Low-Code — Innovation at Your Fingertips

Explore To Get Ahead

Steve Jobs once said: ‘Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower’. Who wouldn’t want to put their business in the former position and gain a real competitive advantage? If innovation truly is the key to success, how can it be boosted in a business environment? The answer that often comes to mind is technology, something that simply wouldn’t exist without innovation. On the other hand, advanced technologies are often considered necessary to further innovate and create. Still, the application of these technologies may require a significant investment of both money and time, and companies afraid to lose either sometimes simply give up on new projects before they even start.

There is, however, a technology that can open up new innovation potential — and it’s low-code. Let’s have a look at how it can help you assuage any doubts related to exploring and experimenting.

Innovative Solutions: Don’t Fear Mistakes

Innovation requires experimentation, an idea can’t push you forward unless it’s been tested out and turned into something tangible. In traditional software development, experimenting and validating ideas are often complicated processes that require an advanced skillset across the team. They’re also time-consuming — and one may wonder what happens if the experiment fails? Do you feel like you’ve just exhausted your resources to no avail? This fear of making mistakes may call a halt to many innovation initiatives and, at the same time, leave your company no further down the line to becoming the aforementioned leader. This is where low-code comes into the picture. As opposed to those traditional means and ways, a low-code platform can become your experimental ‘playground’ where you can easily and quickly test out your ideas. Instead of engaging a dedicated team to write code from scratch, you can leverage low-code platforms’ built-in visual tools and drag and drop components to smoothly move from thinking to creating. What’s more, low-code allows for collaboration between technologists and non-technical teams. Experts from different fields receive a common ground where everybody can work on the application hands-on and be inspired by other perspectives.

One of the inherent qualities of low-code is rapid development. This means you can simultaneously try out several ideas and pick out the ones that show the best results. You can build your app quickly and even push it out to the market just to test the waters and see how it resonates with your customers. If it doesn’t succeed, you can easily pull back and improve. The cost-effectiveness and delivery speed of low-code remove the fear of failure and loss.

One of our clients, a global expert in the water and waste sectors, utilises Siemens Mendix, one of the world’s leading low-code platforms, across a range of their original solutions. These include a customer self-service portal, mobile apps and an eCommerce platform. The solutions are unique and provide their users with quick access to information, services and safe financial transactions. All of them help the company maintain its position as a market leader. The client continues to challenge their competitors by constantly improving their services and innovating customer experience through digital solutions. According to their IT Director: ‘Low-code makes us less afraid of failing when building software’. Low-code instils a sense of security and helps companies like this innovate and continue to learn as mistakes can be quickly turned into successes.

Rapid Development: Set the Trends for Your Industry

In the competitive business world, few companies can afford to sit on good ideas and wait until someone else comes up with a similar one. Even fewer can get by without at least trying their hand at innovating and modernising their tools or processes. Be it a start-up looking to establish its position on the market, or a well-settled enterprise that wants to expand, it’s the innovative solutions that let them meet these goals. Again, this is where low-code can tip the balance in your favour.

Adopt your ideas early by utilising resources available to you instantly in the low-code platform, and take advantage of automated controls and other measures to keep your solution safe. Deploy it to the cloud with simple steps and quickly scale it up or down, according to your needs. With a variety of options at hand and nothing hindering their creativity, your team is empowered to work independently and quickly.

Does low-code with its rapid development really make such a difference? Let’s discuss the example of another one of our clients, a technology start-up working for the insurance sector. They noticed a gap in the market and seized the opportunity to fill it with an innovative solution created with low-code. Their original, Mendix-based application accelerates and improves collaboration among various professionals handling insurance claims. It provides a safe way of communicating and document sharing while leveraging data science and AI functionalities, all resulting in considerable cost savings. The alpha release of the solution was built and ready to be tested with prospective clients within only 3 weeks — whereas with traditional development it would take months to reach a similar stage. If you can shorten the time needed to develop your solutions by that much, you’ll be well on your way to getting an edge over your competition.

Conclusion

Though low-code brings many benefits to software development (at the hands of both technologists and ‘citizen developers’), its innovation-enhancing potential is certainly a quality worth exploring. With the adoption of this approach, managers and their teams are no longer slowed down by the perspective of months of work before an idea turns into a solution. There’s no fear that this vast and costly undertaking will fail, leaving them practically empty-handed. They’re free to test out their creativity, inspired to collaborate and bring even more ideas to the table. And, once that outstanding concept has been found, it’ll be out there in the market in no time.

If you’d like to identify low-code use cases within your organisation, download our latest “Solving Business Problems with Low-Code: Use Cases & Benefits” eBook.