Digital transformation has become a critical component for businesses aiming to stay competitive in today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape. It involves the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business, fundamentally changing how it operates and delivers value to customers. However, this journey is fraught with challenges that organizations must navigate to realize the full potential of digital transformation. This essay will explore the common challenges faced during digital transformation and propose strategies to overcome them.
Challenges of Digital Transformation:
Cultural Resistance: One of the most significant barriers to digital transformation is the resistance to change within an organization. Employees may be accustomed to traditional ways of working and may view new technologies with skepticism or fear.
Lack of Digital Skills: The successful implementation of digital initiatives requires a workforce with the necessary digital skills. However, many organizations face a talent gap, with a shortage of employees proficient in areas such as data analytics, cybersecurity, and cloud computing.
Data Security and Privacy Concerns: As organizations become more data-driven, they must also address the increasing risks associated with data security and privacy. Protecting sensitive information from cyber threats is a top priority.
Integration Challenges: Integrating new digital technologies with existing systems can be complex and costly. Legacy systems may not be compatible with modern solutions, leading to integration challenges that hinder progress.
Strategic Alignment: Aligning digital transformation initiatives with the overall business strategy is crucial. Without a clear vision and objectives, digital projects may fail to deliver the desired outcomes.
Strategies to Overcome the Challenges:
Fostering a Digital Culture: Encouraging a culture of innovation and openness to change is essential. Organizations should invest in training and development programs to help employees adapt to new technologies and ways of working.
Building Digital Talent: Addressing the skills gap requires a multifaceted approach. This includes hiring new talent with digital expertise, upskilling existing employees, and partnering with external experts when necessary.
Prioritizing Cybersecurity: Implementing robust cybersecurity measures is non-negotiable. Regular security audits, employee training on data protection practices, and investing in advanced security technologies can mitigate risks.
Leveraging Integration Platforms: Utilizing integration platforms and APIs can simplify the process of connecting new technologies with legacy systems. This enables a more seamless and cost-effective integration.
Aligning Digital Initiatives with Business Goals: Ensuring that digital transformation efforts are closely aligned with the overall business strategy is key. Regularly reviewing and adjusting digital projects to align with business objectives can maximize their impact.
Overcoming the challenges of digital transformation is a complex but achievable task. By fostering a digital culture, building digital talent, prioritizing cybersecurity, leveraging integration platforms, and aligning digital initiatives with business goals, organizations can navigate the hurdles and successfully transform their operations. Embracing digital transformation is not just about adopting new technologies; it’s about reimagining how business is done in the digital age.
In the digital age, industries are transforming their traditional operations to keep up with evolving customer expectations. The insurance industry, traditionally known for its paper-based processes and complex procedures, is now embracing digital transformation to enhance the customer experience. By digitizing the insurance customer experience, insurers can streamline operations, improve efficiency, and provide a more personalized and convenient service. This essay explores the numerous benefits that arise from digitizing the insurance customer experience.
Enhanced Accessibility: Digitization brings insurance services closer to customers than ever before. By leveraging digital platforms, insurers can offer self-service options that enable customers to access policies, submit claims, and manage their accounts conveniently. With 24/7 accessibility through websites and mobile apps, customers can obtain information, request assistance, and make transactions at their own convenience, eliminating the need for time-consuming physical visits or phone calls. This enhanced accessibility provides customers with greater control over their insurance needs, leading to improved satisfaction and loyalty.
Streamlined Processes: Digital transformation allows insurers to streamline their processes, reducing paperwork and manual tasks. Online forms, electronic signatures, and automated underwriting processes eliminate the need for physical paperwork, making the application and policy issuance procedures faster and more efficient. Additionally, digitized claims management systems reduce the time and effort required for claims processing, leading to quicker resolutions for customers. Streamlining processes through digitization enhances operational efficiency, reduces administrative costs, and enables insurers to focus on delivering better customer service.
Personalization and Targeted Offerings: Digitization enables insurers to gather and analyze vast amounts of customer data, facilitating personalized insurance offerings. By leveraging data analytics and artificial intelligence, insurers can gain insights into customer behavior, preferences, and risk profiles. This information empowers insurers to tailor insurance products and services to meet specific customer needs, leading to improved customer satisfaction and increased cross-selling or upselling opportunities. Furthermore, personalized digital communication and real-time notifications enable insurers to engage with customers proactively, providing relevant information and assistance when it matters most.
