Digital transformation is now the top priority for enterprises across all industries. If businesses don’t evolve through digital transformation, they risk being overshadowed by more efficient competitors delivering more value to customers.
Yet, most businesses struggle to transform successfully. 70 percent of digital transformations fail due to challenges like tight budgets, high technical debt, and IT resource shortages.
Enterprises are now adopting low-code technologies to overcome these digital transformation challenges by including non-technical employees in application development.
However, implementing low-code solutions also requires a major shift in organizational culture and employee responsibilities. With 80 percent of technology products and services predicted to be built by non-technical professionals by 2024, employees and enterprises must be ready for this shift.
The challenges of digital transformation
Implementing a strong digital transformation strategy requires CIOs to invest significant money, time, and resources in IT. It's also essential to have buy-in from all the stakeholders involved as the business processes and priorities shift. While digital transformation sounds simple, its vast depth and breadth make implementing it challenging.
Some of the many challenges enterprises face when implementing a new digital transformation strategy include:
Overburdened IT department:
An increasing IT backlog with limited IT resources and longer development cycles leads to an overburdened IT department that is always playing catch up.
Shadow IT:
When business users need solutions faster than the IT department can deliver, they use new applications to manage work without IT approval or supervision, leading to long-term data security and maintenance issues.
Outdated legacy systems:
While legacy systems manage critical business functions, they can be vulnerable to data breaches, challenging to scale, and expensive to manage. These legacy systems monopolize IT resources and make digital transformation even more complicated. When the modernization is not handled correctly, it can lead to problems like compatibility issues with new systems and excessive outages.
Resistance to change:
Employees can resist new tools and technologies due to the fear of change in their day-to-day processes. Change is uncomfortable for everyone, but you can streamline this by introducing new tools that are easy to use and have a low barrier to entry.
The power of low-code
Low-code takes a visual approach to application development, allowing users to build and deploy applications faster, with little to no coding knowledge. Low-code platforms enable citizen developers or business users to build complex applications on their own quickly while reducing the need to rely on IT teams. With more developers, you can deploy various applications in less time, maximizing efficiency and productivity.
With low-code platforms, enterprises can also address time-sensitive requirements and improve their responsiveness to the constantly changing markets.
“IT can leverage one low-code development platform and have the flexibility to meet all department initiatives. Low-code platforms that are flexible and can achieve results across the organization are extremely valuable to IT organizations.”-- Suprakash Das, GEP’s VP of platform engineering. “
Overcoming digital transformation challenges with low-code
Low-code platforms have the flexibility and versatility to overcome digital transformation challenges and support continuous digital innovation in enterprises. They can boost digital transformation strategies by democratizing app development and opening new possibilities to solve complex problems.
Here are some of the many ways low-code can help overcome the major digital transformation challenges:
Reduced reliance on IT teams:
Since even business users can leverage low-code platforms to build applications independently, the constant reliance on IT teams is significantly reduced. Instead, IT teams can use the freed-up time to focus on more complex projects and quickly clear up the IT backlog.
Automate processes:
Low-code platforms can help build apps to streamline and automate repetitive workflows, eliminating time-consuming manual work and saving time.
Reduced shadow IT:
Low-code platforms reduce shadow IT by giving employees IT-approved tools that they can use to build applications and streamline day-to-day business processes. With a centralized location to build and manage all enterprise applications, data siloes otherwise caused by shadow IT are also eliminated.
Seamless integration with existing legacy systems:
Low-code platforms can simplify and fast-track legacy modernization by allowing users to build extensible modern apps that can incrementally replace the legacy systems in an enterprise.
Low-code is the way forward
Leveraging low-code equips businesses with the ability to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives. Businesses minimize the risk of being overshadowed by competitors while delivering more value to their customers.
Low-code can transform organizations at scale, allowing them to continuously improve, adapt, and stay agile in an ever-changing business landscape.
Ready to go on a digital transformation journey? Adopt Kissflow as your low-code platform to accelerate your digital transformation strategy.
