Workplace Innovation 4.0: How companies stay competitive thanks to low-code

We all know companies that have disappeared from the market due to a lack of innovation. Some of these companies were even long considered leaders in their field. In other words, innovation is necessary for the existence and growth of every company. Only with innovations can companies react quickly to changes in the market and leverage them as new opportunities for themselves.

This is also the case in a newly forming “post-Covid world” in which there is an increasing focus on “mobile-first” and remote work. As a result, companies must be able to provide their employees with the necessary tools and methods quickly so that they can continue to contribute to the company’s value creation. Due to this, people and their work tools are moving to the center of attention and becoming the foundation on which every company must build.

The solid foundation and innovation accelerator is and remains IT. But software development has long since ceased to be a closed-off department within a company. Instead, it is increasingly softening and becoming the responsibility of different employees within the company through no- and low-code approaches. Ten years ago, Netscape founder Marc Andreeson said that “every company must become a software company.” Today, that statement is more fitting than ever.

It’s no longer enough to implement off-the-shelf software if you expect to gain a competitive advantage. Mastering and harnessing the opportunities offered by digitization requires the ability to experiment at an ever-faster pace.

To stay continuously innovative, companies need to think in a more agile way. This requires more than just tools like low-code, but the right attitude and integration. And agility is an attitude. That’s why we’re seeing a shift in consciousness in the corporate world: we’re evolving from a static working model to flexible ways of working and ultimately to continuous improvement. What is essential is a cultural change within the organization so that this development does not remain just a platitude but can be anchored in the mindset and processes.

In trying to build a solid digital foundation, there are a few challenges along the way. One is trying to solve the new demands on software development with old ways of looking at things. We need to move away from project-based ways of working and see digital solutions as products.

Product management is shifting focus and defining success based on their offerings’ value to customers, not on milestones achieved during product development. New approaches such as low-code, agile methods, responding to user feedback and constantly adapting to new market conditions are both integral and timely here, compared to project-based methods where all budget and staffing decisions are tied up in a project plan at the beginning.

Rapid application development is essential for continuous growth and improvements. While innovation has traditionally resided in IT departments, this is no longer the case today, meaning that software development must extend across the entire enterprise. For this, no- and low-code platforms are the enabling tool.

More than anything else, these tools shouldn’t be too complex but should strike the right balance between user-friendliness, simplicity, and flexibility. In addition, a concept should be developed that uses modular, ready-made components [building blocks principle] to enable easy but also fast app creation by fusion teams – i.e., hybrid teams of operational employees and developers.

With this approach, digital products can be developed quickly and scaled up immediately and deployed on a large scale in the enterprise right away. Moreover, based on application building blocks, such platforms offer adaptable tools to collaborate more efficiently and overcome digital challenges with more ease. No-code/low-code platforms thus dissolve departmental boundaries and, as tools, create an organizational environment for hybrid forms of work, paving the way for the complete digitization of every company.

New types of adaptive organization and innovation architecture are needed to keep up with the speed of change. For this, agile and continuous development within the framework of hybrid and remote working models must become a reality. The use of low-code can significantly support this. The right technology needs to be understood and leveraged as an enabler to drive digital transformation and ensure business efficiency, agility, and security. The question that remains is which companies want to strategically embrace this to survive this change.