#49 The Low-Code Checklist Episode

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys. I'm here again with Arno, as usual, and we will talk about low-code, one of our favorite topics, isn't it, Arno?

Yes, that's right, Sascha. And what we want to do today is, is really run our listeners through a bit of a low-code checklist. And, you know, is a low-code platform your best option for software development? And, you know, currently when you're in the market for technology that will help your business run better, you know, you will go out to vendors and they'll make pitches to yourself that focuses on, on, on their current features and functionalities and all the capabilities they, they, they provide, perhaps their, their roadmaps. So it's, it's all very impressive things, um, but you know, they still might not deliver those sort of outcomes that, that, that you need, right? So, so, so what we're going to discuss today is really just a a checklist of when you evaluate your options, you know, what is it that you look for and can low-code perhaps, you know, be an option for technology choice, you know, to meet your needs in a very fast-paced world where we're sort of the speed of software development really needs to be quite quick, time to market needs to be quick. So, so it is really just running, running through that checklist today with our, with our listeners, give them a few tips if you're out there and you are up sort of in the early stages of your research into technology options. So perhaps this is a chance for you to perhaps, you know, look at those options and perhaps if low-code is something that might need those, those requirements, it's worth looking into.

Of course, yeah. Low-code is, as you mentioned, so big in the market and there are lots of vendors out there and they of course all say they are the best and low-code is the answer. It is definitely an answer, but yeah, let's go through the list and if you sort of can relate to some of those, then yeah, let's reach out to, or you can reach out to us and we can go deeper into that low-code market together with you. And we have probably, yeah, over 40 episodes on the podcast already, so there's probably a lot of information you can already get from there as well. But of course, always reach out to Arno and myself. So the first one up is, yeah, speed to market is critical. So if that is something you can relate to, maybe low-code might be the answer. Yeah, if you operate in a highly competitive market, so the faster you can stand out and come up with new applications, new solutions to meet your business needs, the better. I think there are lots of businesses out there, they have to be super fast with innovation. Yeah, so that's one thing. Yeah, I take it. I know, do you want to jump on the next one directly and then we—

Yeah, I'll, I'll do the next one as well. So again, if, um, on your list is, is for your organization to, um, to, to have more agility and also to be able to change very quickly, um, low-code is definitely something you need to look at. Of course, we always talk about agility. There's even terms like hyper-agility. And, you know, I think the ability to, to be agile is, is, is true now for virtually every, every business on the market. And, you know, like they say, it is an environment which, which, which is the new normal. And low-code obviously provides you, your organization, that ability to to rapidly change, rapidly evolve, create new applications, respond to challenges, exploit new opportunities. So very, very fast-paced way of developing software.

Mm-hmm. If you have complex business processes you want to automate or that must be automated, yeah, this is maybe also a good reason. So if you want to allow your staff to focus all the energy on activities that will add value to your business rather than on sort of the tedious repetitive manual tasks. Yeah, so with automation those can be handled more easily and more efficiently. So if that's, that's the thing for you, then yeah, low-code might be the answer.

So the next one is if you look at sort of approving paths and routing in your business, where stuff goes to for approvals and what input people must provide. If, again, if that's part of something that's really important for you, again, that just adds to the case to look at low-code. Of course, with the low-code platform, you can build very advanced orchestrations in your process, routing options, tasks, inputs that's captured from various people based on business rules. So again, you know, one of the items on the list that certainly jumps out to warrant going to a low-code or low-code vendors to look what's out there.

If sort of coding errors, security vulnerabilities, and data quality are sort of of concern, then yeah, looking at low-code might be, might, you know, or it might be good to look at low-code platforms. So there's normal coding, there might be a lot of effort in getting your coding done. And yeah, yeah, so you might not be aware of all the latest security things as a coder. And yeah, all these things if you're not aware of that, they might be a big problem for your solution. So yeah, with low-code, you can actually address those things easier because with pre-built components, et cetera, you might not need to worry about those things at all. It just works and you can get on with different things.

Yeah, and the next one is probably one of the, the bigger ones that you might be interested in, and it's, um, do you need to increase your developers' or your development team's productivity? Um, you know, and obviously we always hear about, um, business are putting pressure on IT teams to, to deliver software and you need to deliver application fast. Um, so low-code could be one of those where you can increase the developer's productivity and actually deliver these applications faster and alleviate the pressure on these teams.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, next important one on the checklist is, for example, if your stakeholders don't have the sort of data necessary available to make sort of informed decisions. Yeah, there could be a very negative impact on the business. So, so if you if you have bottlenecks slowing you down, um, and you don't know about them, um, slowing you down with your ability to make sort of all these informed and rapid decisions, then, um, you know, bringing in a local platform with those capabilities sort of easily are built in, um, is, is a good option.

And the next one on the list is if you have multiple data sources that needs to be integrated without migrating data. If that's on your list, then again, it's worth looking into low-code platform because you might have data stored in a variety of systems and formats. And if it's essential that all of that data is sort of accessible from a single interface, low-code platforms actually provide you with those connectors to connect all of these disparate data sources together. And surface them in single interfaces quite quickly and easily.

Yeah, if your organization operates sort of in an unregulated environment, you know, there's a lot of compliance involved. And with all these compliance needs and governance you need to have in your systems, out of the box. That's very nice. And then local platforms very often have those technologies and elements already built in. So you will not be caught out with lots of these compliance problems. Yeah, so it's good to jump on a local platform for those reasons as well.

