August 28, 2019

Shift from Working in Silos. Achieve Agility Using Low-Code Platforms

Here’s a thought. Every minute, more than one person in the workplace is using an application to connect, communicate, or coordinate. More than one person is responding to emails from their smartphones, digitally updating a sales opportunity, virtually conducting a project meeting, or collaborating to update workflows and tasks.

Welcome to the hyper-connected workplace, a complex ecosystem where people, devices, and applications interact.

Be it an HR application, an instant messaging application, a task management tool, a virtual meeting, or a team coordination application, core business applications have become the lifeline of enterprise operations.

As enterprise applications become easier to develop, everyone in the workplace wants to develop an app for their specific business needs. An app to interact with other peers, to collaborate and share work, for leave management, IT support, project planning and management, content management, resource management, learning and development, the list could be endless. But what about the stamp of approval from IT? What about security and agility? Our Lines of Business (LoBs) working in silos?

LoB Apps - Fighting Functional Silos of Teams Within Teams 

When LoB units, with teams within teams, decide they need a software application to solve a business need, it leads to the development of innumerable enterprise applications.

While this system may solve individual business unit requirements, a need will arise to interact and connect, securely and seamlessly. With this hyper-connectivity comes the need for agility and security, and here’s where the technical challenge arises. The ground reality, however, is that LoB units within themselves and IT are working in silos, while in fact, they need to complement each other.

As digital businesses today need faster release cycles and agile development, ensuring tools, processes, and knowledge skills are established early in the development lifecycle is needed. To bridge silos and improve the performance of application development, a new approach of Agile Operations must be embraced.

The Winning Agile Approach for LoBs in the Application Economy 

Go beyond “Keeping the Lights On”. The core focus of LoB managers is on improving the quality and performance of applications. Maintaining the balance between “keeping the lights on” or reducing operational expenses and innovation will result in operational excellence and internal competency. Adopting an agile approach gives LoB leaders to streamline processes to achieve competency and optimize resources.

With agile development techniques, LoB and IT functions can be connected. IT is part of every business function. With more freedom for developers and LoB managers to develop applications independently, the bottleneck arises when it has to be vetted by the IT team for security and viability. To ensure better collaboration between IT and LoB, and accelerate project delivery, enterprises are embracing agile development practices.

Using Low-Code Platforms to Achieve Agility and Shift from Working in Silos 

A ‘not so secret ingredient to achieving agility is connecting people, devices, and applications seamlessly. Each line of business requires various types of applications specific to their business needs and as LoB applications store valuable data typically in legacy databases, integration with other systems is complicated.

Moreover, LoB apps are built by mainstream developers than business users. For them, innovation and code control are important factors in their development process. Here is where low-code platforms positively impact professional developers to build and maintain LoB applications. low-code platforms provide agility to LoB managers and team members by:

  • Streamlining the process of collaboration and developing solutions to connect business units seamlessly.
  • Enabling the reuse of legacy functions, integrations, and scripts, therefore empowering LoB app developers to rapidly develop and deliver responsive apps.
  • Providing visual tools that team members can use to communicate and collaborate better.
  • Enabling them to handle technology requirements to process data, develop shared repositories, automate workflows and create dashboards without writing a line of code or visiting the IT team.
  • Enabling better collaboration between  LoB and IT to drive real-time, data-driven decision-making.
  • Creating customized applications that provide a functional technology solution that drives specific business goals faster.

21st-century LoB leaders understand the importance of achieving agility. Low-code platforms empower professional LoB app developers to develop new apps to meet functional needs and bring LoB into the mainstream. In this hyper-connected workplace, low-code makes it possible to connect, communicate and coordinate, seamlessly.