COVID-19 has proven that every business must be able to respond to change. When the pandemic hit, businesses were forced to pivot quickly. Long-standing business processes have been erased. Employees have been moved, separated from corporate systems, corporate data and from each other. Companies that could adapt quickly survived or even prosper, while those that could not cope with severe consequences.

From financial services and insurance to healthcare, life sciences, construction, retail, telecommunications, public sector, etc., no industry has proven itself. Additionally, as organizations in all markets struggled to respond to the effects of COVID, most found that they had yet to achieve much success in digital transformation, despite years of discussions. From 2020, they all had to find new ways to operate. And they looked for new technologies to help them.

The popularity of low-code development has increased in 2020, as low-code platforms are platforms for change. The agile nature of low-code now makes it a must-have for businesses and organizations looking to drive change quickly and easily. Low-code can improve the efficiency, productivity and agility of almost any organizational function, be it sales and marketing, R&D;, frontline customer service or finance, back office accounting and human resources.

What exactly is low-code? It’s a new way to build business software applications. Instead of using complex coding, you draw the app with boxes and arrows, like a flowchart. Low-code has two key components. The first is that it is fast. It allows you to create applications by drawing a workflow diagram. It is therefore quick to build and quick to change. It energizes agile development processes. The second is that it is unified. Low code allows you to include any worker (people, bots, AI, and business rules) or any resource (data and system) in a single workflow. It uses all of the company’s assets.

According to a 2021 Forrester report, the low-code market will achieve an annual growth rate of 40%, with spending expected to reach $ 21.2 billion by 2022.

One organization leading the way in developing enterprise-level low-code applications is Appian. The Appian Low-Code Automation Platform comes with the Appian Low-Code promise: When you build low-code apps with Appian, you should expect to build your apps 10 times faster, lower your maintenance costs. 50% and benefit from superior features. compared to traditional development.

Turning your idea into a business application is quick and easy than anything you’ve come across before. It’s a visual and intuitive process: you create a drag-and-drop flowchart of your work tasks, which turns into a secure, reliable and bug-free application. There is often AI support (many apps follow proven workflows; perfect training grounds for AIs to learn) and minimal manual coding or zero coding options. This is a minimal initial investment in setup, training, and deployment.

In the Forrester report, companies said it takes between a week and a month to train users to use low-code. Forrester noted an average 94% reduction in the time it takes to develop apps and a 50% reduction in app release time. In fact, your first project can be up and running in as little as eight weeks.

The beauty of low-code is that it unifies all of your resources – people, technology, and data – into a single workflow. User-created applications are seamlessly integrated across the entire business architecture, so they are all coordinated and aligned with your business goals and high standards. This eliminates shadow IT and gives you orchestrated synergy that benefits the organization.

When you can see the big picture, you can direct robotic process automation (RPA) to the areas where it would work best instead of applying it to bad use cases, which often happens when you have tunnel vision and disconnected resources.

With better workflow automation, you can improve the efficiency of your employees and deliver more value to your customers. You can shrink your legacy application portfolio, thereby reducing licensing costs and reclaiming space in on-premises storage. You can declutter and streamline existing systems into integrated workflows. According to Forrester, simplifying and automating an organization’s application portfolio has reduced costs by an average of 50%.

TO Tech Wire Asia, we considered several providers of low-code and no-code technologies as part of a series of “citizen developer” reviews. These are platforms that allow those not directly associated with DevOps to bring their specific knowledge and expertise to the application development and deployment table.

Appian’s low-code environment first caught our attention because of its unlimited bot capacity. While fees may vary depending on a user or application and any level of support required, Appian users can create an unlimited number of automation bots.

There are four low-code options suitable for you and your specific goals:

1. Low-code for professional developers (citizens): often called “no-code”, this is for users who need to solve immediate problems within departments but do not need to involve the IT department or professional developers.
2. Low-code development platforms for AD&D; (professional developers): These are generally intended for professional developers who need to build and deploy various applications.
3. Digital Process Automation (DPA) platforms for large-scale deployment: These are aimed at citizen and professional developers to quickly automate moderately complex workflows and processes.
4. Software for DPA platforms for deep deployment: These are intended for professional developers to quickly automate very complex processes. They often have strong low-code development capabilities.

The Appian Low-Code Automation Platform also supports high code options, where it is open to further expansion and creativity by letting you add extensions to support interface components. users and add new logic and process models. It is scalable and enables sustainable application development: you have the flexibility and tools to respond to changes, and you can quickly manage complex and critical challenges.

The drag-and-drop simplicity of low-code automation and its centralized, enterprise-wide data access enables more productive workflows and enables frontlines to respond to customer needs faster. Forrester estimated that a composite organization experiences a net present value (NPV) of $ 10.68 million after a low-code deployment on this scale.

Appian enables users to develop more applications quickly and inexpensively. It reduces manual labor through process automation and generates smarter applications to improve business efficiency and create better customer experience.

The development of low-code applications will continue to increase in this era of rapid change and will represent an opportunity for organizations to completely change the way they deliver applications. To learn more about how Appian can drive change in your organization, contact a representative at Appian today.