Written by Philip Van Puyvelde
Low code development is already impacting many businesses directly and will change the (business) world in years to come.
Low code platforms allow anyone to write software using a drag-and-drop interface by translating these actions into pre-written or automatically generated code. Although there are quite some non-believers, we already see today that low code development is becoming a more substantial digital shift than many might have initially assumed.
3 Pertinent Questions
To illustrate the impact of low code, let's look at three pertinent questions.
What would be the impact if developers could learn their trade faster and create more value?
The impact on your company – or your IT department – is clear. Low code applications allow beginning developers to create meaningful output while learning more complicated code and structures in the process. Even tech-savvy profiles, which are not developers, can learn to code and, in time, become proper developers while working on low code applications, providing a concrete output and thus real business value.
This leads us to the second question, with a surprising result:
How would the world change if the cost and speed of IT development were substantially reduced?
Imagine that companies could develop IT systems for a fraction of the price. Assuming companies would increase the number of processes supported with applications and digital functionalities is reasonable. The gains for the business world seem straightforward: More efficient output with fewer costs.
When thinking about speed, however, the result is different. For all the talk of agile companies, often businesses are still slow to change, and understandably so. It takes a lot of time and work to change processes, habits and IT systems before a company can embark on a different course. Arguably, even the IT systems, notoriously slow to adapt, hamper true agility the most. This is the reason the "agile methodology" was born.
So, increasing the speed of change (agility) will become a competitive advantage. This advantage grows exponentially the more unstable the environment in which a company operates. Low code development increases the speed of change required to survive.