In today’s highly competitive and dynamic world, companies and public sector organisations cannot afford lengthy software development times, let alone the high cost of implementing their digital transformation,

The process of rapid change itself remains imperative. Given this problem, any company today is faced with a choice.

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Suppose you wanted to create an inventory program which pushed notifications on stock levels to your mobile device.

You could either hire a team of developers and spend three months on the project—or you could put something workable together in an afternoon using a (relatively cheap) codeless environment.

Which would you, as a head of IT, choose?

The fact is that these days, the new codeless environments have become powerful enough to do a lot more than inventory management.

Various vendors offer suites of codeless developer tools which come with pre-set templates to handle contacts, customer information, document management, expenses, fault reporting,  building management, project management, sales tracking, and more.

The range of tasks that can be tackled by today’s codeless environments is limited only by the developer’s imagination. Furthermore, the beauty of codeless environments is that is equally geared towards handling front-end and back-end applications.

They are just as suited to building apps capable of collecting credit card numbers as they are of satisfying the needs of timesheet collation or project coordination.

Having in-house staff develop software applications and apps based on their intimate knowledge of the job at hand is also much faster than outsourcing.

To give one example, pharmaceutical companies, in particular, tend to restructure as often as once a year and so their accompanying digital transformation processes must be reasonably rapid.

Other companies, meanwhile, are searching for new markets and new directions and cannot afford the luxury of waiting too long to go digital.

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Some 86 per cent of enterprise executives believe they have only two years to integrate digital initiatives before suffering financially or falling behind their competitors, according to a study by the enterprise software firm Progress.

At the same time, organisations have to adapt to new technologies such as mobile applications.

A 2012 study by Forrester Research concluded that “employees work, collaborate, and make key decisions anywhere on any device” and hence that 48 per cent of employee-facing IT investments are bound to be mobile-focused.

 

In 2017, the US planning software company Planview found that 49 per cent of companies in a survey had seen one or more IT projects fail in the past year. Meanwhile, 55 per cent of project managers cited budget overruns as a reason for project failure (IT-Cortex).

The bottom line is that one third (33 per cent) of organisations worldwide have cancelled a digital transformation project in the past two years.

The average cost of a failed project is more than €500,000 according to a recent report by Fujitsu Corporation.

While many companies or organisations attribute the failure of their digital transforming projects to poor design, unrealistic expectations, or even bad management, there are, in fact, several main reasons why they fail:

 

• Failed software development projects,
• Taking too long to develop the software,
• Corporate restructuring cycle getting shorter,
• Inability to cope with the rate at which the market is progressing.

 

The best way organisations can avoid these pitfalls is to shorten the software development life cycle or SDLC.

They can do this, for instance, by using codeless development tools since this support such trending methodologies as Design Thinking, Fail-fast, and DevOps.

In this way, organisations can empower every in-house user to build their own apps (indeed, they are probably already doing this with more basic tools like Microsoft Excel).

Rather than outsourcing their software projects to ponderous, IT houses they can also seek to break their IT and mobile requirements into smaller pieces so that it is easier and faster to turn around.

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The codeless developmental model offers businesses a platform to develop their own mobile and web apps without the need to code; this means that companies can now produce working web and mobile apps within the space of minutes instead of weeks, or months.

The fact is that codeless development is the way forward for lots of corporate digital needs—and a big opportunity for companies to provide those solutions.

This creates a new space called “DevOps”, an amalgam of the “development” and “operations” cycles. Instead of doing one and then moving to the other to testbed new systems processes, companies can now close the circle and accomplish both simultaneously.

Project managers can adopt DevOps methodology to shorten the software development life cycle and use development platforms that provide the opportunity to “Fail fast”, identify shortfalls, and arrive at a quick fix.

The evolution of codeless software development tools has recently been identified by the Info-communications Media Development Authority of Singapore (IMDA) as one of the nine key tech trends in the region.

The use of such codeless platforms quickly materialises the ideation of an innovation, puts it into live testing and allows for a Fail-fast to identify shortfalls and arrive at a quick fix.

In line with IMDA’s direction, Singapore-based 7-Network Pte Ltd. recently launched JET 2.1, a codeless development platform which supports the use of Design Thinking, Fail-fast, and DevOps.

We’ve recently launched a codeless system, JET Workflow 2.1, which empowers ordinary users to develop mobile and web applications without training.

One of JET’s clients, an Indonesian energy provider, based in Jakarta, uses its codeless tools to create a back-end inventory program which feeds through to users’ smartphones, allowing for easy and convenient stocktaking on the fly.

Another Singapore business uses JET’s GPS, picture-taking, and time stamp tools to create “proof of visit” notifications for their roving technicians to update their supervisors on service calls.

These apps are developed and deploy for production use within minutes and are refined over time as and when needs arise.

But as already mentioned, today’s codeless environments are also suitable for front-end applications too.

Many codeless developers offer integration with a variety of microservices like SMS gateway service providers, e-vouchers/e-coupons management, online payment gateways, or text-to-voice messaging.

With our software, any user could, for example, develop an app to accept credit card payments within just a matter of minutes (versus weeks if this was tasked out to a professional developer).

 

Faced by overly lengthy delays in undergoing a digital transformation of their business, companies in my home market of ASEAN cannot afford to overlook the maturing codeless and low-code space.

China, meanwhile, is still lagging: we’ve yet to witness a major codeless product emerge from that market.

But this is the usual way of things on the Chinese mainland and, just as Alibaba is arguably overtaking Amazon these days, so China is probably destined to lead the pack in codeless development tools within just a few years.

 

By embracing the new codeless IT trend businesses unquestionably stand to make the transformative process more accessible, certainly much faster, and more goal-oriented (less “hit-and-miss”) than was previously the case.

In this way, digital transformation need not be an arduous task but a timely and relatively effortless journey of exploration into possibilities.

“Digital Transformation” has been defined as “the transformation of organisational activities, processes and models to leverage the changes and opportunities offered by an assortment of digital technologies”.

Although digital transformation is used mostly in a business context, it also impacts other kinds of organisations like governments or public sector agencies.