Originally published by Vijay Pullur, CEO WaveMaker, in App Developer Magazine.
The role of CIOs has evolved. With the emergence of the app economy, they need to adapt to a hyper-connected world, work with the next-gen, digital workforce, and adopt a strategic role.
To support the fact that the role of CIOs is changing, the 2019 ‘State of the CIO’ report by IDG states,
“67% of IT leaders are spending more time on business strategist activities to help drive innovation and nurture go-to-market plans.
Over the next 3 years, CIOs expect to not only retain but to expand their newly-established business strategist charter.
77% of CIOs are planning to devote time to activities like driving business innovation.”
What’s your level of involvement? How are you planning to drive business innovation? Where would you start your digital transformation journey? Take a look at our previous post which emphasizes that the best place to start would be at the core, which is IT.
To achieve digital transformation success, enterprise application development is emerging as an integral aspect. Get to know how you can drive digital transformation ROI using enterprise application development and low-code platforms.
Leveraging the Power of Low-Code
How rapid application development platforms help CIOs drive digital transformation ROI
In modern enterprise application development, ‘transformative technologies such as rapid application development platforms drive ROI by providing ready-made application infrastructure, full-stack development, improved usability with rich user interfaces, predefined best of the breed technology stack, API-driven integration, and business user participation.
By adopting low-code platforms and rapid application development, you can align teams and enable them to focus on innovation providing the necessary support to your digital transformation strategy and revenue-generation initiatives.
Low-code platforms provide the agility to create and deliver custom-built applications that revolve around user preferences, with a speed that resonates to demand. CIOs who utilize rapid application development to implement their DX strategy have a better opportunity to create custom enterprise apps that adapt to experiences rather than devices.
What rapid application development platforms offer that traditional IT development doesn’t is ‘inward-facing agility with intra-departmental APIs. By supporting the development and delivery of custom LOB apps efficiently and on time, low-code platforms ensure enterprise agility.
As traditional software runs out of steam, enterprises can transition IT infrastructure to app modernization using low-code development. With rapid app development and agile integration, CIOs can support the digitally-empowered workforce in a cost-effective and efficient manner.
To realize ROI on modernization and transformation, CIOs need to ensure a culture of innovation, where creativity and productivity are instilled. They have to be committed, involved and encourage technology enthusiasts to work on emerging technologies.
CIO’s ‘Not-so-Secret’ Approach to Digital Transformation Success
Business transformation is all-encompassing, it affects everyone, involves everyone, and requires strategic alignment between processes, people, technology, and culture. There is a ‘not-so-secret approach to digital transformation success. It's the innovation philosophy of design thinking. More than ever before, CIOs are leveraging design thinking (observing and analyzing user behavior to gain insights) when devising IT development strategies. This, however, will be covered intensively in another article.
As a tip-off, there are several sides of digital transformation you need to consider:
Many questions need to be answered, several strategies need to be made, different demands need to be met, now. As they say “take your time but hurry up”, because digital transformation demands velocity!
With transformation comes change
With change comes making choices
With choosing comes responsibility
Make it count!
Rapid Application Development (RAD), also termed low-code development, is a visual approach to creating apps that enable greater developer efficiency. However, what started as technology to help the masses address the speed of basic development has since matured so RAD definition is changing.
RAD platforms started out as tools for citizen developers without substantial technical knowledge of coding, who could use intuitive “out of the box” features to create applications suited for simple departmental and experimental needs. While these early RAD platforms (not this "rad") brought basic coding capabilities to the masses, the applications created were short-lived and unable to evolve and scale with changing business needs. To address this gap in enterprise IT, RAD technology transformed to meet the needs of developers looking to efficiently undertake more sophisticated legacy app modernization projects, end-user customer experience updates, and long-term digital transformations.
Gone are the days of non-responsive front-end technology, cumbersome integration approaches, and non-standards-based widget and page development. The RAD platforms of today are far more nimble – they’re capable of leveraging millions of APIs and the most advanced open-standards-based technology stacks while maintaining enterprise-grade security and end user experience. As a result, IT teams can tap into these functionalities to execute large-scale digital transformation and modernization projects faster than ever before. The technology enables a higher degree of coding intermixed with visual development, facilitating the creation of long-standing and flexible enterprise-grade applications (see Figure 1).
While there’s no question that low-code platforms have transformed over time to become the advanced, high-impact digital tools of today, the enterprise IT environment continues to evolve as user expectations and preferences shift over time. This dynamic begs the following question: where is RAD headed next?
The future of RAD platforms
Increased usage – As technology further matures and encompasses professional developers’ needs, RAD technology will become the de-facto productivity platform for professional developers executing long-lasting enterprise IT modernization and digital transformation projects.
Enhanced enterprise-grade applications – Over time, professional developers will continue to push the boundaries of RAD as they bring best practices in app development, deployment, and DevOps from their vast experiences into every stage of the application lifecycle. Enhancements will span a range of capabilities, including cloud deployment, real-time integration, and increased developer collaboration.
A central hub for app development via integrations – With increasing API adoption and service consumption, RAD platforms will continue to become the central hub for application development via lightweight integrations to external services. The integration model will redefine the user experience and will serve a specific use case. Examples of such integrations include RPA, BPM, cloud services, SaaS services, IoT, AI, analytics, etc.
