Bridging The Gap Between Business And IT: Low-Code Helps Accelerate Innovation And Cultural Change

With rapid digital transformation, traditional methods of application and software engineering can no longer keep pace with the required speed of innovation or the new realities of work. Increasingly, businesses are turning to low-code as a solution. In fact, more than 84% of enterprises have adopted low-code to bridge the gap between line-of-business workers and IT teams.

The demand for developers continues to far outpace the supply, even with the recent slate of hiring freezes at tech companies large and small. IT teams are often bogged down managing technical debt, as organizations are forced to balance code quality with a faster time-to-market for mission critical applications.

A digital engineering company called Persistent Systems is making significant headway using low-code solutions to help enterprises accelerate the pace of software development and build applications without the need for large teams dedicated to a single technology stream such as Android or iOS.

To better understand what’s happening in the industry and at Persistent specifically, I caught up with Preetpal Singh, Senior Vice-President - Intelligent Automation, to get his views on how low-code is affecting not only software and application development efficiency, but also company culture and the fundamental dynamics between business and IT teams.

Gary Drenik: Let’s start with the topic of Intelligent Automation since that is in your official title. Is it essentially the same thing as digital transformation? Where does low-code fit in?

Preetpal Singh: Thanks, Gary. That’s essentially right. Intelligent automation is using technology to automate and simplify traditionally complex business processes. Tools for BPM (business process management) and RPA (robotic process automation) were the first generation of solutions. However, we’re increasingly leaning into what we call Hyperautomation or intelligent automation, which combines low-code with BPM/RPA and AI/ML-based technologies such as NLP (natural language processing), OCR (optical character recognition), and Conversational AI (Bots).

The applications for intelligent automation can be used in countless ways to create more seamless customer experiences across multiple verticals from digital banking to patient access and care in healthcare, to claims management in the insurance industry. Low-code is a key element of intelligent automation in that it enables business users to build applications and make changes to processes with simple logic and drag-and-drop interfaces without the need for coding skills.

Drenik: In your opinion, why is business process automation a viable use case for low-code? Is low-code just part of a current hype cycle?

Singh: In many ways, the pandemic acted as a catalyst to the already emerging reality of low-code development. The ability to accelerate business processes and software engineering is the fundamental underlying driver of innovation in any company. Every company today needs to think like a software company. When processes or applications that need to be built and optimized quickly are slowed down due to IT backlogs, innovation is hampered – plain and simple.

Without low-code solutions, developing an enterprise-grade app relies on developers with specialized software skills. This keeps business users sidelined and IT teams bogged down. Low-code is not just another fad. It has been proven to accelerate time-to-market, it allows for more collaborative development, and enables much smaller teams to develop applications in a tech agnostic way without a need for specialized expertise.

The ability for organizations to get their business and IT leaders to work collaboratively and build applications in an agile and cost-effective manner is a challenge. This is even more critical in our continued world of remote work with smaller distributed teams. It was interesting to see that a recent Prosper Insights & Analytics survey reported that 54% of Gen-Z and 56% of Millennials say that they would prefer to work for a company that allows them to work from home rather than in an office – so this trend doesn’t seem to be changing soon.

Drenik: Let’s talk a little more about workplace culture. Do you think low-code solutions can have a positive lasting effect on workplace culture and employee satisfaction?

Singh: That’s actually very interesting. Software engineering is our core value proposition, so I first think about low-code in terms of time-to-market. The larger the enterprise, often the slower things move in terms of innovation. This is why many developers and heads of product are attracted to startups. Low-code can help speed up innovation even at larger companies by putting creative power into the hands of citizen developers. In fact, in order to work, the low-code paradigm must become a way of thinking across the entire enterprise.

Another perspective is about how low-code can bridge what’s often a tenuous relationship between business and IT teams. Business teams often ask IT “why can’t you just build me something to get from point A to point B?” And then when IT builds them a skateboard, they say “this is wrong, what I needed was a bicycle.” This attitude of “can’t you just do it?” due to a lack of understanding and also a stark shortage of skilled developers can cause internal tension. Low-code gives business users the ability to embrace tasks that may have once been delegated to resource constrained IT teams. It’s a win-win.

Maintaining a strong company culture can be tough today – and culture can affect employee happiness for sure. I was not totally surprised to see that 55% of employees across generations polled in the latest Prosper Insights & Analytics survey reported feeling unhappy or neutral about their work life. Digital fatigue, feeling powerless to drive innovation forward, and friction between business and IT departments are certainly only pieces of that larger puzzle, but they are a factor. Being confident is one of our corporate values and low-code definitely helps instill confidence in business users to push innovation forward and to collaborate with IT.

Drenik: Anytime there’s a growing trend like low-code, or AI before it, we hear a lot about theoretical applications. Operationalizing these things is the trick. How has Persistent put low-code application development into action in the real world?

Singh: We are partnering with some of the biggest players in the low-code space today including Appian, Outsystems, MS Platform, Mendix, Unqork, and others. There is no shortage of success stories with the use of low-code with our customers. One example is in the healthcare industry where we used low-code to develop a Digital Front Door solution that enables an omni-channel experience for patients, care providers and agents. This includes solutions for virtual care and remote patient monitoring.

This is just one example of the hundreds of low-code applications that we’ve delivered across various industries for smaller startups to large enterprises. There is a significant runway ahead for low-code development and we have a lot of interesting projects underway as we speak, so we’ll definitely keep you posted.

Drenik: Preetpal, you’ve shared a lot with us today. Thanks for your insights on intelligent automation, low-code and how both of these are changing businesses for the better.