LOW / NO CODE
Why Low Code is the perfect business transformation cherry picker In December, IDC predicted that global digital transformation investments will total $6.8 trillion between 2020 and 2023, with 65% of the world’s GDP digitalised by 2022. BY RUTH WEATHERALL, CO-FOUNDER AND OPERATIONS DIRECTOR, UP3 deliver results quickly. An over-focus on strategic transformation projects involving huge scoping and planning can be at the detriment of quick wins needed to build groundswell and momentum.
IT’S FAIR TO ASSUME that any organisations not going through some form of technology enabled transformation are today firmly in the minority. However, according to McKinsey, 70% of digital transformations fail, suggesting that intent alone is no guarantee of success. We help organisations scope and implement transformative projects using low code and the challenge we experience is too much slow and steady and not enough opportunism. Most organisations have large scale change projects that think big and have the potential to tackle numerous objectives under the broad banner of ‘digital transformation’. But these may be hard to get off the ground, could be slow to adapt and the more stakeholders you add into the mix the higher the risk of inertia. By the time it’s complete (if indeed it does even get completed) some business requirements may have already moved on.
The fixes that are needed urgently tomorrow get missed, and over time, appetite for transformation wanes while cynicism grows. When the pandemic came along and forced organisations to implement digital applications in days rather than months, it was a lesson for many that not everything you want to change needs to take forever. It also thrust low code and ‘citizen development’ into the limelight. Low code platforms, such as ServiceNow and its App Engine solution, absolutely provide the framework required to build and deploy transformative apps quickly without huge amounts of technical knowledge. In fact, low code has the power to enable organisations to ‘cherry pick’ the crucial quick wins and benefit from them to build more transformative momentum than any top down strategy alone can.
Smaller projects may be less exciting on the CV or seem unambitious when getting executive buy-in, but they allow the opportunity for tightly focused programmes that
46
WWW.DIGITALISATIONWORLD.COM
l
ISSUE VI 2021
l
COPYRIGHT DIGITALISATION WORLD
Although big transformation projects are still essential, changing and improving the way people work in small and focused ways gets different business functions thinking more creatively about change and actively contributing more ideas to IT.
