to develop an application for a specific use case. In other words, no code allows organizations to equip teams with the tools they need to build applications without formal development training.
Everything the no-code vendor thinks the user needs to create an application is already built into the tool. No-code solutions are similar to popular blogging platforms and e-commerce website design companies with pre-built pages that you can use to start your blog or business in a matter of minutes.
No-Code Advantages
No code is great if you need a simple app to solve a single business or department issue and you don’t want to expect it to build and deliver 3-6 months from now. No-code platforms require very little training, so anyone in your organization can often create an application in the business process management area, such as expense approvals. No-code gives business users the freedom to address an urgent need without moving away from critical development projects.
Low-Code and No-Code: When To Use
Both low-code and no-code platforms are built with the same thing in mind: speed. But how do you know when to use the other? The sections on advantages and disadvantages point to the answer to this question, but let’s dig a little deeper.
Low code is good for developing standalone mobile and web applications and portals that require integration with other systems and a variety of data sources. In fact, it can be used for almost anything except highly complex, mission-critical systems that integrate with multiple backend and external data sources. No-code tools, by contrast, should only be used for front-end use cases.
So, low code is probably the better option, unless you develop only the simplest apps and require little in the way of customization. Low code allows you to build user-friendly, responsive applications. While it’s not as simple as without code, there is enough simplicity inherent in low code tools to run these apps much faster than if you code them manually. Since low code still requires some coding knowledge, you know that the people who create your apps will do this correctly and your new apps won’t saddle you with security risks or compatibility issues.
Is it the future of low-code and no-code application development?
The short answer to this question is yes. Low-code and no-code tools play an increasingly important role in accelerating the deployment of applications. Gartner predicts that by 2023, more than 50% of medium and large businesses will adopt low-code or no-code code as one of their strategic application platforms, and low code will be responsible for more than 65% of application development by 2024.
We believe that the pressure to offer digital solutions to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic is one of the reasons for the accelerated adoption of low code and no code. Another reason is that only the biggest, wealthiest companies have access to the best technology capabilities and the most advanced development tools. No-code and low-code Tools flattens the playing field and empowers organizations of all sizes to do more with their available resources.
In light of the research results, as BAYPM, we would love to help you with your Digital Transformation journey, give us a shout and we’ll be sure to assist you as best as we can. Currently, we are working on a project to digitize manual processes within different locations. The client opted for an incremental implementation approach based on geographical locations and the needs of their different factories.
