In the modern market, digital transformation is the ultimate way to increase the efficiency of an organization for innovation while staying competitive with the other contenders.
While the idea of digital transformation sounds lucrative, the process consumes a lot of time and resources.
To counter this expense, there are several approaches you can take toward the digital transformation journey as an enterprise. The low-code development approach, among all, is the best.
Today, we’re going to discuss why digital transformation with low code is the most efficient for the digital journey of your business. But first, we need to understand the actual purpose of going through the digital transformation process.
The True Purpose of Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is more about gaining strategic agility, rather than just stuffing the entire company with the latest technology without any rhyme or reason.
The top priorities of a business during digital transformation are:
- Customer Experience (CX)
- Operational Efficiency
- Business Innovation
- Employee Productivity
Even when the boundaries are set clearly, the path to reach the goal is ever elusive to business leaders. The goal of a digital transformation is to reach all the aforementioned goals, and all the challenges lie in reaching the goals throughout all existing business operations.
The most challenging aspect is the CX since there’s already an underlying monolithic architecture, and modernizing it will require attention from enough resources to affect CX itself.
At the same time, hundreds, or even thousands of small-to-medium applications require constant attention for changes and updates from the management that tackle other operations.
The task of modernizing them all is highly critical for management to tackle them efficiently without major errors.
The only approach that can solve all these issues is to take a highly adaptable approach. That’s where low-code platforms come in.
Low Code Platforms: The Ultimate Solution For Digital Transformation
Low-code platforms equip you with the ability to adapt faster with next to zero hassle when it comes to digital transformation.
Low-code platforms operate on a visual model for development and ensuring performance, and it accelerates the development cycle when you already have professional developers on your side.
Low-code platforms are not just a temporary trend either. Low code is the modern industry favorite, and it’s here to stay. And it’s not our personal opinion either.
A statistic reveals that low-code will be responsible for developing over 70% of application development activity throughout the industry by 2025.
Difference of Approach Towards Digital Transformation: Low-Code Vs. No-Code
The differences between low-code and no-code approaches in digital transformation are very brief, so the following table should serve the purpose of pointing out the difference.
| Low-Code Approach | No-Code Approach |
| Low code can be used to create a wide range of applications. The ability of these apps can be extended with custom coding, and samples can be delivered to stakeholders in hours. | No-code is more suitable for non-technical business personnel who want to create basic apps and customize them without coding, or help from professional developers. |
| For developers with basic programming knowledge, low-code platforms are easy to pick up. But the majority of code generation relies on platform tools. | No-code is a fast, hassle-free solution for businesses that don’t want to wait a couple of months for professional software devs to deploy a solution. |
| For developers with basic programming knowledge, low-code platforms are easy to pick up. However, the majority of code generation relies on platform tools. | No code doesn’t require developers, and anyone can create an application with pre-built templates and faster deployment options. |
10 Ways Low Code Platforms Benefit The Digital Transformation Process
To understand why low-code development is the preferred path for a complete digital transformation, here are a few benefits that digital transformation with low-code offers.
1. Provides Better Agility
Longer development cycles are one of the key deterrents of digital transformation. Traditional architectures have a more complex tech stack, resulting in longer development for updating or modernizing them, which can also prove to be a challenge.
When you leverage low code, you get to speed up the entire process with
- Baked-In Security
- Point-And-Click Workflow Designers
- Pre-Built Templates
- Ready Connection To APIs
- Ready Connections To Data Sources
- Visual Model-Driven Process
All these features take away most of the boilerplate process and accelerate the product-market fit discovery, which results in fast prototype deployment and iterating toward fully functional applications.
With such agility, it’s very easy to change and adapt to market needs within the shortest possible without hurting your business.
2. Democratizes Application Development Process
Talent gap is one of the toughest obstacles when it comes to digital transformation. A great workaround to this issue is to turn a bunch of non-technical individuals into citizen developers, who can then contribute to the transformation process.
Citizen developers can create simple solutions with different low-code or no-code platforms for optimizing or automating daily operations while still meeting IT regulations and other security concerns.
Low code platform users can also integrate these applications into multiple data sources, and it makes each app important when it comes to increasing overall business value.
3. Makes Data Integration Process Much Easier
If you want to get the most out of your existing legacy systems, customization is the best process for it. But customizing legacy systems in traditional methods can take ages. That’s where low code comes in.
With integration-ready modules that are highly compatible with any legacy system, low code development allows you to extend the capabilities of the existing legacy system, enabling complete customization and scalability. This allows you to extract every bit of benefit from your legacy investments.
4. Helps Rationalize Application Portfolio
With low-code development, you can prevent the introduction of multiple-point solutions, which helps you rationalize the application portfolio.
When you’re working with a good low-code platform, it offers you a unified approach toward your goal with features such as
- Workflows
- Content Management
- Mobile Application Development
- Collaboration
- Business Rules
- RPA (Robotic Process Automation)
- AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning)
5. Lower Cost And Higher Scalability
“Project Backlog” is a two-word horror story for many organizations that can cost billions of dollars and end up in lost opportunities.
The main reason for project backlog is because most of the time, companies can’t find the right talent or tool for the job to prioritize them high enough over other business goals.
Since low-code application development allows you to get more work done in less time, it’s a wonderful opportunity to reduce backlogs for the developer team.
The low-code approach simplifies the workflow and allows all the backlog items to be deployed accordingly, all of which have complete functionality and scalability.
6. Provides Means To Govern Your IT
When working with low-code models, you establish a standard modeling environment through which the low-code platform promotes IT governance.