Emphasized digital experiences – The customer/user experience will only grow more important as enterprises compete digitally. As a result, RAD platforms will increasingly cater to building highly user-centric digital experiences with clear customer touchpoints.
Long-lived applications – With serious professional enterprise application developers using flexible RAD processes, the future will hold increased development of mainstream business applications that prevail for many years (long-lived applications) and continually serve organizational needs.
RAD platforms have come a long way since their inception, and time will tell exactly how citizen and professional developers will leverage this approach in the future. Regardless, the IT community can count on the fact that as enterprises’ digital needs continue to develop, RAD platforms will continue to be a high-impact tool for modernizing years of legacy applications and creating digitally agile business infrastructures.
Originally published by Vijay Pullur, CEO WaveMaker, in App Developer Magazine.
Rapid Application Development (RAD) or low-code development is a dynamic approach to creating applications that minimize hand-coding to increase developer productivity. At first, low-code technology grew out of the needs of citizen developers with little coding knowledge to create basic applications using intuitive "out of the box" features - but over time, the technology has matured drastically to suit the nuanced and complex needs of IT professionals.
Today's low-code technology features advanced open-standards-based approaches, comprehensive API capabilities, enterprise-grade security measures, and more to help developers execute on sophisticated digital transformation and modernization projects efficiently. However, the evolution of low-code technology is far from over. In fact, I predict that the low-code space will continue to grow in the following ways in the year ahead:
1. Increased usage - Low-code technology enables a higher degree of nuanced coding intermixed with intuitive visual development, allowing developers to efficiently create high-quality and specific enterprise-grade applications. As more and more enterprise IT teams recognize the ways in which this type of development process can free up internal resource constraints, low-code technology will become the de-facto productivity platform for professional developers.
2. Enhanced enterprise-
3. Central hub for app development via integrations - With increasing API adoption and service consumption, low-code platforms will become even more of a central hub for application development. The current model of enabling streamlined integrations to external services will open the door to an even wider range of use cases - including RPA, BPM, SaaS IoT, AI, and analytics integrations.
4. Emphasized digital experiences - The customer/user experience will only grow more important as enterprises go head-to-head in a progressively competitive digital environment. As a result, RAD technology will increasingly cater toward building highly user-centric digital experiences with clear customer touchpoints where feedback can be provided quickly and easily from any device, channel, or location.
5. Longer-lived applications - The flexibility of low-code technology will contribute to a future in which most mainstream business applications are built to be long-lived and capable of adjusting and scaling alongside changing business objectives. Previously, factors like cumbersome integration approaches would result in the creation of "locked in" applications incapable of change over time - which is both inefficient and costly.
There's no question that low-code technology will continue to be a high-impact tool for CIOs and developers looking to tackle big enterprise IT projects more efficiently and flexibly in 2019 - and beyond.
Originally published by Vijay Pullur, CEO WaveMaker, in VMblog.com
According to Forrester Research, the low-code market is here to stay as they estimated it will go up to $15.4 billion by 2020. This in other words defines that enterprises are beginning to realize long-term benefits while they make a shift to using low-code platforms. Businesses today seek app-based solutions built quickly and easily to meet their business needs. This has caused a change in the dynamics of low-code platforms, which earlier offered niche-based solutions are now expanding with the rising number of use cases being offered by enterprises from various industries as mentioned in the table below,
Banking and insurance | Healthcare and pharma | Energy and utilities | Information technology and services |
---|---|---|---|
CRM apps | Patient management app | Business process management apps | Legacy app modernization |
loan approval app | Accounting and invoicing app | CRM apps | Business process management apps |
Insurance management app (Read case study) |
Laboratory information management app | Monitoring dashboards | CRM and ERP platform dashboards |
While there are a plethora of industries with varying app requirements, the use cases to build these apps roughly remain similar.
With more enterprises and businesses making a smarter choice with low-code platforms, this list will further grow and provide greater depth in the capabilities of low-code platforms in the future bringing success to more businesses.
WaveMaker’s low-code platform has supported enterprises that can bring their applications to life with minimal code, effort, and at a reasonable cost. With WaveMaker’s out-of-the-box features, the use cases mentioned above and more can be tackled easily providing a smart choice for your enterprise application-based needs.
Today, enterprises are embarking on a journey venturing into new possibilities of application development to meet business demands. The adoption of low-code application development platforms seems to be very popular with most enterprises these days. However, while some have made the transition to low-code application development, there are enterprises out there who are unsure and hesitate in making this change to adapt to a low-code platform. This is understandable, as there are risks involved when it comes to choosing a low-code platform and a wrong choice can be costly.
We have put together five pitfalls that an enterprise can avoid while they choose a low-code app development platform.
Benjamin Franklin famously said, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". Keeping that in mind, the above pitfalls can be avoided and can help enterprises choose the right low-code platform for their application development needs.
WaveMaker’s RAD Platform is designed keeping in mind the requirements of a Software Developer, Citizen developer/business user, IT architect, and CIO.
Get Started to find out more about WaveMaker’s modern low-code RAD platform.