Future of Application Development: Low Code as a Catalyst for Digital Transformation

It has been more than a decade since enterprises are talking about digital transformation. They are investing heavily in it with the aim of improving their competitiveness and adapting to the changing consumer behavior resulting due to increased technology adoption in their day-to-day lives. But it is very difficult to measure the alignment and execution of this digitization investment with the needs of the business users of those enterprises. Also, with an increasing backlog of application releases pending for production at various stages ( like design /testing/ UAT ), coupled with increased time-to-market (TTM), the drive for innovation is minimal. This is where Low Code tools shift the balance. Low code is basically a product and/or cloud service for application development that has a visual drag-and-drop functionality to create and configure an application workflow. In short, low code platforms make application development simple. The objective of this Paper is: a) To understand the drivers for Low code tools and how can they catalyze the digital transformation of organizations. b) To explore how low code affects the alignment of multiple stakeholders for the development and modification of products and services by enabling them to work more closely on digitization projects. The Paper adopts a case-study-based approach wherein it focuses on the use cases for Low code platforms for multiple industries and the type of applications for which these tools can be leveraged to the fullest. The Paper will be useful for non-IT users as it touches on the security and governance aspects that enable non-IT users to utilize the platform and give life to their requirements. It will be useful for practitioners to understand how enterprises are utilizing low code for differentiating their offerings from their competitors through increased digitization of their services.