Accelerate Innovation with Low Code

Accelerating innovation with low-code solutions is a starting point for many organisations who want to leverage the cloud to achieve their business goals. This article will take you on a journey of discovery through challenges, scenarios, and solutions to common business challenges. What is surprising is you may already have the solution; you just need some guidance on how to implement if effectively.

Introduction

Organisations are increasingly looking at digital solutions to address shortages in technical skills by adapting their IT development strategies. Enabling everyone to develop from the business to IT and pro developers, organisations can increase technical capacity and accelerate innovation cost-effectively. Gartner expects that by 2025, 70% of new applications developed by enterprises with low code. Increasingly, we are seeing organisation adopt the Power Platform to accelerate this journey into the cloud.

Challenges & Solution

Below are several challenges organisations face currently where a low-code development environment such as the Power Platform will help:

  • Hard to scale businesses efficiently and securely due to shadow IT that sits outside of central governance and control.
  • Custom applications are costly and challenging due to higher barrier to development and requiring an extensive coding knowledge base.
  • Customers are increasingly requiring agile solutions that take days instead of months to build. Due to changing needs, these solutions need to be adaptable and change with the business.
  • Accelerating workflows from start to finish is increasingly a priority as pen and paper processes take up time completing redundant tasks.
  • Organisations need to maximise data quality which is difficult with error-prone paper or Excel solutions. This reduces the confidence in the accuracy of data held across the business, which can hinder innovation and restrict useful insight.

The Power Platform helps bypass these challenges by accelerating innovation with low-code which enables everyone to developer digital solutions using integrated low-code development tools. This suite of tools provides the following benefits:

  • Modernise operations at scale.
  • Differentiate services and experience.
  • Accelerate journey into the cloud in a secure and governable way.

Scenarios

Microsoft provides the following scenarios based on interactions across the partner community and directly with their client base.

Enable Everyone to Innovate

Enabling everyone to innovate ensures anyone from a business IT or pro developer background can build better solutions and drive innovation. Using low-code tools from the Power Platform, anyone can develop better solutions and drive innovation. Not only that, but they can also do so quicker and in a controlled manner with built-in security and governance. Thanks to being centrally managed IT can monitor and manage the rate of adoption and ensure a positive impact on the business.

Top Pain Points

  • Short on developer time and skills.
  • Demand for custom and tailored apps are at a high.
  • Slow processes due to no automation.
  • Siloed data across departments.
  • Inability to sale security and under a governance framework.
  • No way to control data permissions.
  • Gaps between systems lead to errors.

Business Outcomes

  • Reduce time spent building and increase time spent problem solving.
  • Decrease manual errors and resolve issues faster.
  • Save money spent outsourcing custom builds.
  • Connect business data across apps and departments.
  • Scale solutions seamlessly to meet growing demand.
  • Reduce overhead costs and increase staff efficiency.
  • Simplify integration across departments and services.

Rapidly Build Apps

Rapidly building applications means the business can fill gaps between systems and meet requirements faster. This involves extending current platform/solution functionality due to the Power Platforms native integration with popular tools. This means with the right support; a business can drive innovation internally with the users that access and work in systems day in day out.

Top Pain Points

  • Dev time lost to switching apps and platforms.
  • Cannot keep up to date with changing demands.
  • Takes too long for dev team to collaborate.
  • IT ticket queues and one-off requests take time.
  • Technology sprawl splinters IT time and focus.
  • Manual data collection leads to report errors.
  • Platform not user friendly.

Business Outcomes

  • Increase agility and decrease time to marketing building with low code.
  • Embed teamwork and collaboration in application development.
  • Improve time to market and scale solutions across the organisation.
  • Decrease IT maintenance and increase security and governance.
  • Consolidate apps and increase time to focus on strategic work.
  • Reduce IT backlog with low-code apps and reduce IT costs.
  • Improve insights.

Automate Business Processes

Automating business processes help to deliver end to end innovation by replacing paper and manual processes. Enabled using API, RPA, AI and bots, organisations can adapt legacy systems to streamline operations and look to centralise systems. This could be to create a single source of the truth or connect systems to reduce manual overhead.

Top Pain Points

  • Scarce resource requires doing more with less.
  • Current automation tools are cumbersome.
  • Legacy, on-premises software limits automation.
  • Limited tools for building bots
  • Application data is not secure.
  • Barriers between pro dev and low-code teams prohibit scaling.
  • Repetitive tasks and processes take time.

Business Outcomes

  • Eliminate paper-based processes with fully digital operation.
  • Increase staff efficiency by automating legacy tasks.
  • Reduce errors due to manual processes and data pulls.
  • Improve time to market and reduce business risk.
  • Reduce IT and staff time spent building complex bespoke solutions.
  • Democratise automation and reduce time spent on legacy processes.
  • Reduce operational costs with automated processes.

Next Steps

Organisations will start using low-code technologies to drive innovation, develop offerings, increase value, and reduce inefficiency. This is all possible with the capabilities present in the Power Platform whether that is using Power Apps, Power Automate, Dataverse, Power BI, Power Virtual Agents and beyond. The Power Platform is not just about products that answer a problem but bridging the gap between business and IT, enabling innovation with the blockers of technology.

If you would like to learn more, contact us. We can provide Architectural Design Sessions (ADS) to help start this journey into the cloud using the Power Platform. We will tackle key business challenges and work out show your organisation how the Power Platform will support your journey.

Contact Us to find out more!

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