Awareness, training, and governance are essential to creating low code value

Low-code adoption is booming and has become a technology of high interest for businesses and software development teams. To dive deep into this topic, with support from KPMG’s Lighthouse team, HFS brought together 18 thought leaders from major European enterprises for a digital roundtable (DRT) to discuss ways to unleash the potential of low code across industries. Our expert panel discussed the importance of training employees and mastering low-code governance to deliver the desired outcomes of flexibility, speed, and agility in developing fit-for-market and fit-for-purpose applications.

We supported over 800 clients last year with low-code solutions, and a high-value area for low code continues to be in legacy modernization. Lifting functionality from core systems and making components available to the front office has immediate value.

— Rui Goncalves, Partner, KPMG

Low-code solutions make digital change faster and more widely accessible

Low code can help firms create an environment where both IT and business are better able to engage and innovate to craft applications for their users’ needs. Low-code application platforms (LCAP) are garnering interest as they empower cross-functional teams to develop solutions in a fast, simplified, and visual toolset. Being able to actively collaborate on software development can establish democratized development models, which result in agility and responsiveness to market, business, and individual needs. Coupling business requirements with timely solution delivery is a huge advantage for companies.

Know your use case to apply technologies to solve problems. With low-code solutions, logic is user-driven rather than technology-driven. This is what makes the technology so powerful.

— Head of Process Optimization, global financial service firm

Training is essential as technology leaders become more business savvy (and business leaders more technology savvy). Both teams must share an understanding of the tools and methodologies to deliver desired results. That need is well served by low-code solutions. As Exhibit 1 illustrates, low code creates advantages from the delivery of experiences to the ability to drive a change in mindset about how software development is changing. Along this journey, CIOs and application development leads must play an important role in defining agility, sustainable impact, and leveraging the lessons learned, especially from past Agile and RPA efforts.

Exhibit 1: Understanding where low code fits in the journey from delivering experiences to driving change is a key to success

Source: HFS Research, 2022

Lack of awareness and training are the most significant headwinds to low-code adoption

In HFS’s DRT with executives from Global 2000 enterprises, we found the key low-code discussion point is awareness of how these solutions deliver results for stakeholders (Exhibit 2). While low code may be a decade-old concept, many leaders don’t appreciate the full benefits real-time collaboration on application development can bring. As such, it needs a nudge from the leaders to see enterprise-wide adoption and awareness of low code.

Exhibit 2: Call it a lack of awareness or leadership conviction; low code isn’t getting the limelight it deserves

Sample: 18 executives from Global 2000 enterprises, holding a range of positions from low-code platform owners to heads of intelligent automation, digital transformation, and GBS
Source: HFS Research Low Code Digital Roundtable, September 2022

To succeed, low-code adoption must incorporate the efforts required to educate users on how to think about code development. This requires a basic level of training users on software development across the business to ensure basic principles of design, documentation, and dependencies. With this basic understanding, the business can be enabled to create more than one-off personalized tools; they can participate in the creation of long-term value.

A low-code development platform requires an adaptable governance framework

Every organization, regardless of its industry, wants to build role-relevant applications. We need front-end employees to be more productive, effective, and efficient in their jobs. Yet, before such applications are put into production, a set of guardrails must exist to address change management, documentation, security, and integration issues. Results from our DRT session poll in Exhibit 3 show that for executives from Global 2000 enterprises, developing a stance on governance is a priority.

Exhibit 3: Low code might change the game, but for now, the low-code platform owners need to focus on the governance framework

Sample: 18 executives from Global 2000 enterprises, holding a range of positions from low-code platform owners to heads of intelligent automation, digital transformation, and GBS
Source: HFS Research Low Code Digital Roundtable, September 2022

While the rationale for developing and adopting low code may be apparent—speeding the capturing and delivering of customer value—the means to fulfillment remain varied. Some leaders used a mindset similar to their past process automation efforts. Unfortunately, this approach led to the creation of solutions without the rigor needed for long-term reporting, optimization, or support.

We leveraged our work in RPA [robotic process automation] governance and applied that to our low-code efforts. We placed the product development mindset to the business and retained the global go-live and support within our technology teams.

— Global RPA Lead, global construction and workplace firm

While RPA experiences are a great starting point, low code can potentially have a much larger impact. Leverage these lessons learned, but unlike with RPA, keep in mind that you’ll need to develop awareness and education at a more granular level across your organization to truly realize its benefits.

The Bottom Line: Democratized low-code development helps augment and accelerate value proposition and time-to-market for new software products and software-enabled service offerings. Both business and technology leaders need to work together to encourage collaboration, but they can’t skimp on training business users on the basic understanding of how software must be designed for long-term value creation.

Democratizing development accelerates time-to-customer-value, which in turn drives business growth. As many companies adopt low-code solutions to innovate how processes, tasks, and workflows are automated, the real value arises from how they can democratize development. Teams closest to the customer can adopt agile mindsets that speed up the conversion of business requirements to development, resulting in real business agility.

The value of low code to our organization is business teams can play a hands-on role alongside technology teams in our digital transformation efforts.

— Head of Digital Transformation, global premium car manufacturer