CEOs might not be too interested in the mechanics of most technologies, but they are certainly interested in how those technologies can help the business launch new products, retain customers, and become more profitable.
Digital experience is also increasingly important to consumers. Recent Nuxeo research indicated that 54% of shoppers would change from a favored brand or retailer to a competitor if the overall digital experience did not meet their expectations.
This has all been clearly illustrated during the Covid-19 lockdown. Businesses needed to launch new services that met the changing market requirements and could not spend months doing so. It is in this context that ‘low code’ development has risen up the business agenda, with CEOs all over the world becoming increasingly aware of how low code can help enterprises become more agile and responsive.
Covid-19 and the content digitization challenge
A realization of the need to be ready for anything had dawned long before Covid-19, but lockdown cemented the thinking. If an organization’s employees, supply-chain partners, and customers found it difficult to engage fluidly with content and processes beforehand to progress to the next actions, this was certainly the case once office premises closed and usual courses of action could not be taken.
Changing Marketing Landscape Post COVID-19
Previously, companies looked at the content digitization challenge as a means of continuous business differentiation. How could they pivot activities to respond to new opportunities and keep ahead of competitors with new and exciting propositions? During the lockdown, maneuverability became a matter of survival. If different parties couldn’t access the information or digital assets they needed on-demand to accomplish routine or new tasks, companies’ business continuity was directly under threat.
By contrast, those companies that were empowered by smart and flexible content access were able to progress ably under even the most extreme conditions. The most notable point of difference for the businesses that continued to thrive was that 100% of their critical processes were digital – supported by on-demand, anywhere access to whatever information or content people needed.
Low code development as an innovation enabler
This has all helped accelerate the rise of low code development, especially in the context of content access, management, and re-use. Low code is about giving companies the ability to create and roll out new user experiences without having to engage in long development projects.
The idea is to make developers more efficient, by allowing them to re-use existing components and templates to speed up application delivery, drawing on vast libraries of proven constituent software assets. Rather than doing away with the need for developers, low code allows IT teams to make smarter and more efficient use of their time and skills, accelerating the delivery of new functionality.
The realization that this low-code development approach can be applied specifically to content-based applications is particularly exciting for organizations emerging from lockdown. It paves the way for companies to create new content-based services at high speed. Whereas it might have taken up to 12 months to create a new customer or supply chain experience the traditional way, development teams with access to a low-code development platform for delivering new content-based services and experiences can do so within just a few weeks.
Low code and Big Tech
This ability to sprint from idea to execution is transformational, for both innovation and development teams, and puts businesses in a very powerful position relative to their competitors. It is no coincidence that Big Tech companies like Amazon and Google work in this way, to bring out new early versions of new products or user experiences at speed – to get them into users’ hands quickly so that they can test out the potential in a quick, low risk way.
CMOs Need to Remain Flexible to Adapt to the Changing Market Dynamics
Using an iterative, low-code approach to development, they are able to combine already- proven functions and features to create something new, which they can then test with customers in a live environment – giving them something to refine and build on in subsequent releases.
Crucially, shortening the gap between idea and launch gives these companies a critical market advantage. Then they can go about evolving the application or service to deliver the best possible customer experience – one which they can keep tweaking and embellishing over time.
In 2020, it is unrealistic to try to conceive and build the perfect application from scratch, especially when the need for urgency is more start than ever. A low-code development approach is much more viable, allowing for the unforeseeable and providing businesses with the agility to create new content-based services at high speed.
