#27 Low Code vs Traditional App Development Part 1

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys. In today's episode, we will cover an interesting question we get from our listeners a lot. So what are the cost benefits of low-code versus the traditional app development methods? And for this, to answer this question, we will also cover sort of some basics. So as you know, most companies have opted for custom-made software development over the years. So the traditional coding as you know it, sitting in the basement with lots of pizza. But it's started to give way to low-code development as a very viable option. And it is viable because Forrester states in general it's faster development. And this is why it's so attractive, 10 times faster. And because of that, the low-code development market is growing at the rate of nearly 50% year to year. So this is incredible and somehow in line with what other analysts say in general about the growing automation market. So one question to answer is really, what is low-code app development? So we're talking about this a lot here on this podcast. Arno and I also have chats about low-code on Clubhouse regularly on a weekly basis. And yeah, low-code is one of these newer approaches to build business applications and building business applications quickly. So that's in terms in comparison to traditional development. You don't have to write code line by line in a normal way, so you completely avoid this. So it's a way to develop applications very, very quickly with sort of minimal hand coding, drag and drop usually, or you have visual kind of editors— not editors, visual way of building your applications One thing to probably compare it to is building websites these days. Back then you had to ask someone to do your HTML coding, and these days when you build a website yourself for your club or so, you can just drag and drop everything. So everything is done for you, and this is very similar with business applications and low-code app development. So you can really work from existing building blocks, existing templates that have been produced by the vendors or some partners of these vendors. So they create these ready-to-go components, drag-and-drop pre-built elements, and you can very easily build your forms and objects. And you're basically— you get this working application in, yeah, with less hassle and less time. And Yeah, and that basically means app development can be handled by even those with limited coding knowledge. So the so-called citizen developers, that's, that's a term you probably hear more and more because of these pre-designed elements. So you can customize or configure them rather than you actually need to develop. So yeah, so that means both developers and non-developers can use low-code because low-code means if there is a situation you need to do a bit more in-depth stuff, you can go still into a coding mode and get stuff done. And otherwise you just use the low-code components, no-code components even. And yeah, less training to get started really. So your whole team can just put these ideas they have into applications.

Yes, of course, with, like Sascha mentioned, with low-code development, it is very easy to get started. It is using building blocks to assemble applications very quickly. And there's, there's a lot of benefits in doing so because of course, you know, one of the benefits is that low-code development has this potential to decrease the time it takes to meet business requirements when you build out these these apps. And like Sascha mentioned, you know, according to Forrester Research, using low-code can accelerate development times tenfold compared to traditional app development methods. And this allows for really kind of faster delivery for a minimum viable product. And of course, you can take that product and then evolve it by using user feedback. You can get something out there and get feedback from your end users and transform this into a sort of a product that fulfills their needs over time. And low-code is a great way to aid digital transformation within side companies. You can automate tasks using very simple applications and companies save time in doing so where they shift the resources away from the manual work they would normally do that's associated with, you know, manual processes. And of course, you know, if you compare low-code with traditional app development, traditional app development might take too long and cost too much, or it might not be kind of worth your while in terms of effort for the development teams to engage with these type of projects because there might be other higher business priorities. So low-code is a perfect way that you can kind of slot these sort of projects into your backlog, deliver very quickly, use some of the business people's knowledge to deliver these apps and provide value. And, you know, like we know, IT teams are often very overloaded with backlog and they're understaffed in, you know, in the amount of work they've already got. So low-code really allows these people to allow these projects to be created very quickly without tying up these expensive, highly skilled development teams. We always described it as sort of a best-of-breed shadow IT solution where you bypass some of the IT development team completely. And you could build these solutions pretty fast within a sort of a, I guess, a controlled environment. And again, you know, staffing development teams can be quite expensive. And, you know, there is a shortage of developers out there, you know, and your average kind of salary for a software developer, a senior person that writes traditional code, is around the sort of $80,000 to $100,000 a year mark. So that's quite, quite expensive. And, you know, if you take sort of the benefits that person has on top of that workspace cost, hardware, software, you know, that, that's quite a big cost for a business. So low-code development really allows you to sort of, I guess, bypass some of those costs by allowing sort of these, these low-level applications developed developers really to engage in development as well to solve their problems and really kind of taking this out to the masses and alleviating some of that, I guess, you know, the pressures on these sort of IT staff, you know, the technical developers.

