» INSIGHT
THREE WAYS LOW-CODE NO-CODE CAN INCREASE ROI Dan Matthews, Chief Technology Officer at IFS discusses the key to enabling successful lowcode no-code environments and how the vendor is working on a more intuitive no-code way Low-code or no-code is something enterprise software companies have been moving towards for obvious reasons—the chief one being that it empowers customers to quickly do more with their software. TechTarget defines a low-code, no-code development platforms as “a visual software development environment that allows citizen developers to drag and drop application components, connect them together and create a mobile or web app.” This is the effect of democratizing software development so a business analyst or line manager can structure new process flows and functionality without the external expense or time drag of involving a team of developers or programmers. It is no wonder that IDC Analysts Joe Pucciarelli and Serge Findling predict that by 2025, 60 percent of CIOs will implement governance for low/no-code tools to increase IT and business productivity. Gartner predicts that over 65 percent of all application development will take place in low-code, no-code environments by 2024.
Part of the plan
IFS has prioritized openness and configurability throughout our history, but with our coming release and to a certain extent in IFS Applications 10, we see an imme-
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diate future where a company can drive more value more quickly with enterprise software than ever before. I think we will see three ways for an executive team to achieve this type of return. Behind each of these three routes to higher return on investment (ROI), we see that successful low-code no-code environments do not just happen. The ability to provide simple and graphical ways to draw relationships between systems and transactions and events is dependent on underlying software that is good at working and playing well with other systems. Some vendors will talk about how they have open application programming interfaces (APIs), but these are often few and designed for specific, pre-determined integration scenarios. The application in the meantime internally communicates (for example between the user interface and the business logic) in a proprietary fashion that cannot be leveraged by external systems. To maximize the agility delivered by lowcode, no-code tools, the entire application should be built on open APIs, and those APIs should be used internally by the application as well. As for the exact technology to use--that varies over time. A decade
CXO DX / FEBRUARY 2021
ago, it would have been web services technology, but today the most appropriate is use of RESTful APIs—based on the REpresentational State Transfer architecture. Enterprise applications can go a step further by relying on the ISO/ICE-approved OASIS OData (Open Data Protocol), making things even more interoperable. When the application is built on the same set of RESTful APIs it exposes to other systems, it is a lot easier to access the precise spot in a value flow with which you need to integrate. 1. Faster external integrations A robust architecture built on RESTful OData APIs, documented according to the Open API Initiative specifications, gives customers the ability to use a low-code solution to extend enterprise software on the outside to create task specific apps or connect to other systems. This may be used for something as simple as automating steps to take around a new hire. Creating a new employee number may, for instance, fill in a desk number for new employee in an office floor plan, initiate payroll activities in a human resources creating an account in Outlook and ordering flowers from the local florist and having them delivered to the desk on an employee’s first day. It may also populate in a serialized part structure from a machinery manufacturing process into the software that will be used to manage service of that piece of equipment under an annual maintenance contract. Any data, action or event in an enterprise software system should be accessible in a clear and thorough API library.
