Consider this while adopting low-code app development technology
This article was developed out of a conversation on a CIO panel discussion at the 2021 Kansas City IT Symposium by IT industry leaders Manish Kedia (Co-Founder & CEO, CloudMoyo), Rich Miller (VP Information Technology, Burns & McDonnell), Jason Kephart (CIO, Terracon), and Josh Edwards (Global Director of Data Science & Operations, Black & Veatch).
IT departments are hard-pressed to keep up with the pace of demand. Coincidentally, these needs have led to increased adoption of the latest app development technology, low-code, and no-code platforms. These platforms provide templates and functions for businesses to quickly build and deploy custom apps with less coding or development time involved. IT firms, however, need to keep a few things in mind before they adopt low-code technology for their business.
Here are the top 3 considerations for IT firms when adopting low-code app technology:
The vision for the future
There’s been a fair share of buzz in the market recently about these new low-code platforms. But the truth you distill from this noise is, essentially, the power of bringing data, processes, and apps together to democratize and govern data, enhance collaboration, accelerate time-to-market, and automate business processes. No longer do you need to know .NET or Java to build an app that solves a pressing problem. With controlled data access, you can collaborate better, whether within IT or the business. This also means that you need to have a single source of truth for enterprise data, which we’ll talk more about later.
Keep in mind that these low-code applications aren’t going to replace your standard SAP and Oracle apps. But what these apps can do is empower both IT and business users to integrate data and functions, building solutions under a self-service model that takes you to the next step of the evolution of digital transformation.
The dialogue that IT leaders should be having with other leaders in the business is around the considerations you should make when evaluating the adoption of low-code technology—such as how accessible your data is and what your business needs are. You also need to think about the role that IT plays in the readiness, adoption, and governance of low-code apps. Let’s take a look at each of these considerations and how IT leaders are approaching them.
One of the key first steps in the adoption process is making sure you’re ready for the successful usage of low-code apps. What you don’t want to miss out on is introducing these apps to the larger business, understanding the use cases and problems, determining who would be creating apps, and understanding the role IT would play in facilitating all this.
3 questions that IT leaders can ask as they consider the adoption of and readiness for low-code platforms are:
领英推荐
Leaders should think through these questions, to avoid creating islands of information and functionalities spread across applications. By first understanding the value of creating these apps (i.e. to solve business problems), and understanding how they complement existing apps, you can create value with low-code technology rather than add to the noise!
According to?Jason Kephart, CIO at Terracon Consultants, when it comes to determining readiness for low-code apps, “You need to understand the business. You should never be doing anything unless there is a business need.”
Once there is a clear understanding of the business value, there needs to be an assessment of enterprise architecture and data maturity. You should be looking at how accessible data is and if it’s fit for use. Don’t underestimate the time it’ll take to get data ready.
Another key role that IT plays in low-code adoption is in ensuring successful adoption, from the selection of the low-code application development platform to the training of power users, and measurement of a successful adoption. According to?Rich Miller, VP of Information Technology at Burns & McDonnell, “IT organizations can really leverage this development and technology to address a lot of problems that we have…IT plays a very important role in facilitating for the community of citizen developers in your organization.”
This is no shiny new technology with harbingers of shadow IT! Instead, IT plays a pivotal role in facilitating the development of low-code apps, along with access to needed data. IT is also going to drive the strategy of how to scale as app adoption increases in the organization.
The third consideration is around governance, and how to avoid creating multiple sources of truth due to a proliferation of apps and limited governance. As you embark on the adoption of low-code technology, establishing governance over data will be key to making sure citizen developers can the data they need to make better decisions without creating “virtual copies”. IT will drive the management of access tiers, policy governance, and the setting up of custom connectors or integrations with other business applications.
Continue reading the article here - https://www.cloudmoyo.com/blogs/top-3-considerations-for-it-while-adopting-low-code-app-development-technology/