Prior to the digital age, businesses tended to define themselves according to their products or services. However, digital technology has fundamentally altered buyer expectations and habits in both the B2B and B2C sectors. Survival in the modern marketplace necessitates viewing customers, rather than the product or service, as the center of the enterprise, and embracing digital transformation to meet customer demands. Most organizations realize this: 83 percent of respondents to Forrester’s Q1 2018 Digital Process Automation Survey stated that they were going to expand the use of process improvement methodologies for customer journey-mapping within the next 24 months.
Organizations must develop five to 10 times more applications than they did in the past. Meanwhile, there is a severe shortage of qualified software developers to meet the insatiable demand for apps. A survey by CapGemini and LinkedIn found that 54 percent of global organizations have been impacted by the IT skills shortage and forced to alter their digital transformation plans.
Everyone agrees that to cope with this problem, organizations need to “future-proof” their digital transformation efforts by abandoning traditional development processes – which result in hard-to-maintain legacy code that does not scale – and find a more sustainable way to develop applications. Low-code development platforms were created to address this need. These platforms allow non-programmers who have strong general computer skills to quickly and easily develop and deploy applications using drag-and-drop modules, without having to write a single line of code. This greatly reduces the need for skilled software developers and allows companies to develop and implement applications much more quickly.
However, sustainable, “future-proof” digital transformation isn’t just about implementing certain technologies; it alters the way in which organizations conduct business and helps support the organization’s strategy. Following are four requirements for a sustainable digital transformation.
Do not focus solely on “fast and easy” application development. Arguably, the biggest myth of sustainable digital transformation is that it’s all about “fast and easy” application development; this is why “fast and easy” is a major selling point for many low-code software platforms. Future-proof digital transformation isn’t just about “fast and easy” app development.
