#98 Low-Code and No-Code in 2024 - Part 1

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys. Yes, you know, here on the podcast we are chatting about all things process and automation. Yeah, we can't stop talking about that. That area. Yeah. And of course, with me here as well is Arno. Hello, Arno.

Hey, Sacha, hope you're well. And to all our listeners out there, hope you guys are doing well as well.

Yeah. And one of the topics, without doubt, when you listen back to all of our episodes and over the recent years, we have been talking a lot about low-code and no-code and everything related to that, workflow automation, AI, etc. We all know the advantages of automation and sort of customer-facing apps are acknowledged by many businesses these days. So we know that the demand for software development increases rapidly as well. So this is why low-code development sort of came up, as it provides an opportunity for companies to to deliver faster and cheaper applications with— there's this new term which came up over the last years, was the so-called citizen developers. And yeah, we now see several generations, or we are now several generations in with low-code and no-code. And we can say that this really means that software development is becoming more democratized. So really everyone can get going with applications application development. It's not just something just for high-code developers. So the developers would just do the normal coding like Java and C and then C#, etc. So, so what was driving the hype, or what is driving the hype? When we, when we look back within organizations, very often we see there is a misalignment of business and IT teams. And yeah, that can be considered as that critical problem when it comes to new applications and software development within companies. So, so yeah, it was, was low-code development platforms. We, there are plenty out there from, from different vendors. So yeah, IT and business teams can now sort of be a bit closer together and, and get started with that rapid and continuous agile development. What does it mean for, for business going forward? Yeah, the time to market and speed are key drivers. So that's, That's what the C-suite is really interested in. Yeah, and that will ultimately bring business that competitive advantage. With low-code development, yeah, we can develop faster and increase that productivity. So yeah, with that said many times here, and we said that here many times on the podcast already, Forrester and other analysts also say that a lot. So 10 times faster software development with low-code and with no-code even faster. But we dive into that a bit deeper. So yeah, so let's look a bit closer into that again. So one of our favorite topics, of course, here. And yeah, I guess that's a topic for pretty much all businesses. We, of course, talk about enterprise business use cases here a lot, but it means what we're talking about in a bit is for any size business. So if you're small business, startup, scale-up, that's content for you now coming up. Yeah, Arno, are you happy to give our listeners a brief overview of low-code and no-code?

Yeah, we can dive straight in. Thanks. That was quite the intro of—

Yes, sorry, couldn't stop talking.