Yeah, and it's not necessarily just the cost. I think if you, even if you have the budgets available, I think it's really difficult to find the very skilled software developers out there. So you currently, we argue, or not argue, we hear more and more every day in the news. We have this digital skills gap everywhere because of automation. Everyone wants to digitalize their business, wants to automate their business, and obviously every, every business is looking for these skills in the market. And currently there's such a big gap. So if you, if you only looking for software developers in that traditional sense, yeah, you, you will not find them, or they're even more expensive than what Arno mentioned. So they're very, very much in high demand. There's always sort of competition headhunters coming, coming around. So, so, so this will always be then a problem if, if, if this will be the way of developing. I think low-code is, is really giving that chance to, to even IT grads coming in if they are upskilled to, to jump onto low-code development projects and fill that gap. I think there's— and it's not just low-code apps, there's so many low-code areas these days: RPA, chatbots, low-code AI, low-code low-code process mining. So everything comes as low-code these days, and it is perfect for this new sort of the new type of talent coming through. But this talent has to be prepared for what is coming. Currently, we have that huge gap, and I think that leads as well to the potential pitfalls with low-code app development. So if you allow sort of a wider pool of people to develop applications, sort of super users within departments, IT graduates coming in, it might be easy to lose control over governance. So everyone is building apps because they have great ideas on the way to work, on the commute, they're thinking about how they can improve their department, how they can get rid of this Excel email workflow. So they come up with all these ideas and they want to get going, but without these strict controls, controls and guidelines within the organization. The IT department will usually make sure everyone adheres to them to a certain extent without sort of slowing that innovation. But, but it's very important to, to follow these strict controls, uh, controls, protocols and guidelines within that organization so applications are not becoming a mess and are not very difficult to scale when they actually go live. So that's, that's very important to look at. So yeah, because of low-code app platforms out there, and these platforms use common components and pre-built sort of modules there. I think, yeah, there's, there's much less ability to customize, I think. So yeah, it's a pro and con with these two worlds. This is why low-code rather than no-code is more the thing, because it just doesn't give you that specific component and that's it very often. It allows sort of the more, more advanced developer to customize it, but still in some aspects you have to use the platform as it is. Very often when it comes to user interface, some style elements and some, some structures are very, very, um, yeah, they are given, um, and usually it's not a problem. So you can always find ways to, to make this attractive to the business. Sometimes the business They want to have 100% control of every pixel and position. But, but yeah, it may prevent you from getting the exact functionality or integration you need.

Yeah.

Yeah. And in traditional app development, you're only limited by the sort of, by the, by the skill level, the expertise of the developers. So they can just open up a sort of a Visual Studio or another development platform and just start coding and they can do pretty much everything. But some of these local platforms, Yeah, so it's a bit limited.

And yeah, I guess it helps in the governance, right? Because it provides those guardrails.

Yeah, less bugs, isn't it? So if you start writing lines of code immediately, with every line of code, it's a potential place for a bug. And if you have that wrapped up, an integration into an ERP system, usually that's quite complex. If that is already there as a building block, as a Lego block, we might say, it's quite easy to use. And this is sort of you're pretty sure this is not a place where the bug occurs anymore because it's tested and by lots of companies and customers. Yeah, and I would say, yeah, another pitfall for local platforms is sort of you are locked in with the vendor. So some of these platforms, they come, they give you the cloud platforms ready to go, you can do everything on it, you build all your applications on it, you have a dev environment managed, test environment managed, production environment managed, very easy, no hassle really there. But if you, if you like that idea, you're building out hundreds of processes within your organization. So you don't have just one purchase-to-pay application. Maybe that's where companies usually start, with a small, small kind of proof of value. But if there's excitement there, usually that extends to hundreds of process applications. And you're then potentially locked in. So depending on the platform, Yeah, you, you're locked in into this underlying code. You can't work outside of that platform. So yeah, so you can't even use very easily like a tool to switch into a new platform. So once these applications with this low-code, yeah, if you take it out and very often you can't really take it out, but it wouldn't work with a sort of runtime that that vendor provides. Yeah. So, so that's, that's That's why it's crucial to evaluate licensing and portability when choosing a low-code platform. But I think generally, if the business value is so much bigger than potentially those kind of issues, then maybe it's not even an issue.

