If, as CIO Magazine says, design thinking is ‘the secret to digital success’, then low-code development is emerging as the way to ensure the software that underpins digital transformation efforts delivers on business outcomes. At Optimation, some of our most experienced developers have been hard at work investigating the practical potential of low-code platforms. We’ve learned that by combining our design thinking expertise with low-code development, we can offer customers a best-of-both-worlds approach that will help them clearly define the right problem to solve and then rapidly build, test, and deploy the most impactful, effective solutions.
Industry experts like Gartner and Forrester agree that the combination of design thinking and low-code development is so powerful because it fosters genuine collaboration between people from the business and from IT. This ensures solutions get strong buy-in from everyone: from front-line staff to the Board, as well as from your customer’s customers. It also frees businesses to experiment and innovate at low cost and with minimal risk.
At Optimation, we see software development as a human-centric and highly iterative process. Low-code development fits our philosophy well because, when used in combination with design thinking, it means people can rapidly get to a point where they see if an idea or proposed solution is on the right track, often by co-creating models or prototypes with end users. At that point, we can test, refine, and deploy fast, or discard an idea before expending too much time or effort on it (the ‘fail fast’ approach). Regardless of the specific development methodology we use, our focus is always on finding pragmatic ways to deliver a Minimum Viable Product at the earliest stage possible.
Big benefits from low-code development
So what are some of the benefits we see with a low-code approach? The biggest plus is that businesses can achieve speed-to-market with reduced development and maintenance costs while also ensuring a solution gives end users and customers what they really need or want. Other key benefits include:
- Effective business-IT collaboration and co-creation: Visual modelling techniques bridge the gaps between the development team and the business owners/end users. This means everyone can easily see and refine the solution from very early in the development process
- Rapid prototyping: Reusable templates and components will enable us to quickly create functional prototypes without having to do a lot of coding from scratch.
- Rapid iteration: Because development is so fast and users can preview solutions instantly through visual models, we can accelerate the ideate – prototype – test – refine cycle that is the keystone of our design thinking approach.
- Ease of integration: Low-code makes enterprise deployment easy by drawing on a huge range of re-built connectors to platforms like SAP and Oracle and to cloud services
- Massive scalability: Low-code development ensures exceptional performance regardless of the number of users, complexity, or data volume.
Some of the best uses for low-code development include:
Greenfields: Quickly design and build a new application from the ground up
Application modernisation: Transform an existing legacy application and extending its life, for example, by adding a web or mobile front end that enables customer self-service
Integrating disparate systems to create a seamless customer experience:
Low-code development is a powerful way to build a digital overlay across multiple existing enterprise applications. ‘Out of the box’ connectors allow us to design and build a single interface – for example, a web or mobile app – that creates a seamless view of business processes that cross disparate applications and databases.
Using the OutSystems low-code platform
Over the years, the Optimation team has honed its expertise in traditional development, agile development, rapid application development, and DevOps deployment (as well as using hybrid approaches that fall somewhere in between). Regardless of the method, we’re always looking for better ways to innovate, transform, and create value for customers.
As part of our ‘kit bag’, low-code development enables us to design and deliver great software fast and at scale. That applies whether you simply want us to develop a new standalone mobile or web app, or you want us to help you build large-scale business critical applications that leverage enterprise systems and legacy platforms.
Drawing on our deep knowledge and more than 26 years of experience in development and integration, we made the call to partner with OutSystems for our low-code development platform. We chose OutSystems because it offers features including:
- Speed – we can develop fast and deploy with one click
- Integration with everything
- Beautiful, functional user experience design
- An open systems platform, meaning we can extend and enhance applications with custom code when and where it makes sense
- Security
- Scalability
Speed-to-value outcomes achieved with low-code development
Benefits of low-code development with Optimation and OutSystems