How Low-Code is Solving Challenges for Enterprise Architects

What happens when inflexible, outdated systems hinder innovation and agility? Or when you struggle with aligning your organization's technology strategy with business goals and teams’ capabilities and resources?

There are two scenarios: You continue with traditional development, which typically leads to slow, costly, and rigid processes. This approach, while avoiding the learning curve of new tools, makes adaptation to changing business needs more challenging due to legacy system constraints and the inability to optimize time and costs.

Or you can embark on a digital transformation journey leveraging low-code. This will not only enable rapid development and deployment of apps but will also help you tackle some of the biggest challenges Enterprise Architects face: modernizing legacy systems to build future-proof and secure apps, ensuring the company is up to date with current tech trends, accelerating time-to-market through automation, managing skills gaps, and standardizing and ensuring everything aligns with business strategy to result in more significant ROI.

These are among the challenges that low-code platforms effectively address and resolve for enterprise architects.

Breaking Down 'Low-Code'

You need to understand the idea behind low-code tools and their potential even if you're not a developer using them to build apps. Until very recently, low-code was perceived as a technology for developers only. However, it is a process booster that enables a broader range of users, including business analysts and other non-technical stakeholders, to cut through complexities to contribute to application development and business growth.

Now that low-code development is gaining momentum, more organizations are turning to it. The 2024 Reveal survey found that over two-thirds (71.8%) of developers are using low-code/no-code tools, and more than half (56.4%) anticipate greater reliance on these tools in 2024. In addition, nearly all the survey respondents (90.4%) said that low-code tools boosted developer productivity in their organizations.

Low-code in practice streamlines everything from design to code and from an idea to an app. These tools contain all the capabilities developers need to craft custom software solutions. At the same time, Enterprise Architects and other C-level executives use the advantages of low-code to foster innovation and introduce a new type of thinking within their organizations. This approach allows more room for improvement and creates new revenue streams—a win-win situation.

How exactly does low-code achieve this? A typical low-code development platform includes one or more of the following features that allow for seamless execution of all the factors mentioned above:

• A visual IDE: for defining the UIs, workflows, and data models of your application and, where necessary, adding hand-written code.
• Connectors to various back-ends or services: to handle data structures, storage, and retrieval automatically.
• Automated tools: for building, debugging, deploying, and maintaining the application in testing, staging, and production.
• Design-to-code capabilities: this provides designers and developers with a platform to design prototypes and transform designs into clean, production-ready code.
• Collaboration tools: to allow more people to use the platform at the same time, track progress, share code, etc.

Combining the capabilities above, low-code tools have the power to solve many challenges for enterprise architects.

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Future-Proofing Old Infrastructures

Building future-proof and secure apps and accelerating time-to-market depends on the tools in place. Organizations with outdated infrastructures operate with hindered abilities to innovate and compete effectively. Can the rip-and-replace scenario work 100% in that situation? Not entirely, because you can’t simply eliminate traditional development. While low-code platforms are great for rapid prototyping and small to medium-sized applications, they might not scale as efficiently as traditionally coded solutions for large enterprises with certain specific use cases and extensive needs.

However, outdated systems are often heavy, bloated, and lack essential modern tools like integrated development environments (IDEs) or version control systems. This overall complexity poses challenges, particularly to tech newbies. But by integrating low-code tools as a solution here, you will streamline processes, improve collaboration, keep up with current development trends, and empower developers to build apps without having to write code line by line, thanks to user-friendly, modern-day tools.

Automated Precision for Faster Time to Market

Competition puts pressure on companies, where the speed of delivering products and services can be pivotal to success or failure. To address this challenge head-on, more and more C-level executives are implementing low-code.

This approach not only reduces strain on IT resources but also ensures timely delivery of products thanks to low-code tools’ ability to replace manual and error-prone hand coding. Interestingly, products like App Builder have simplified WYSIWYG drag and drop interface, and their code generation capabilities provide full control, so digital product, design, and development teams can deliver pixel-prefect applications up to 80% faster while increasing customer satisfaction by as much as 35%.

In addition, this streamlined approach also leads to better ROI as it aligns development efforts with business goals and enhances customer satisfaction by delivering high-quality, standardized code that ensures consistency and reusability across projects.

Best Low Code Platforms!

1. 

   Appian

   This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.

   4.5

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2. 

   Appsmith

   This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.

   4.7

   Visit Website
3. 

   Nintex

   This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.

   4.5

   Visit Website

From Deficit to Proficiency: Managing the Skill Gap

The Reveal Survey Report: Top Software Development Challenges for 2024, found that “the biggest business challenge for the technology industry in 2024 will be working with limited resources (40.9%),” which is why more business owners are incorporating low-code solutions. What’s more, in teams that do not collaborate or include designers, such tools are a huge time-savor. More advanced solutions typically have an integrated design system and the ability to convert design files to pixel-perfect code in an instant.

By adopting low-code platforms, you enable rapid application development and deployment, which allows you to focus strategically on maximizing your team's resources and skills. With pre-built components, these tools allow citizen developers and less experienced programmers to handle basic tasks and app functionality. This gives engineers the opportunity to refocus their efforts on business logic and more complex app scenarios.

Low-Code: Leading the Change in App Development

Low-code is undeniably redefining how businesses approach application development, collaboration, and business growth initiatives. By simplifying and accelerating the development process, low-code software equips organizations with all the tools they need to adapt to the dynamic tech landscape and ever-changing market demands. This transformative technology not only reduces time to market but also enhances operational efficiency and ROI by streamlining workflows and ensuring alignment with business goals.

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