Maximizing Business Agility with Low-Code Development

What’s the one thing that has become a critical factor for operational efficiency and long-term success? It’s the ability to rapidly adapt and innovate in a business environment that has become complex and extremely dynamic. Processes and applications are no longer stagnant. They evolve, requiring teams to make updates and reflect on the changing needs of end-users even after deployment. Meanwhile, Dev Team Leaders, CTOs, and other high-level executives juggle between tight deadlines, shifting priorities, and resource constraints while focusing on maximizing business agility with the right development and business strategies. All of this while trying to enable flexibility without sacrificing quality.

And while traditional software methods and outdated business strategies struggle to keep up, a new game-changer has emerged to redefine the landscape – low code. Low-code platforms have embraced this need for change and agile methodologies, enabling organizations to react proactively and remain competitive.

But let’s examine how innovation tools like App Builder drive transformation and help companies achieve business agility through consistent processes and stable structures.

What Is Business Agility?

At its core, business agility is about fostering company traits like adaptability, better workforce management practices, and innovation. An agile business is not just one that replaces the traditional Waterfall approach with Agile software development. It goes beyond the technical aspects to explore how the entire organization can respond to dynamic market conditions, customer demands, internal challenges, and changing processes. It’s a paradigm shift in management.

Yes, as part of the agile transformation, organizational silos do break down. The key point is that the focus shifts to creating a holistic approach that integrates every aspect of the business. This involves aligning strategies across departments, boosting productivity, improving communication, and ensuring that all teams share a common goal.

Why Agility Is Important In Business

According to the McKinsey Global Survey, “highly successful agile transformations typically delivered around 30% gains in efficiency, customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and operational performance; made the organization five to ten times faster; and turbocharged innovation.” The survey involved 2,190 respondents from different industries and geographies. Their organizations were split into two broad groups: the first consisted of organizations with no agile transformation efforts; the second group included organizations that either aimed at or had already established agile transformation.

Business agility, then, reshapes the company to compete and deliver real business impact. This extends to the flexibility to:

• Introduce and leverage new products or services: That will improve how people innovate, build, operate, and strategize in general, so there’s no pressure when teams have to deliver solutions quickly, for example, or when executives need to align business goals and technical implementations.
• Reconfigure processes at a rapid pace: This will help organizations to have intact operational excellence and eliminate things like technical debt that hampers long-term scalability, maintainability, and extensibility, as developers must dedicate time and effort to address accumulated debt and prevent future issues.​ In essence, agility will optimize resources by aligning them with shifting priorities.
• Maintain competitive advantage: Companies that are more agile and sensitive to market dynamics prove to be able to compete more, produce more, and deliver more value than those that are not that responsive to ongoing changes. This ability is critical for capturing market share, building customer mindshare, and driving revenue opportunities because agility yields a competitive advantage.

How To Maximize Business Agility With Low Code?

Business agility, the hallmark of a forward-thinking organization, can be significantly enhanced using low-code platforms like App Builder. It basically provides a user-friendly environment where both technical and non-technical users can collaborate to build applications quickly and establish better operational efficiency in the company. Let’s look at this closer.

Faster time to market

Low-code platforms provide a WYSIWYG visual development interface featuring a library of pre-built UI components for major frameworks, templates, and layouts that users can leverage to accelerate development. So, when it comes to development teams, they can easily utilize reusable building blocks with every functionality they need functionalities, such as user authentication, data management, and UI elements, to assemble applications at a fraction of the time. By speeding up the development process, organizations are empowered to achieve faster time to market and quicker product launches. For a CTO, this means benefiting from an increased ROI and the potential to capitalize on more market opportunities.

Scalability, adaptability to industry dynamics, and performance

According to the Gartner CEO Survey, enterprise priorities vary, with the most common ones being growth, technology-related, workforce, and others. How do low-code tools and business agility fit in here? From a more practical perspective, low-code platforms are built on scalable architectures that accommodate both business and app growth over time, helping companies adapt to market changes. These architectures typically leverage cloud infrastructure and microservices-based designs to enable horizontal and vertical scaling. This ensures the company can:

• Efficiently manage increased user demands
• Deploy new features faster
• And pivot their strategies accordingly

The search for high-performance teams

Low-code platforms offer intuitive, drag-and-drop visual development interfaces that enable even developers with little technical expertise to design apps and user interfaces quickly without extensive hand-coding. They can start from a sample app and customize it further or convert Sketch/Figma design files to production-ready code in the framework of their choice thanks to the instant Code Generation low-code capabilities. Moreover, these platforms also provide real-time preview and feedback capabilities that allow users to visualize and interact with their applications as they build them. Because app development here is democratized, everyone (from developers to stakeholders) can preview changes instantly, test functionality, exchange feedback, and enable rapid iteration and refinement of designs and features​. So, agility here is taken to the next level.

Cost saving

Low code allows executives to allocate technical resources more efficiently by reducing reliance on highly specialized developers. This means teams can accomplish more with fewer resources. In an ideal situation, developers with more technical expertise can focus on complex projects and app logic. Meanwhile, citizen developers will be allocated to more straightforward and repetitive tasks.

Increased relevance

When you have an agile strategy in place, your teams can experiment with new and more relevant ideas without excessive risk. Add the use of low-code tools here and the process won’t even take that many resources either because people will benefit from task automation and productivity boost.

How To Overcome Common Challenges With Low-Code Adoption?

I’ve summarized this in five crucial steps:

Step 1: Skill gaps assessment: You will have to start by evaluating the current skill expertise of your development teams. Once you’ve identified the gaps, assign proper training programs.

Step 2: Ensuring seamless integration with existing systems: Check requirements, plan integration in advance, choose platforms that are easy to integrate, and dedicate time to testing procedures.

Step 3: Security and compliance concerns: Conduct regular security assessments of the low-code tool for potential vulnerabilities for this purpose. Also, stay up to date with the latest regulatory requirements.

Step 4: Scalability and performance issues: Research to what extent the tool can scale to ensure that the company’s goals and solutions expand along with market changes and customer demands.

Step 5: Equip and enable everyone: The decision to introduce new processes and tools is usually followed by the question “Why.” And in order for everyone involved in the process to better understand how things are going to work with the new platforms, executives should clearly communicate the benefits of the transition.

The Future of Business Agility with Low Code

Business agility has transitioned from theory to practice for the last few years. More and more companies are seeing its benefits because it’s a proven way to improve performance and gain a competitive edge.

For those who haven’t yet relocated any efforts to business agility, it’s essential to reevaluate the current strategies. How come? The reason is that the market is shifting really fast and development processes are changing, while customer demands are growing. Your company must facilitate faster app development and promote a culture of collaboration across teams where everything happens faster and effectively. Now low code seems to be the perfect way to boost business agility. With it, organizations can break down silos and empower non-technical users to contribute to solutions, thus fostering a more agile and productive environment.

For those who have already started business agility initiatives or are near it, integrating low-code platforms like App Builder will further amplify the process. Gartner estimates that “by 2025, 70% of new applications developed by organizations will use low-code or no-code technologies, up from less than 25% in 2020.”

And as companies continue to navigate their agility journeys, low-code development will continue to become more and more fundamental in reshaping the future of the tech world. By adopting these platforms, CIOs, CTOs, and other executives can unlock new operational efficiency, boost innovation, and increase productivity levels. All while ensuring their organizations remain competitive in an environment that demands rapid changes and fast adaptability.