Well, I think it, it use it where it needs to be used at a specific sort of level, right? So If there are use cases where you could pass a low-code platform to a business user to assemble a workflow or a digital form to solve a particular problem, and that's the scope of that requirement, then that's great because, you know, you, you are providing this person with the ability to solve that problem, you know, with inside your governance frameworks. It might only be internal facing, so there might be some limitations on how it looks and how it behaves, but it's still one less problem with inside your business. You know, there might be other problems which is customer-facing problems where it's not necessarily just up to a business user to solve that. Perhaps this business user understand the concepts of low-code and how to create a minimal viable product, but they might need some kind of deeper expertise within low-code to create some additional sort of low-level implementation that uses a bit of scripting or coding to solve specific problems that makes this fit for purpose to, you know, to put in front of, you know, your customers, for example. So again, it's kind of putting the solution to the problem next to the type of problem you have and who uses it. And I think that, of course, you know, you're not going to rely on citizen developers to create a very strategic system using low-code. That will be a blend of people. But at the same time, you might have some very elementary problems that business people can fix using low-code, and you want to give them those tools to do so. And so I guess it's kind of like choosing this right approach for you as a business, and you need to look at the scope of the project to understand, you know, what type of tool do we need to use and what type of skill set do we need to deploy or mobilize to implement a particular solution for a problem. And, you know, I think that you need to look at low-code as one of those options in the box to understand, you know, what sort of expertise do I need to solve this problem? You know, what's the nature of this problem? And, you know, at least it is another development option for you to accelerate your development and to, you know, get a very cost-effective solution to solve specific, you know, a specific problem using low-code. So it's a very compelling capability with Insider Business. I always like the Lego analogy. You have a problem, you can assemble a solution very quickly using drag-and-drop constructs. You can take advantage of, um, the, the capabilities that's inside the box in terms of security, login controls, reporting controls, data persistence, frameworks for case management frameworks for document approval, frameworks for document management, frameworks for communication, automated responses, task management, frameworks to present tasks on mobile phone, for example. So if somebody receives a task, it's not just something that lives on their desktop somewhere, it is something that they could have on their mobile phone as well and action on mobile phone. And then of course, not just stopping with traditional low-code workflow automation, also looking at low-code chatbots, looking at RPA, you know, that's all low-code as well. So it's, it's really kind of all of these different technical capabilities that you could use to assemble a solution to a problem. And these type of technical capabilities, you could put this in front of people with various degrees of skill. And obviously the complexity of the type of problem they would solve is a function of that skill set. So if you do have somebody that wants to create a very simple document approval workflow, integrate DocuSign, or a simple workflow where it gets— the document gets routed to various people, you know, that's a great use case for a citizen developer. To create, right? If it's a more complicated problem that perhaps you could use low-code to accelerate development, but you still need integration into a third-party system, then of course you might need expertise of a more technical person. So you could have a scenario where you have a blended team of business people kind of configuring the user journeys. There are elements in there where they need to engage somebody that's more skilled up in integration to help them configure that part of the block, the building block, and then rapidly assemble this solution using the outputs of all of these various parties working together. Again, for me, it's this ultimate collaboration tool where people can do what they can do within the skills they've got to accelerate development without writing code or minimum code. And, you know, with inside IT governance and where there are complicated bits that needs to be integrated to solve more advanced problems, like I said, integrations, for example, that creates a better refined product and a better refined output, then of course, you know, you need that kind of more technical skill, but Again, collectively, it reduces that burden on IT. It accelerates that time to market to these solutions. It makes a difference to how people solve their problems and how quickly these problems solve. And it's all positive steps in the right direction. And I think that's the kind of right approach for me, that kind of nice blend of all of these tools that you use together. To solve these business problems really cost-effectively. And, you know, some people argue and, and say, well, there is a licensing cost, but I think if you look at the, the overall overarching business case, um, and you are very firm on the, the, the kind of benefits that you want to reap from the low-code platform and you really adopt it quite aggressively The investment in license quickly diminishes when you look at the return the product provides you in terms of business benefits. And this can be hard returns where, you know, you do actually save people's time. That's the FTE costs, right, that potentially, you know, could offset, you know, the impact or the cost to your licensing of your low-code platform.

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