Efficient Customer Support: Digitization offers new channels for customer support, making it easier for insurers to engage with their policyholders. Online chatbots, virtual assistants, and AI-powered customer service tools enable insurers to provide instant and accurate responses to customer inquiries, guiding them through various processes and addressing their concerns promptly. This efficient customer support helps improve customer satisfaction and loyalty by ensuring a seamless and hassle-free experience.
Improved Risk Management: Digitization plays a vital role in improving risk management for insurers and policyholders alike. By leveraging technologies such as telematics, IoT devices, and data analytics, insurers can gather real-time information on risks, enabling them to develop more accurate underwriting models. This data-driven approach allows insurers to offer customized coverage, more accurately assess premiums, and reward customers for low-risk behavior. Moreover, digitization facilitates proactive risk mitigation through predictive modeling, helping policyholders take preventive measures and reduce potential losses.
The digitization of the insurance customer experience offers numerous benefits to insurers and policyholders alike. By embracing digital transformation, insurers can enhance accessibility, streamline processes, personalize offerings, provide efficient customer support, and improve risk management. As customers increasingly expect seamless digital experiences, insurers that invest in digitization will gain a competitive advantage by delivering superior service, fostering customer loyalty, and adapting to the changing demands of the modern insurance landscape. Ultimately, digitization opens up new possibilities for insurers to better meet customer expectations and build strong, lasting relationships in the digital era.
The economic downturns that come with a recession can be tough on businesses. In such times, companies need to find ways to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and maintain productivity to stay afloat. One way to achieve these goals is by implementing low-code development. Low-code development can recession-proof your business by enabling rapid application development, faster time to market, and more efficient use of resources.
Low-code development is a method of software development that relies on visual modeling and configuration rather than traditional coding. With low-code platforms, businesses can develop and deploy applications faster and more efficiently than traditional software development methods. This approach can help companies cut down on costs, reduce the time required to develop applications, and improve the productivity of their development teams.
During a recession, businesses need to be agile and responsive to changing market conditions. Low-code development provides companies with the ability to quickly create and deploy new applications to meet evolving business needs. With low-code platforms, companies can develop applications in a fraction of the time it would take with traditional development methods, allowing them to respond quickly to market changes and maintain a competitive edge.
Furthermore, low-code platforms allow businesses to optimize their resources. Low-code development requires fewer development resources than traditional software development, allowing businesses to allocate their developers more efficiently. Additionally, low-code platforms enable citizen developers, or non-technical users, to build applications, freeing up IT teams to focus on more complex tasks. This allows businesses to get more done with fewer resources, reducing costs and improving overall efficiency.
In times of recession, many businesses are forced to cut back on their technology budgets. With low-code development, companies can continue to innovate while staying within their budgets. Low-code platforms have a lower total cost of ownership than traditional software development methods. The platforms require fewer developers and less time to develop and deploy applications, reducing costs and increasing ROI.
Low-code development is also beneficial for businesses that need to maintain legacy systems. As companies look to modernize their applications, low-code platforms offer a cost-effective and efficient solution. With low-code development, businesses can build new applications that integrate with existing systems, providing a modern user experience while maintaining the functionality of legacy systems.
In conclusion, low-code development can recession-proof your business by enabling rapid application development, faster time to market, and more efficient use of resources. During a recession, businesses need to be agile and responsive to changing market conditions. Low-code platforms provide companies with the ability to quickly create and deploy new applications to meet evolving business needs. With low-code development, businesses can optimize their resources and continue to innovate while staying within their budgets. By adopting low-code development, businesses can emerge from a recession stronger, more efficient, and more competitive.
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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.
According to Gartner, “70% of new applications will leverage a modern application platform using low-code or no-code technologies by 2025, up from less than 25% in 2020.”
These numbers foretell a dramatic shift in how enterprises will approach app development moving forward. Namely, your future success hinges on the ability to continuously respond fast to change and based on a new approach to constantly deliver applications and enterprise systems, modernize enterprise software development, and keep up with the competition.
Of course, not all modern application platforms offer the same capabilities. Not every platform is suitable for every use case. So how should you compare your options?
