Systems Developer
The call for digital transformation is nothing new. While businesses conducted the thoughtful, tactical work of digitizing their processes over the last decade, the market changed dramatically over the past year. Increased competition and customer expectations have made it clear that traditional methods of application development are not suited for the current business landscape.
Many businesses face challenges in leveraging investments they made years ago, which have not scaled well to fit their current needs. Yet in the face of looming economic uncertainty, maximizing the value of existing technologies has become vital. According to a recent Prosper Insights & Analytics survey, buyers are becoming more budget conscious, with 45.3% of respondents citing they now focus more on what they need rather than what they want.
Prosper - Life Changes Last 6 Months
Businesses need an agile, cost-effective approach to application development. Low-code platforms are a promising solution. A digital solution provider called CafeX Communications is using low-code to help enterprises accelerate transformation initiatives and drive tangible impact by putting people at the center of application development.
To better understand what is happening in low-code generally, and its role in digital transformation specifically, I sat down with Rami Musallam, CEO of CafeX Communications, to get his views on how low-code has become one of the most competitive ways to optimize business processes and excel during change.
Gary Drenik: Digital transformation is a familiar topic to most organizations. What is its relationship to low-code?
Rami Musallam: Thanks, Gary. They are essentially extensions of one another. Digital transformation leverages technology to optimize traditionally complex or manual processes. Digital transformation has been used to refer to almost any way in which a company modernizes a legacy process, or improves a core offering. Increasingly, we expect digital transformation to deliver higher levels of personalization and flexibility. That’s where low-code comes in, enabling businesses to develop applications with less time and effort than traditional approaches.
One of the reasons why low-code is highly adaptive and effective is that it makes application development more accessible to IT and tech-savvy business users. It abstracts the coding needed for development, and replaces it with configurable components and intuitive, visual builders. Most low-code platforms include capabilities to design user interfaces, automate workflows, integrate data, and apply business logic. This allows businesses to stay agile, and build solutions that keep up with changes motivated by growing customer expectations, process complexity, and regulation, among other factors.
Low-code can be applied across any industry or use case. It can be used to create a more seamless experience for clients accessing financial services, vendors streamlining onboarding processes, or agents managing insurance claims. Businesses are always looking to make processes more efficient, intelligent and intuitive, and low-code is the most agile way to deliver these improvements.
Drenik: Current conditions require organizations to adapt to the market, fast. Do you think low-code is a sustainable approach to business growth and agility?
Musallam: Absolutely. Businesses are in a difficult position at the moment. They are expected to reach new levels of efficiency, productivity, and innovation, but are stuck using dated technologies that inhibit them from doing so. As a result many continue to rely on manual or semi-digital processes, and prevent them from keeping up with the competition. People either use applications that are too rigid to fit new demands, or request updates from IT, which is often already inundated with a backlog of work. Whatever the case, this is a huge burden to business, which needs to be putting people in the best possible position to perform instead of bogging them down with inefficient tools.
Low-code removes some of the burden from IT, and distributes responsibility to business users. By calling on business users to step up and innovate, low-code fundamentally makes the business more productive. Fusion teams composed of IT and business have been proven to improve productivity. Their collaboration creates more effective solutions, which accelerates time-to-market of new offerings.
Drenik: There are many low-code platforms on the market. How can organizations determine which low-code platform is right for them?
Musallam: There are two questions every business should ask itself before purchasing a low-code platform: what do I need to build a quality, digital experience, and who do I need in order to deliver it. These answers provide a framework for assessing a platform’s extensibility and alignment with the company’s vision.
Many low-code/no-code tools grew out of need to manage database records or orchestrate workflows. These platforms work well for businesses that have a broad, potentially singular workflow that they want digitized. However, if you plan to develop many, multifaceted applications you are better off adopting a platform that does more than automation. I would recommend platforms that are more extensible and intuitive so that your people can develop applications that cover multiple use cases.
At CafeX, we call this “people-centric” application development. This approach recognizes that agility and accessibility are core requirements for businesses today. Platforms with steep learning curves inhibit companies from achieving both agility and accessibility. Why? They raise the barrier of who is able to develop an application, which makes it difficult to reuse and extend them.
Drenik: Let’s talk a little more about the importance of taking on a people-centric mindset in application development. Why should people be at the core of transformation initiatives, instead of technology?
Musallam: Great question. New technologies promise a lot of theoretical benefits. However, there is often a significant gap when it comes to putting trends into practice. The early phases of low-code demonstrated that capabilities mean nothing in a vacuum. If invoking and extending applications is time-consuming, then platforms become more of a burden to business than a benefit.
This is why we emphasize the people-centric approach at CafeX, and put people at the center of the application design. Our customers have achieved success by leveraging low-code in this way. For example, we have a solution in the healthcare industry that uses low-code to facilitate an omnichannel experience between agents and providers. We helped optimize the claims management process by decreasing touchpoints, reducing back-and-forth communications, and equipping agents with information personalized to each claim. This is just one example of the use cases we are delivering across various industries and types of enterprises. The success we are seeing in this use case and others is because of the people-centric approach we took in building our platform. Successful application development is centered on people. When their experience is at its best, the entire business performs at its best.
Drenik: Rami, you’ve shared a lot with us today. Thanks for your insight on how low-code is positioning businesses to grow and thrive, and the importance of using technology to empower your people through change.