Yeah, and the next one talks about technical debt. And if your IT department has got a lot of technical debt and that needs to be reduced or eliminated, of course, what we talk about is there's a massive backlog that needs to be looked at and, you know, it just becomes longer and longer if it's left unchecked. So, you know, obviously low-code provides you with that, you know, rapid speed to market for your apps. So, So it is an opportunity to actually eliminate that technical debt by focusing your efforts in building these applications very quickly and responding to business requirements and end users, their needs very quickly by using a low-code platform.

Yeah, another really important one is the maintenance of your technology and your platforms in general. Some older technologies can be, could be quite, quite tedious to maintain and to control updates and upgrades and all that stuff. So it is a good thing to look at low-code platforms if you're wasting a lot of time on that maintenance and you can't really concentrate on that innovation. Yeah, because we want to be fast, agile, and we want to have something easy to maintain these days. So Yeah, a local platform might be the right answer for you.

Yeah, and I mean, these are just some of the kind of the technical or the typical, I guess, items that people might have on their list when they evaluate new technology vendors. And I think these checklist items cover such a broad range of points that you need to consider and that you need to evaluate. Sasha, you talked about security and we talk about sort of elimination of technical debt, getting rapid sort of time to market when it comes to app development, alleviating pressure. So all of these things. So, so again, you know, a low-code platform satisfies those requirements and challenges because of course what the low-code platform does, it creates a lot of that coding in the background and adheres to very, very good and high security standards. And because it takes care of that coding, you know, it is something that is also very cost effective to use. So it's not just kind of the speed of execution, but in terms of the investment in it, it is a lot lower than conventional high-code sort of development approaches. You know, it's fast. They say it can be up to 10 times faster than high-code solutions. It's very powerful. You know, you can, create very comprehensive automation, automated applications that integrates into other core business systems. And again, it's easy to maintain. Everything is in one platform. You know, I talked about security, but all of the security standards and the device standards, all of that is built into the platform. It doesn't need to be coded. You don't need to be a security expert. You could just use these blocks to, to, uh, to build your applications and make your business a lot more profitable.

Yeah, and then low-code covers so much these days, isn't it? So some, some, some of our listeners might have heard just about building low-code apps, just a normal typical sort of business apps like a holiday request app, etc., etc. But actually low-code it can reach far wider. So it can be low-code automation, low-code process mining, low-code software robotics. So all these tools, some of these tools are more complex than others, and there are lots of vendors out there. They offer those technologies sort of in a low-code, on a low-code level, and Yeah, so it's sort of— we talk, talk here in the podcast around sort of several pillars of automation, and we mainly look at the low-code elements of that here. And it goes to low-code AI. So AI doesn't need to be complex and difficult anymore. A few episodes back, we talked about how easy it can be to do text natural language processing with AI and computer vision and all those things that that's all available on low-code. So very powerful and has to be fast, powerful, and easy to maintain. Yeah, I think then everyone will have lots of success with low-code.

Yeah, absolutely. And again, you know, you talk about bringing in quite advanced tooling to solve, you know, business problems like eradicating manual processes. There is so many commodity-based AI engines out there that you can just subscribe to. It's very easy drag and drop, very, very low-code environment to create the solutions. Robotic process automation that automates repetitive mundane tasks to take that robot out of the human. Very, very powerful traditional workflow automation. And of course, We talk about chatbots a lot. That in itself is quite a big area. And all of those platforms are low-code platforms. So there's no need to hire very specialist people to create these solutions and maintain them.

Yeah, and I guess everyone who is now looking at low-code won't be sort of one of the rare species out there. So So in the previous episodes, we discussed the Forrester in general, the S&S analyst and the Forrester Waves. And one of those analysts predicts that by the end of 2021, sort of 75% of development teams will use low-code platforms, development teams within sort of businesses. Yeah, that's, that's a huge increase of sort of they say 44% increase from last year to this year. So it is really in trend. But yeah, with that checklist we did cover today, you should have something on your hand to quickly see if that works and is needed. And if that's the case, Arno and I, I'm here on the podcast to answer all your questions. And you can reach out to us on all the social channels. You can visit our website, theautomationguides.net, to sort of join the community, become a member, and yeah, become sort of strong with low-code. Yeah, I guess, are there anything to add on this? Otherwise, we can wrap up that episode.

No, that was very good. Thank you, Sasha, for, for sharing your thoughts as well on that. And of course, yeah, for all our listeners, um, if you require any help to demystify all of this, uh, low-code business, you know, feel free to, to get in touch with us. Um, we'll take you through the, the very easy steps to explain, perhaps by an example, what it is and how you can use it. Of course, between myself and Sasha, we've got hundreds if not thousands of use cases of where low-code has been deployed, which types of projects it's good for. And, you know, it's a good way to, you know, to get started with software development if you don't want to have huge investment in if you compare that to conventional high-code development. So yeah, feel free to contact us, reach out to us, and thank you for listening to our podcast. And thank you, Sascha.

Thank you. So then let's automate. Unfortunately, that's it again. With this episode of the Process and Automation Podcast. If you like this episode, please give us a 5-star rating and don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any upcoming episode. We hope you will tune in next time, and until then, let's automate it!