Breaking the code: Why no-code platforms are gaining traction with IT and the business
No-code and low-code platform adoption has taken off as a way for businesses to accelerate application development. The past year underscored the need for people to quickly build applications and functionality, as organizations scrambled to support remote workforces in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
What have we learned about the benefits of using no-code platforms to improve business processes and workflows? That’s the question we posed to members of the IDG Influencer Network, a community of industry analysts, IT professionals, and other experts who contribute their knowledge and expertise to IDG clients. Here are their top takeaways.
The drag-and-drop functionality and visualization aspects of no-code platforms allow individuals with no programming skills to “tap into their creativity without the need to memorize and debug strings of laborious and esoteric code,” says Scott Schober (@ScottBVS), president and CEO of Berkeley Varitronics Systems Inc.
That user-friendly factor empowers those individuals closest to business problems to help solve them, say the Influencers:
“It empowers domain experts who understand the business or processes but lack programming skills.” — Mark Sangster (@mbsangster), author of No Safe Harbor
“It unlocks the potential for anyone, regardless of technical capability, to be able to prototype an idea and test it with potential users. It allows those closest to the problem to create a solution without the barrier of learning all the tech.” — Noelle Silver (@NoelleSilver_), founder of AILI
“Low/no-code platforms enable business analyst experts to directly solve and automate the processes and workflows that they are intimately familiar with, instead of having to articulate those details to a development team, which could result in inefficiencies via ‘lost in translation’.” — Mike D. Kail (@mdkail), CTO
Empowering users to build applications has multiple benefits for the business. Among them: Speed and agility, says Martin Davis (@mcdavis10), CIO.
“Time to value and time to market. Further, no-code solutions can be quickly updated to meet customer, market, or unexpected needs.” — Gene De Libero (@GeneDeLibero), chief strategy officer and head of consulting at GeekHive
“Benefits include: Ability to quickly and easily turn business improvement ideas into action. Reducing the time to understand business processes since no-code is being used by subject matter experts.” — Arsalan Khan (@ArsalanAKhan), blogger on business and digital transformation
“No-code/low-code platforms can help organizations quickly build solutions in a matter of days, and constantly iterate on those solutions when disruption or changing business conditions occur.” — Deb Gildersleeve (@DebGildersleeve), CIO at QuickBase
In addition, “no-code platforms help in reducing total cost of ownership for systems, thus improving costs and improving business margins,” says Sarbjeet Johal (@sarbjeetjohal), cloud leadership consultant.
The right no-code platform has guardrails that help “citizen developers” align with traditional development practices. These tools support “repositories like Git, allowing them to become part of a full CI/CD pipeline,” says Simon Bisson (@sbisson), tech journalist.