I think that the key takeaway there is obviously the time to market. So this is the speed that you could develop software with inside your business. And, you know, there's, there's quite a few numbers being thrown around. Obviously, for some of the analysts, 10 times faster. We see 7 times faster, sometimes 5 times faster. But essentially, to understand where this, this speed comes from, it is critical to understand what low-code and no-code development is. And if you've never heard the term before, it basically allows you to develop software without actually writing any code or allows you to develop software while writing minimal code. So that's where the sort of low-code and no-code comes from. So for example, you know, you might have some scenarios in the low-code world where you— there's a business requirement that you have to implement. Let's say it is a process where you have to automate a document approval, for example. And a low-code, a good low-code platform will allow you to do most of that automation, probably about 95% of it. If you compare that to sort of traditional high-code development platforms or approaches, of course, the speed at which you would do that is, you know, far greater than if you were to write coding. Obviously, coding needs to be done by technical people. And it just means that the platform allows you to write a tiny bit of code in scenarios where, you know, you've got an edge case or you need something very specific doing on your document approval process, you know, and perhaps your out-of-the-box platform doesn't support that. So, you know, that's where you can write a bit of scripting, a bit of configuration, So usually in our world, low-code, it doesn't equate to a tremendous amount of coding. You know, I think it's sort of the 5, maximum sort of 10% of your development project, which means that, you know, professional developers often use low-code environments to develop processes. So of course, it is suitable for businesses out there that already got an IT team that's got developing skills or developer skills. So very beneficial because of course armed with a low-code platform in your armory with, let's say, developers that's got coding skills, you know, you could create, you know, many types of processes. Of course, low-code also offers great customization. So, you know, it offers the flexibility and all of the customization options that traditional coding allows you to bring into your solutions. You know, and developers can actually use that to their advantage to fine-tune the applications that they developed, you know, its functionality and also its design. Now, a pure no-code platform is, does what it says on the tin. You know, you don't need any coding or programming experience. You can build applications entirely using sort of visual interfaces and also prebuilt components and integrate those together. This is mostly used by what we call citizen developers. So these are people that usually, you know, quite good at Excel and people that's quite good at expressing what a process looks like. You know, and perhaps these people don't have formal coding backgrounds, but they have got, you know, very good business knowledge and domain knowledge. So they can take that leverage, a no-code platform, and perhaps, you know, create an approval process for finance, for example. And most of the technologies we use, so if it's a workflow technology or robotic process automation technology, even some AI technologies as well, most of those will have no-code interfaces. So I just want to talk about the ease of use. So again, for citizen developers or people out there that's building these applications using no-code, it's very user-friendly, very intuitive. It's very accessible to sort of all sorts of, I guess, personas, you know, so whether or not you're a technical person, you could still use it, or if you're a business person, you can use it. So it really it's a sort of a catch-all. So, you know, again, these sort of concepts are applied throughout, you know, sort of various of the technologies that we work with. Like I said earlier, you know, it's not just workflow automation, it's also RPA, robotic process automation, AI, even some of the sort of the reports you could create, workflow reports, integrations. So all of those sort of best-in-breed tools actually do support low-code and no-code capabilities. So I guess the best way, so that's a sort of a very high-level description of what it does or what you can do with it. But I guess the best way to really sort of explore this a bit further is by an example. And on this one, usually talk about, Sascha, is use cases, because that's the easiest to use an example so people actually understand. I've got this wonderful tool these guys are talking about, but where can I apply it? Or what sort of scenarios is it good at? So did you want to tackle some of those?

Yes, exactly. Yeah, we want to bring it down sort of more to practical terms here generally, because sometimes, yeah, there's— you can talk a lot about these things without actually getting practical. What does it really mean for someone who sits in the business, or for our listeners, for you? You maybe listen to this and you think, okay, how can I get started? How can I touch it? So this is what we try to achieve here on the podcast. So yeah, looking into low-code, no-code use cases. Yeah, there are different things you can do with low-code and no-code, with AI, with workflow, with RPA, so many different things. So for example, it is a business process application. So you can create applications to streamline your internal processes, managing workflows and improve efficiency. So what could that be? It could be the invoice approval workflow, holiday requests. So it could be from really simple business process applications to very complex business process applications. So depending what kind of tools you're using and what kind of skill set you have, you may be focusing on the right tools or on the right processes here instead of trying to tackle something really complex with a very simple no-code tool. But yeah, so business process applications. The next big one is data management and reporting tools. Yeah, you can build these data-driven applications to collect, to store, and then with the power of AI or with some other tools, you can start analyzing that data and visualize that data for helping you to make more informed business decisions. So yeah, very cool to have that. And yeah, the next one, pretty much every business has that in-house, either off the shelf, but you can start building your very custom solution with it. So customer relationship management CRM system solution. You can do that to track your customer interactions, manage leads, do more with your customers, enhance the customer experience. So that's also an example what you can build with no-code and low-code platforms. And sometimes this is the beauty now, is that so instead of taking off-the-shelf product, you can, instead of taking for example a HubSpot, which is very vast, you can obviously go with free versions, etc. But sometimes these tools are already so big. But now with low-code and no-code, you can then say, no, I'm building it myself, I'm building it very specifically to my needs. It might be simple, but it's exactly what I need at that time. So yeah, CRM systems, you could build with that as an example.

