Radically improving speed, cost and value of digital transformation
Having designed, developed and delivered various innovative and large scale software based products and platforms throughout my career, and the thrilling experience of founding and growing tech startups, I have been on a quest for a way to combine the benefits of a startup approach with the scale, robustness and reach of a large corporation.
I have therefore been searching for ways to radically improve the speed of development and end-user value, whilst at the same time reducing costs. Agile and codesign/development are important to ensure end-user value, and reduce costs of pivoting (due to being on target with the value proposition). Business model innovation is also key to ensure profitability and sustainability.
As today’s enterprises undergo a digital transformation, they become software-driven organisations – and thus having developers on staff who can hand-code software has become an increasingly strategic necessity. After all, this need has been driving the rise of enterprise DevOps across all industries.
But just like having the next shiny computer, I was always dissatisfied with the speed of delivery. I realised it was mainly because the coding aspect of development was so slow (regardless of the current Agile/DevOps hype).
So, when I had the opportunity to create a digital innovation capability in HP, I wanted to remove this bottleneck by eliminating code as far as possible. This was seen as almost heretical especially when the Government at the same time was hailing coding as the key skill for the future. In order to radically improve the speed, and therefore ensuring co-design at the speed of the end-user, not code, I introduced a Low-Code/No-Code platform for all our digital product and platform development.
This has paid off many times, especially in supporting live bids, where innovative thought leadership via the building of a real working system during the short life and intensity of a bid, codesigned with the client and their customers, resulted in significant value add, contract value, competitive differentiation and resultant win probability. Since consumerism is driving businesses to respond faster and faster, a new approach to addressing speed like this is needed.
My main proposition therefore, nicely articulated here by Joe Bloomberg, is that Low-Code/No-Code will disrupt the software development industry, as enterprises realise they can be even faster, better and cheaper with their digital transformations if they do away with hand-coding altogether, adopting Low-Code/No-Code across their organisations instead.