(By Virender Jeet)
Speed is the new business imperative. Spending a lot of time on translating business requirements into applications is no longer an option. Business leaders are always looking for ways to reduce the process cycle time involved in developing software, optimize processes, and minimize operational costs. But, despite their proactive approach, the ever-widening gap in IT capacity to cater to the evolving business requirements act as a roadblock. To address the stumbling blocks and enable smooth operations, the need of the hour is to adopt an agile operating environment that can help enterprises quickly and smartly respond to dynamic business requirements, thereby eliminating technical debt.
Understanding Technical Debt and How it Acts as a Roadblock
With the increasing pressure to deliver rapidly on one hand and the shortage of skilled IT resources on the other, business leaders are faced with two challenges, modernizing their legacy systems and investing in technology that future-proofs the organization. However, to address these challenges quickly, they often end up investing in short-term point solutions. Point solution may seem to be the quick and easy fix for a business need, but it often incurs additional costs and rework over the software’s lifecycle. Acquiring and maintaining these short-term solutions over time can culminate, resulting in a technical debt for organizations. It, therefore, becomes indispensable to eliminate these technical debts while being able to leverage innovative technology.
A Low Code Platform to the Rescue
A low code platform empowers users to build business applications, with minimal coding requirements. The platform provides users with a modelling-driven environment to design and develop an end-to-end application with point-and-click configurability, thereby transforming employees into citizen developers Both skilled IT professionals and citizen developers can equally leverage the graphical application development tool to rapidly build industry-specific applications , thereby reducing dependency on IT while ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.
How Low Code Addresses the Technical Debt Challenge
The low code software development allows enterprises to get rid of manual coding, shorten development cycle time, and fast forward the deployment process. Furthermore, involving citizen developers can foster enterprise-wide innovation.
By leveraging low code, enterprises can:
- Modernize Legacy Systems
Legacy systems may help in running a business smoothly, but these often fail to match up to the pace of changing business demands. With low code, organizations can extend the life and enhance functionalities of existing legacy and line-of-business systems, including enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, core banking, and human resource management, thereby significantly minimizing transactional workload
- Unify Cloud and On-premise Applications
As deployments are increasingly shifting to cloud, it becomes imperative for organizations to integrate their legacy systems with modern cloud-based applications. With a low code framework, enterprises can seamlessly integrate on-premise systems with modern cloud-based applications, thereby reducing the upfront migration costs
- Embrace Platform Approach Over Point Solutions
Platform solutions provide a robust foundation and offer the ability to tailor a solution to organizational needs. A platform approach will help innovate and adapt to the changing market trends, while fostering continuous improvements. Furthermore, there are fewer integrations, lower implementation and maintenance costs as a result of a single technology stack
- Reduce IT dependency
With low code implementations, enterprises can expedite their application development process, empowering business users to build industry-specific applications rapidly. Empowering and transforming business users into citizen developers free up IT staff to focus on more value-added tasks
To Conclude
The dynamic business environment requires enterprises to innovate and evolve rapidly. Businesses must leverage technology frameworks that are designed to optimize existing resources and help in staying future-ready. Furthermore, enterprises need to envision for the long-term and invest in solutions that are current and future-ready.
(The author is the Senior Vice President (Sales & Marketing / Products) Newgen Software)