To help companies understand the modern application platform market, Gartner recently released their Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms. In this report, they divided platforms into challengers, visionaries, niche players, and leaders based on product capabilities, vendor operational health, market track record, and product vision.
Not only did Gartner name OutSystems as a Leader among vendors, but OutSystems is also the only company to receive a Customer’s Choice distinction as voted by hundreds of customers.
What Is a Modern Application Platform?
A modern application platform lets you quickly but securely develop and deploy new applications by automating the software development lifecycle and elevating the abstraction for the coding process. Not only does this augment your developer team to produce more significant results, but it opens up new opportunities to augment your internal staff beyond developers.
With more and more businesses relying on custom applications to accelerate operations, your ability to create complex applications quickly, interfaces, business logic, workflows, and manage data is a must.
When comparing platforms, Gartner analyzed their capabilities for three primary use cases:
Building custom business applications. You must be able to easily create and maintain complex enterprise applications capable of providing an intuitive user experience, managing complex integrations with your other business data sources and applications, and handling massive transaction volumes.
Automating business workflows. Your platform should help you automate as many workflows involving multiple application systems and users as possible so that your developers can work smarter and more productively.
Empowering collaborative app development. With development teams spread far and wide across locations, continents, and between the office and working at home, you need a platform that can ensure everyone is working efficiently on the same application. In addition, you need a platform that can scale its capabilities and usability to meet the needs of employees ranging from citizen developers to your most experienced, hard-core coders.
What Does Gartner Say About OutSystems?
While some platforms may be more suited for specific tasks, OutSystems is designed to provide a modern application platform suitable for the broadest range of industries and use cases. Unlike other vendors like Salesforce and Oracle, our current application platform is all we do, which has allowed us to focus on continuously innovating our product to meet the needs of almost every customer.
According to the Gartner report,
“OutSystems is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant(…) Its market differentiation is based on its capability to enhance developer productivity for building modern enterprise applications. OutSystems provides robust security, multi-experience development and AI-augmented development capabilities to enable faster application development.”
In the report, Gartner notes three key strengths that elevate the OutSystems solution to the top of the leaderboard.
Product: “OutSystems offers advanced low-code capabilities such as AI-augmented development, native but proprietary continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), application testing, agile enterprise planning, and governance capabilities to support the rapid development of enterprise-grade applications.”
Innovation: “OutSystems plans to introduce capabilities for automated unit testing using AI, native API management, enhanced observability experience (tied to infrastructure and application metrics) and an intelligent data mesh to facilitate seamless data ingestion and cataloguing.”
User experience: “In addition to providing robust capabilities for designing user journeys, OutSystems provides its UI design framework for designing standardized, accessibility-ready UIs. It also enables utilization of popular design systems and provides native support for chatbots and voice UIs.”
“OutSystems received the highest score of all vendors for the custom business application use case. It received good scores for the collaborative app development and business workflow automation use cases.”
In addition, customers also recognized OutSystems as a 2021 Gartner Customers’ Choice Vendor. Unlike the Magic Quadrant, whose leadership was determined by Gartner’s analysts, this award is based solely on feedback and ratings from hundreds of enterprise software users who have experience purchasing, implementing, and working with the OutSystems platform.
At the time of the report, OutSystems had 577 reviews for an average rating of 4.5 out of 5. Only three vendors were named a Customer’s Choice, with OutSystems being the only vendor recognized as both a Customer’s Choice and a Magic Quadrant’s Leader.
For all the details, check out the following reports:
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.
If you’ve encountered low code when evaluating different technologies to support your digital transformation strategy, in this blog post, you’ll learn how low code addresses the most common pain points encountered when developing a digital transformation strategy.
The demand for more business applications, the growth in connected devices, and higher expectations put huge pressure on IT leaders. That’s why a McKinsey study recently found that 70 per cent of digital transformations have failed. Of course, there are many criminals. But one of the most common mistakes IT leaders make is to think about technology first and rush to get it.
A successful digital transformation strategy should start by identifying strategic business challenges. Then you can find the right technology to create digital processes and solutions to solve them.
The value proposition of disruptive technology like low code is that it gives companies the flexibility and agility to adapt to the ever-changing industry reality, while accelerating the time to market new applications and functions to keep up with or change markets. Let’s see how low code can empower your team and gain speed, agility, competitiveness and differentiation.
