Low-code automation for the digital enterprise

Low-code platforms can dramatically speed up the creation of sophisticated enterprise-class applications that incorporate complex business logic, automate workflow and case management activities, integrate with existing information systems and enable a slick user experience.

Low-code enables the automation of basic processes and allows employees with varied levels of experience to quickly develop scalable business applications. Low-code may also expand or enhance the functionality of existing information systems as they are shifted to a cloud-computing environment. In addition to this, such low-code solutions can supplement or even replace existing legacy applications in the back office.

Low-code platforms may be the missing link in today’s digital first, digital now environment—and the key to accelerating enterprise modernisation, agility, and efficiency.

Even as digital technologies change our world at a breath-taking pace, some companies are finding their own digital strategy stuck in low gear. They struggle to bring their work to scale, integrate it into their legacy information systems, or orchestrate their activities in a coordinated way across the enterprise. Too often, the end result is an unwieldy collection of siloed applications and disconnected digital experiments with only marginal business use and no measurable return on investment.

Featuring drag-and-drop functionality and prebuilt functions and integrations, low-code puts more problem-solving capabilities into the hands of non-IT professionals while allowing developers with varied levels of experience to quickly create scalable business applications in response to changing business demands.

Moving forward, we anticipate low-code platforms being used to address various enterprise needs:

1. Filling in gaps in existing ERP and software-as-a-service applications
2. Accelerating customer-centricity and legacy modernisation
3. Empowering the workforce to build with confidence and infuse automation across the business

Designed to align 

With low-code, organisations build once and deploy everywhere so web and mobile users get the same experience no matter what kind of device they’re using. This multichannel consistency helps boost productivity, enhance collaboration, and deliver the ideal user experience that businesses, their employees and their customers crave. With demonstrated agility and a diverse range of uses, low-code applications have the potential to function as the unifying fabric of a digital enterprise.

Low-code means organisations no longer need to think in terms of having separate agendas for robotic process automation, machine learning, analytics, or cloud—agendas often focused as much, if not more, on IT magic than on business outcomes, and requiring extensive coding after they are “completed” to deliver positive business results. Instead, they can pursue broad business transformation initiatives and ultimately deliver, for employees and customers alike, better experiences and better outcomes—all in less time.

Low-code, high reward

While low-code applications can be used to solve discrete challenges or seize singular opportunities, their more dramatic value is in serving as the connection that binds an organisation and its operations together in ways that simply haven’t been possible at scale in the past. Organisations that embrace this shift to low-code will find their digital strategies reinvigorated and more unified, and their operating capabilities more agile.

Enterprises will be able to respond more quickly to the ever-changing expectations of their customers, and deliver a more meaningful, engaging experience for their employees and customers. Low-code platforms are the technology that companies can buy once to build everywhere—and finally create the tightly connected digital enterprise they’ve long envisioned.

Low-code may be the most important technology investment your organisation will make over the next few years.

* Source: Enterprise reboot: Scale digital technologies to grow and thrive in the new reality, August 2020. HFS Research in conjunction with KPMG International.

** Source: Large Enterprises Succeeding With Low-Code, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Appian, March 2019 Low-code: The unifying fabric of the digital enterprise 100%