For years, business leaders have employed technical teams to ‘take care of IT’, but these days the pace of digital transformation is growing faster than the IT team’s ability to deliver.
The drive towards digital transformation is becoming more imperative for many businesses, and many business leaders are keen to accelerate its introduction. A key focus is in the introduction of business apps to increase automation, engage more effectively with customers and to improve business processes.
However, a recent survey by Deloitte highlighted that fewer than 10% of 1400 CIOs across 70 countries believed their companies were advanced on the road to incorporating technology into their digital business strategies. More than half admitted they had not started.
Gartner expects demand for Enterprise Mobile Apps to outstrip available development capacity by five to one, so if they want to achieve their goals CEOs need to find other solutions. Could app development platforms hold the answer?
It seems some CEOs have caught on already – our Evoke app development platform experienced global growth throughout 2018, however, this is the tip of the iceberg. The overall low-code development platform market size is expected to grow from USD 4.32 Billion in 2017 to USD 27.23 Billion by 2022, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 44.49%.
How low code platforms speed up digital transformation
Low code development platforms like Evoke are designed to speed up app development and enable developers and non-developers to create apps. These is introductory training for customers using the system, and this fast learning curve allows businesses to use their existing staff in the development process.
Evoke saves time thanks to its library of actions, widgets and pre-built components, which users can employ in their app in a point and click environment, with easy to use drag-and-drop tools. In practice this allows individuals or small teams, even those with no previous development experience, to experiment, prototype, and deliver apps in days or weeks with only minimal support from the IT team.
John Rymer, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester, says that low-code platforms help advance digital business in three major ways:
- They have the potential to greatly decrease the time needed to meet business requirements. Current usage indicates that these platforms can propel software development to 10 times the speed of traditional processes.
- They harness the forces of shadow IT for good, not evil. Tech-savvy business experts have long been known to take the issue into their own hands — often doing more harm than good. Low-code can harness these “rogue IT” activities by hosting them on managed platforms and adding guardrails to expand software delivery capacity.
- They tackle the key challenge in digital transformation: Automate the hundreds or thousands of operations crucial to customer experiences. Low-code platforms with strong business process features can accelerate these projects and empower the business experts (who know the data and process best) to lead.
A critical factor in the employment of the next generation of low code platforms like Evoke is that businesses are no longer restricted in their development and growth by the choice of platform.
With Evoke the low code design can be generated and deployed very quickly but there is no limit to the future potential of the apps. With the option to engage IT at any stage, Evoke will allow companies to incorporate pre-existing software, add third party software and utilities or develop new customisations thereby allowing the business to customise their apps as much as they require. They also have the option to generate and deploy as mobile web apps, or hybrid or even to go fully native (as Visual Studio and Xamarin projects), as all can be generated from the same Evoke app design.
Ultimately, low-code platforms make automation easy and can save businesses time and money. Low-code is revolutionising software development and the only question for business leaders is when, not if, they embrace the technology. CEOs who want to meet their digital transformation goals ahead of the competition would be wise to start looking at low-code now.
Waiting for an over-stretched IT team to drive the process could see your organisation being left behind.
To arrange a demonstration of the Evoke low-code platform, please click here.