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What Must CIOs Know Before Opting for a Low-Code Platform?

Banking CIO Outlook | Thursday, September 26, 2019

Modern low-code specifications and considerations help CIOs achieve their organization-level goal and face market challenges efficiently.

FREMONT, CA: Low-code platforms allow organizations to modernize their application development tools and help CIOs offload low-risk projects from developers' overloaded backlogs. Today, low-code applications and platforms are adopted by various corporations, as the adoption proves to bring responsive and supportive solutions to the business users' needs. CIOs play crucial roles in choosing and investing in the best low-code platform for their organizations. Before making an active investment decision, the digital age CIOs should research and consider various aspects of a low-code platform. As a low-code platform holds the potential to drive massive transformational change in an organization, it becomes more important for CIOs to involve thoroughly in the specification, selection, and procurement processes.

1. Understanding the Business Requirements

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The most crucial aspect to consider is to identify and understand the businesses' needs according to the present market. A clear picture of the business's position, including total capital investment in application development departments and human resources, market values, and targeted goals help CIOs focus more on selecting the apt low-code platform types. CIOs can consider open-source, which is affordable, and use standard languages for development processes. The decision-makers need to search transparent low-code platform in case of an open-source to optimize entire lifecycle and toolchain of the platform in the work system.

2. Language Specification

Low-code platforms increase professional developers' productivity by streamlining and simplifying their work and enabling them to build a functional but limited application without having to write code. The common and standard frameworks of low-code platforms help the developers to become highly productive and drive results across different digital channels. A language-specific platform not only allows developers to participate effectively in development processes but also encourages business users to solicit their input on requirements and effectively communicate and collaborate with no-code app developers.

3. Hybrid Approach

To match the growing customer demands, organizations tend to develop native applications for different platforms and achieve responsive design and mobility. The hybrid approach offers a container-based mechanism, which helps to interact with the native mobile APIs. The hybrid solution gives advantages of simple development efforts and detects performance and usability issues in poor mobile applications. The hybrid platforms provide complete access to update the container for new mobile releases, and avail code reuse across the web and mobile efforts. CIOs explore different solutions to build legacy architecture and make it easier for developed applications to deploy from one environment to the other.

4. Architectural Considerations

Technologies like AI, IoT, and data in banking analytics play essential roles in industrial production by initiating many digital services and solutions. Advanced features like image recognition, speech to text, sentiment analysis, and more help the organizations improve the market conversion rates and offerings to the customers using predictive results. Considering technology support to create seamless communication with customers allows organizations to collect valuable insights. CIOs identify the opportunity to combine technologies- conversational, machine learning, and invest in the effective low-code platform to train the chatbots automatically. With numerous digital advantages, low-code applications can complete the development process more precisely and smartly.

Low-code platform powered by data analytics leverages advantages of predictive results in the developed applications. CIOs recognize the extensive features of low-code platforms and the abilities to build secure application architecture. The architectural consideration ensures that all the actions performed by the developed application can be trusted. The offered advancements in applications support architectures to handle events using cloud-native approach. Low-code platforms highly depend on the organizational application demands and requirements; hence, CIOs look for a perfect low-code application developer to avail desired results. Advanced low-code platforms often offer a single mobile application container for developers or professionals to run multiple tasks smoothly. The innovative platforms also allow developers to personalize and tailor applications using event-based paradigm and minimize disruptions.

5. Backend Services and Integrations

For effective implementation of low-code platforms, CIOs balance their focus on both frontend and backend tools. As the existing enterprise systems face difficulties for modern mobile and multichannel workloads, improvising the backend system using low-code configuration-based approach helps offline support. Providing offline mobile support for legacy systems can extend the value of current investments on the application development platform. CIOs ensure the application analysis to identify capabilities for handling new workloads with modern API. Extending the integration requirements allow CIOs to test the platform's ability to support a phased and incremental approach to modernization and standard APIs.

CIOs'checklist to look for low-code platform covers all the significant aspects of developing a perfect application. Setting a clear business goal helps business professionals to achieve long-term business growth and marketing strategies. In the customer-driven era, low-code platforms help professional developers to build solutions faster, increase the organizations' productivity, handle complex variations form business applications, and fits in to provide modern business requirements with customer satisfaction. The digital transformation offers versatile solutions and business applications, which can efficiently serve the customers and automate internal workflows. Advanced low-code platforms drive optimization into existing application development processes, and help CIOs face incurring challenges.  

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