To keep up with growing customer expectations in a digital age, organisations are needing to rapidly adapt their internal processes – but at the same time, they’re suffering with a digital skills gap and a shortage of developers, proving quite the conundrum; Enter low-code
Low-code platforms enable teams of developers – and even non-coders – to deliver, support and extend a wide variety of applications, and we’ve been singing their praises for a while now. You’ve probably already heard the major benefits, so we don’t need to mention the improved agility, higher productivity, better customer experience, collaboration and decreased development costs that it fosters, do we?
But with more and more low-code development platforms coming to market, it’s important to know how to cut through the noise and find the right one for your organisation. That’s why below I’ve outlined ten tips below for evaluating low-code platforms and ensuring you make the right choice for digital success.
First, consider who you want to use the platform to build applications. If you are expecting only seasoned developers to build apps, you need to look at platforms suited for application design and development pros only. Bear in mind that there’s a huge shortage of developers – a recent survey found that 64% of companies were looking to hire up to 50 developers this year – so make sure that you have a big enough team. If you want to widen the pool of people who can build, it’s critical to look for platforms that are easy to learn and use, so that others can be trained to build as well. Widening the pool also means that people with first-hand knowledge of the processes are on the team, so the app you’ll build will most likely be ‘right first time’.
Low-code platforms enable professional developers to go faster and become full-stack developers, while ‘citizen developers’ (everyday business users) can easily learn to build apps using their knowledge of the process and simple drag-and-drop techniques. They don’t have to write code. Put simply, together, business and IT can collaborate to address organisational needs to rapidly innovate.
Think about the types of apps you are expecting to build on the platform – are you looking for web or mobile apps, for example? Evaluate platform suitability and richness to ensure that it addresses the relevant use cases that are most urgently needed. What are the limits of the platform, and can you extend its capabilities when necessary?
It’s important to investigate how long the vendor has been around, suss out their reputation and check that they are financially stable and profitable. You can also look into how many customers they have helped using the platform, and how those customers rate the vendor on sites like Capterra, Gartner Peer Insights and G2Crowd for example.
Consider speed and cost of building and deploying apps
Think about how fast apps can be developed in comparison with traditional development methods. And when we talk about speed, of course, time is money, so you also need to consider the cost of building and deploying new apps.