Yeah, and I mean, I was just today speaking to a prospective customer. They've got a startup business about exactly that same problem they face, whether or not they should go buy off the shelf, should they subscribe to Salesforce, or should they build their own system? And obviously what they want to avoid is, you know, pulling in a lot of spreadsheets, starting to do their customer relationship management on spreadsheets, but they don't want to necessarily go out and buy Salesforce. So a no-code platform is a perfect example of a use case that will fulfill that requirement because it just means they can start from scratch. They can actually go in quite lightweight. They can still sort of explore what their actual requirements are. This is a medical company. They sell medical products. So of course there's gonna be bespoke things in that domain that perhaps a generic CRM system.

Yeah, exactly.

Won't provide them. They're very excited about the prospect of actually, you know, building their own system with our sort of advice and, you know, guidance. And actually end up with something that has evolved around their business. Doesn't involve paying for unnecessary features of an off-the-shelf CRM that perhaps you don't use, or something that's too complicated, or something that's effectively a tool, but you have to still configure all of the workflows with inside it. And that could be quite a daunting task. So it's a bit like, well, rather than reach for the Excel spreadsheet, let's create something very simple where you can just capture contacts, you can capture account details, and then you know, almost at the speed of talking, sort of add more fields to it as you need it. And of course, you know, just touching on that scenario, they want to have an e-commerce website. And, you know, that's a perfect opportunity to sort of build an online store then. So that actually, you know, surface all their product catalogs. You can build your kind of shopping cart, all these modules already preconfigured in some of these tools where you could sort of manage a shopping cart, manage somebody's account, secure payment processing. And then coupled with that, of course, low-code platforms also provide the ability to sort of take what you've built and create a mobile view of that. So again, that sort of creates a sort of a different way for customer engagement, for example. And that also introduces more productivity, you know, within your business because it's just a different platform. People reach in different ways and it's all integrated again If you look at the CRM example, you know, talking about sort of content and websites, you know, you could perhaps build a content management system where, you know, you could use the platform to design content-rich websites and a platform for publishing and managing your digital content. And again, that all can be nicely integrated. You know, you talk about things like project management tools. So perhaps you've got a specific way that you manage your projects in your business. And, you know, you could develop a low-code application or no-code application for project planning purposes, task management purposes, you know, collaboration among team members. These tools actually allow you to configure workflows if there's a specific workflow for a specific project. That is different to another one. It's easy to configure that, you know, sort of just things like inventory management. You know, we had another business we were talking about and, you know, they had a really antiquated way of tracking their inventory levels and their orders and backorders and restocking. And this is a perfect solution for them. And the good thing is it actually supported the platform we use also we helped him do the data migration. So that was a positive. And again, that was a sort of minimum coding. That was almost like a bonus, kind of moving from the old system to the new system. I mean, it goes on and on, doesn't it?

Yeah, it does. Yeah. We keep going for a little bit longer just to give you a slightly more sort of rounded view. But I think you get already the idea that pretty much whatever occurs in the business, you can look at and see, how can I build my own very specific for that process we have, for that flow we have. So, and one could be, for example, as well, the survey and data collection. You can create applications to send out surveys to customers, to together feedback and, yeah, to collect more data. So, but really the way you want to do it instead of buying a huge sort of survey application. If you have a very specific use case, why not go sort of no-code, low-code and you 100% control. So yeah, booking and reservation systems, lots of businesses do, do meeting bookings, GP, doctor's appointments, all that stuff. So yeah, there are systems out there that they handle that stuff, but very often, like Arno mentioned in that specific customer, certain things are then not so easy to implement for a specific industry or for specific niche. So you can be in control and do your own booking reservation system, and that flows nicely with everything what you do in your company, in your process. So of course, With no-code and low-code, you can do the whole automation of workflows. You can, yeah, you can look at getting rid of these repetitive tasks and you can automate them. You can trigger actions based on certain events within the business, within other applications. Yeah, and that ultimately enhances, yeah, your whole operation. So you become more efficient and more effective with everything what you do.