3 tips for creating a successful digital transformation strategy with low code:
To participate in digital transformation, IT managers and managers must lead “visionary leadership.” In other words, you need to have a full understanding of where your business stands and what might be, along with well-defined goals, and then take steps to get there.
What you choose to do or not do will affect your ability to win, the trajectory and speed of your success or failure, and the value of the legacy you left behind. Your team has to play to win every game from the start to the last second, and it’s up to you to lead them.
So, here are three tips for a successful digital transformation with low code.
1. Play to win instead of play to avoid losing
Why are so many IT leaders deciding to disrupt software development by using low code in the hands of development teams? Building and maintaining a strong development team and developers is essential. Winning the big game requires increasing their performance, increasing their productivity, and expanding your bench power by optimizing the team’s talent pool. Your team needs to respond to business needs with greater speed and agility, closing all gaps in processes and gaps in your abilities against your competitors’ abilities.
2.Create and share a winning vision
For successful digital transformation, you need to optimize the output of your development team; no questions there. But how do you keep your team in the game when the domain breaks down? Put yourself in the shoes of your development team: you’ve invested more than 4 years in college, plus several years of experience in coding, and you’re suddenly asked to replace everything you’ve worked hard to master with something that reduces complexity and simplifies the job. The challenge is that by increasing your number of developer staff, you cannot scale efficiently and keep up with the demands of your market. You will reach your salary limit quickly, so you have to give something. How do you fix it? It has to create a win-win vision. It would be best if you showed your team that a low-code platform would not replace their work and skills but instead will allow them to use their skills and experience in projects that bring more value to the business.
3.Increase your score skill
How many apps do you currently have and use less than 10% of their capabilities? How much does it cost to protect them? How many of these will limit your capabilities because you can’t get data from them or show it in other apps? If you are like most companies, you have an application base that needs improvement. In fact, most companies find that backlog creates a day-to-day squeeze when it comes to building a high-performing, innovation-focused mindset in your company. You need to eliminate lag, encourage innovation, reduce the number of third-party apps and make big games.
And that’s where the low code shines. Take Schneider Electric, for example. Schneider discovered that the IT landscape was fragmented by duplicated applications using non-standard architecture and weak security practices. Therefore, the company used low code and created 60 applications in just 20 months while replacing a group of legacy applications running on Lotus Notes technology. In the words of Schneider Digital’s Director, Amarpreet Kaur,
“We saw a low-code platform as a catalyst to bridge the gap between business demands and available IT resources. We chose Outsystems, and now we have an engine at Schneider Electric that fuels digital transformation.”
Are you ready for the big game?
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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.
Based on the latest data, the low code market is estimated to reach a value of $ 187 billion by 2030 (increased to $ 10.3 billion in 2019). The reason for this growth lies in the increasing pressure of IT to add value to the business – accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and deadlocks – and the limitations of traditional development that hinder developer productivity and increase backlog jobs. Low code development with its visual approach to coding can enable your existing development teams to build high-quality multi-experience applications faster (if you’re looking for the benefits of low code, we have a full article on this topic). Unfortunately, hot technology attracts a wide variety of vendors and posers. While it may seem tempting to have lower-code platform options, a closer look reveals that many of these products offer solutions that don’t really meet the needs of corporate businesses or developers, just like Visual Basic did not exist a few decades ago.
Clarifying the Low-Code Market Size
In the latest Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low Code Application Platforms (LCAP), Gartner defines LCAP as:
“An application platform that supports rapid application development, deployment, execution, and management using declarative, high-level programming abstractions such as model-driven and metadata-driven programming languages and single-step deployments.”
Based on this definition, the low code market includes platforms that support the development of enterprise applications that run on multiple platforms and devices, connect to data sources, and meet business needs. To be included in Gartner’s view of the low code market, providers must also meet a variety of technical requirements, including:
Demonstrating a go-to-market strategy for its LCAP for cross-sectoral application development,
Providing a minimum set of application platform capabilities,
Ensuring fast application development,
To provide an enterprise-level LCAP for enterprise-class projects.
As the market continues to grow and new providers join the race, Gartner adjusts these criteria every year, and some vendors even move into different categories such as case management. We fully expect to see additional changes in 2021 as Gartner continues to focus on the feature and functionality packs customers can expect from a low-code app platform and whether this suite can truly address all use cases for the organization.