IT Governance helps you deal with data processes and security vulnerabilities within all the applications necessary for your business process while providing complete transparency.
7. Application Life Cycle Management Becomes Much Easier
Low code doesn’t just accelerate software development, it also comes with a bunch of tools that allow you to optimize, monitor, and manage the entire application life cycle consisting of
- Development
- Deployment
- Monitoring
- Maintenance
- Updates
All of these stages can be performed in real-time while ensuring complete security compliance and version control of the product.
Maintenance is the easiest of the bunch. The name “low-code” implies that there isn’t much code to begin with, so it’s much easier to maintain, and it’s highly compatible with Agile SDLC.
8. No More Confusion Whether To Build Or Buy
Enterprises usually prefer to build their applications based on an end-to-end infrastructure to gain a competitive advantage over others in the market. But that is a thing of the past. Long developments like that are risky and of course, break the bank in some cases.
The development speed in traditional development methods is so slow that it’s simply not a sustainable option if the business wants to stay competitive.
Low code can help your business build an app with pre-built templates and you don’t have to waste additional time and resources to create an application that suits all the modern needs of the industry.
9. Enables CI/CD (Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery)
Low-code development doesn’t just enable faster development, it also enables you to adapt to changes faster during development as well.
Your enterprise can leverage the gradual development style of low code with multiple iterative cycles of development through an agile approach.
Low code, while enabling faster development, also helps with more experimentation, faster innovation, and rapid deployment.
Low-code platforms are equipped with fast integration with in-house and external legacy systems that offer real-time business insights.
The best part of it all is, that the cost is much cheaper than if you were to take the same approach with conventional software development.
A good low-code platform always helps enterprises go through a complete transformation while handling complex mission-critical applications with ensured business efficiency. Of course, Mendix has you covered for all the requirements mentioned.
10. Increases Business-IT Alignment
When going through the transformation process, every department needs to be on the same page as it’s vital to company success. High-performance low-code platforms offer collaboration tools that promote cross-team collaboration throughout the organization, ensuring strong business-IT alignment.
Mendix: The Best Low-Code Development Platform For Your Digital Transformation Needs
In the modern highly competitive market, Mendix is the best low-code application development platform that can help you prioritize your business goals while staying competitive and agile throughout the organization.
Whether you’re aiming for simple automation processing or creating roadmaps for modernizing mission-critical legacy systems, Mendix can help you out with industry-leading low-code and no-code tools that every organization needs for an efficient digital transformation process.
Here are some noteworthy features of the Mendix platform that drive digital transformation in full force:
1. Develop
One of the most basic features of Mendix is to be able to create any kind of new app and workflow, even as far as creating entirely new business models. With a wide range of reusable components and APIs, the possibilities are endless.
2. Governance
You can manage and control all the activities with a centralized viewpoint using Mendix Control Center. Once all the activities of the organization are within the Mendix ecosystem, Mendix Control Center can help you increase the overall governance and administrative control over business processes.
3. Data Integration
With Mendix Connect, it’s much easier to connect your existing data sources with applications that you created with Mendix. Data management also becomes much easier, since it’s all part of one big data repository with classification to identify each unique data set.
4. Cloud Support
All Mendix apps are containerized, portable, and scalable by default, which makes them cloud native. You can deploy any of your apps just with a single click to deploy them to a cloud that is either private or hybrid. All apps built on Mendix have cloud support from the get-go.
5. Artificial Intelligence
You can use both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to accelerate the software development life cycle.
You can have AI as your virtual co-developer in the form of MxAssist Logic Bots and MxAssist Performance Bots.
These automation assistants can also help citizen developers to move through the basic development process.
6. Reusability
Mendix Marketplace comes with a large collection of reusable components in the form of widgets and templates.
These components are created by Mendix developers or other members of the Mendix community, ensuring all components are endlessly reusable and will always come with constant support.
7. Security
You can maximize the security compliance of your applications by running your newly built low-code apps in your environment. Mendix Cloud Dedicated allows you to run hardened applications in an isolated environment with complete governance and control.
8. Collaborate
Mendix platform promotes cross-platform collaboration with visual modeling and other built-in collaboration tools that encourage agile methodology practices to make the most of the development life cycle.
Future of Low-Code Platforms and Digital Transformation
Due to the ever-increasing demands of the current market, all businesses are constantly looking for solutions that can simultaneously increase performance while staying competitive through digital transformation.
With low-code or no-code, business owners can take a bold and experimental approach toward business transformation. It leads to digital innovation with unique ideas.
Many businesses have already begun leveraging low code to get ahead of their competitors with increased business agility and efficiency. This increase in overall efficiency comes from the removal of old silos between business departments.
The future of coding is no coding at all
-Chris Wanstrath, CEO of GitHub
To Wrap It All Up
Digital transformation with a low-code software development approach is the best option if you consider the modern market, the pace you require to stay competitive and relevant, and the cost of going through the entire digital journey.
FAQs
Yes, low-code platforms typically support mobile app development, allowing organizations to deliver mobile solutions as part of their digital transformation initiatives.
Low-code platforms incorporate security features, such as role-based access control and data encryption, to ensure the security and compliance of digital solutions.
Yes, low-code development platforms enable rapid prototyping and iteration, allowing organizations to quickly validate ideas and iterate on digital solutions.
Yes, low-code platforms can help modernize legacy systems by enabling organizations to build new digital solutions that integrate with existing infrastructure.
Yes, low-code platforms provide scalability features, such as cloud deployment options and auto-scaling capabilities, to meet the evolving needs of digital transformation.
