FeatureAccelerated digital transformation has rightly elevated the role of the CIO, and outside the boardroom as well, IT decision makers and teams now play a direct and impactful part in driving business and revenues. Indeed, to a large extent, the onus of digital transformation remains entrusted to the IT department. After all, who better to know which technologies to invest in than professionals who have their finger on the pulse of the rapidly advancing IT space.
But we are fast approaching an inflection point. Overworked IT departments who have so far driven digital advancement could now prove to be the bottleneck in innovation roadmaps. Add to this the 50 billion digital skills gaps that the UAE is expected to experience by 2030 and a strong case can be made for the innovation to be opened up to stakeholders who reside outside of the realm of traditional IT.
Low-code platforms are emerging as the answer to this challenge,
A major challenge for IT is to constantly meet the changing needs of the business. The inherently dynamic nature of processes demands continuous optimisation and turns out to be a bottleneck for business, especially if IT can’t deliver applications on time. Low-code platforms are emerging as the answer to this challenge, providing multiple environments for business and DevOps teams to test, build, deploy and modify applications collaboratively.
A comprehensive Low-code platform offers the means of both visual programming and coding capability. For usability reasons, these tools are clearly separated and presented to the development team in a way that allows citizen developers, and business users – who are most commonly the domain experts, to use the visual components and developers to work on adding custom code to extend the capabilities of the application.
They provide environments for business and DevOps teams to test, build, deploy and modify applications collaboratively
While it remains true that a complex app still requires the expertise of an experienced professional developer, Low-code platforms allow setting the tone for an app, or building, modifying its basic functionalities to be carried out by business users and citizen developers.
IT teams are now positioned to enable their organisations to achieve greater productivity and profitability. By setting out a self-serve model using a Low-code platform, they can enable citizen developers to build custom apps, employees to use portals at their convenience, and IT to create dashboards for visibility across the organisation.
For IT leaders, Low-code platforms provide an opportunity to empower non-technical staff with strategic insights and recommend solutions that best suit business goals, mitigating risks and offering budgeting strategies, rather than just being a facilitator of technology.
A major challenge for IT is to constantly meet the changing needs of the business
And while IT will always remain instrumental to digital transformation and the smooth running of underlying technology environments, innovation now needs to be democratised. Low-code platforms pave the way for citizen developers.
By empowering all stakeholders to contribute to the digital journey, businesses can set themselves on the fastest and most cost-effective path to digital transformation.
Overworked IT departments who have so far driven digital advancement could now prove to be the bottleneck in innovation roadmaps.