An Alternative Perspective on the Low-Code Market
If you are considering a low-code platform to digitize internal business processes, replace legacy applications, or create new customer experiences that include mobile, chat, and bots, it can help to understand the low-code environment based on its legacy.
This may seem like a strange way of thinking about development platform vendors, but it turns out, it’s very important. Let’s take a look at the three categories of low code and why they exist.
Niche Tools
Niche tools focus on a specific application development problem. For example:
A better way to capture and store data
A simpler way to describe business processes
An easier way to create a mobile frontend
These tools are used almost exclusively to meet a single business need. It includes business process management (BPM), case management, and no-code technology. As long as scalability is not a requirement, you can use them to build simple applications really fast.
Ecosystem Tools
Players of this category are often large software application vendors whose motivation to call themselves low-code is to provide a way to create more value in cloud ecosystems. These solutions are basically niche platforms as they are developed to solve a specific business need as well as general application development (e.g. database applications, web tools, GUI front ends to CLI backend systems).
Purpose-Oriented Application Platforms
These are platforms designed from the very beginning to handle custom application development using a low-code approach. Vendors in this category tend to keep up with market needs and trends and include new features for future-proof customer journeys such as progressive web apps and chatbots. Purpose application platforms focus on delivering fit-for-purpose applications with a consistent user experience.
These platforms are not purely pure low-code tools such as niche or ecosystem. They include a low-code framework and tools for multi-experience development, but they also have some capabilities for automation, integration, impact reporting, and one-click deployment.
Why Is Purposeful Creation Not Enough?
The problem with purpose-built application platforms is that inevitably there comes a time when solutions created with them must evolve in a direction that the platform does not support. It’s as if you need your content management system to start offering point-of-sale functionality with order menus and payments. Maybe you can add some plugins and get something that works, if not elegant. However, what happens the next time you need something out of the box? Or the time after that?
At this point, organizations using application platforms for this purpose are forced to layer over another tool to bridge the gap, resort to manual coding, or seek other ways to integrate newly coded systems with existing systems. The benefits of low code are lost very quickly.
We see this often. Many of our clients came to OutSystems after hitting this wall with another platform, and this can happen very quickly. The reasons are varied, but we hear things like:
“Yes, our current platform supports online mobile app development… but we also need it to create apps that work offline. It doesn’t.”
And…
“We are not able to integrate with our identity management system.”
Question: Why can’t more solutions get organizations over this wall effectively?
Answer: Because it’s hard to build a development platform that meets the actual needs of customers. Customers don’t just need better, more efficient development tools; they need an entire platform that improves the full application lifecycle in the same way that low-code improves the development experience. A modern application platform, not flash-in-the-pan tactics, can make sure that IT teams never hit a wall.
Solving Purpose-Built Problems with a Modern Application Platform
Almost every day we hear from organizations that are victims of digital disruption – cite retail (Sears, Toys ”R” Us), Mobile Device (Blackberry), and taxi industry references. To avoid this, not only do business and IT strategies need to be in lockdown, but IT needs to be able to deliver solutions that accelerate business demands. Imagine that the business minds behind Uber will be told a two-year wait for their mobile apps.
Development speed is the biggest opportunity for low code platforms. Instead, most of the time, even low-code, IT is constrained by:
Big backlogs
Not enough budget or skilled resources
Development complexity
Systems that are often outdated by the time they’re released.
Addressing these issues requires a modern application platform that offers low-code for the visual development of all layers of an application, including user interfaces, integration, data models, business logic, and workflow for any device, and proprietary code of an application. This looks like a purpose-built app platform, right? The difference is that with a modern application platform it is possible to:
Package mobile apps for the app stores in one click.
Manage the full application lifecycle with automated dependency impact analysis, application portfolio governance and refactoring, and debugging to ensure deployments don’t break.
Handle complex mobile requirements like ultra-responsive user experience, offline data, on-device business logic, and sensor integration.
Scale to support high volumes of users and transactions.
Deliver superior user experience through continuous delivery and deployment.
Meet demanding security requirements.
Adopt a multi-persona app dev strategy, taking full advantage of the governed business and IT collaboration.
Take the credit rating company FICO, for example. They had a two-year development project that failed. In just six months with half the team, they rewrote and delivered a brand new origination system and got to market three times faster using the OutSystems modern application platform.
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.
