Accelerating Digital Transformation Using Low-Code Platforms
The pandemic has created a sense of urgency for enterprises to digitize their business processes to ensure continued support to remote customers, partners, employees, and other stakeholders. While organizations are expected to respond to the changing business and customer expectations with speed and agility in developing customer-facing applications, traditional software development cycles are too long and slow to meet these needs. This is where low code comes to the rescue.
The implications of the growth of low -code platforms — platforms that allow users without programming knowledge to build apps — are profound as it helps organizations solve their complex mission-critical business processes. According to Gartner, by 2024, low-code app development will be responsible for more than 65% of all app development activity. The worldwide low-code development technologies market is projected to total $11.3 billion in 2021-end, an increase of 23.2% from 2020, the analyst firm said.
In this context, CXOToday had a conversation with Arvind Jha, Senior Vice President, Software Development, Newgen Software, who explains why more businesses are looking at low-code development solutions and how the platforms can help enterprises looking to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives.
What role do you see a low code application development platform playing in the digital journey of organizations?
The pandemic has compelled organizations to adopt digital in order to ensure uninterrupted services and enable business continuity. Thus, organizations cannot rely on traditional, time-consuming software development cycles. They need to build applications in a short time frame to meet growing business needs and deliver a superior customer experience to gain a competitive edge. This is where low code helps. A digital transformation platform, with low code capability, reduces the software/application development efforts through modelling-driven data objects and point-and-click application development tools. It allows organizations to move away from coding to developing and deploying applications rapidly. The platform typically provides a rich UI and interfaces to build self-service experiences with deep analytics. This enables organizations to modernize and evolve their applications with agility.
How does low code facilitate citizen and business developers? Can it completely replace traditional coding?
According to Forrester, low-code development platforms have the potential to make software development as much as 10 times faster than traditional methods. To effectively work in a remote work environment, employees need access to many applications that enable them to collaborate, serve customers, access information, and more. A low code platform empowers citizen and business developers to fulfil all these requests, without coding, by rapidly developing and deploying applications and integrating them with content services. The platform abstracts databases through its master data modules, allowing business users to quickly build analytical and data collection applications while pro developers can focus on critical application transformation. We believe that most enterprises will switch to low code-based application development over the next 3 to 5 years, given its advantages over traditional coding.
With remote work becoming the new normal, security vulnerability has increased and must be given a priority? What is your take on it?
There has been a 238% increase in global cyber attack volume during the pandemic.. To ensure effective operations and uninterrupted services while remote working, employees need access to the organization’s information, including customer data, financial records, operational data, etc. However, ensuring the security of the shared information is critical, especially when employees are working in unsecure network environments. A digital transformation platform with low code capability, backed by an enterprise-grade content management system, can enable information security through data and password encryption, extensive audit trails, SSL/HTTPS secure transmission, access permissions, and more. Our low code platform integrates with multiple security layers and protocols to provide top-notch security and safety to our customers.
How do you think the CIO’s role has evolved with Digital Transformation in the post-pandemic era?
As per Deloitte’s report, four in ten CEOs expect their CIOs or equivalent tech leaders to become key driver of business strategy. A CIO’s role transforms every few years. According to a survey, the top priorities for CIOs are to enable digital transformation, cyber security, cloud migration, and improve customer experience. CIOs today are not just responsible for cost optimization or modernizing IT infrastructure. They are spearheading digital transformation initiatives enterprise-wide and are playing a strategic role in the organization. CIOs that master low code application development and can enable their organizations’ digital transformation leveraging legacy applications and emergent digital business offerings might have an opportunity to move to the C-suite and even to the boardroom.
Enterprises across industries are rapidly embracing low code platforms. What is unique about your low code offering?
According to research published by G2.com, large enterprises typically use nearly 1900 different digital applications and add another 300 applications each year to achieve their digital transformation objectives. Most of these applications are simple or data analysis-focused. But, there is a need to modernize and transform more complex applications that integrate customer document handling with complex business process automation, rules, and third-party integration for data management, analytics, lookups, etc. As more enterprises are embracing digital transformation to simplify processes spanning siloed departments, information across data systems and files, and customer engagements across channels, we recently came up with a comprehensive digital transformation platform — NewgenONE to handle such levels of complexity for superior employee and customer experiences. The natively-built enterprise-grade low code application development platform combines process automation, content services, and communication management capabilities. The platform enables enterprises to leverage low code for developing and deploying complex, content-driven, and customer-engaging business applications on the cloud.
