Nearly every organization in India is attempting to move up the digital curve or achieve digital transformation for myriad enterprise challenges. Corporate India is now dipping its fingers in the acronym soup of buzzwords like machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation(RPA), which are being thrown around as the key towards the digital leap.

But behind all this flash and buzz, all of these technologies function well only through applications that support them. India’s diverse customer groups, cultural breadth, and intense brand competition raises the bar on app development outcomes. But building the right apps that enable digital transformation can be a notoriously long and arduous process. As a result, more organizations are adopting low code software development platforms to help them become nimbler in driving market disruption and delivering on customers’ digital expectations.

Low code tools make application development simpler. Capabilities like out-of-the-box user interface (UI) templates or drag and drop integrations allow anyone relevant to the development project, even thos lacking technical ability to create and modify applications faster than ever. The result is that organizations today can quickly deliver app functionalities or new processes to stay abreast with market disruptions.

Low code is expected to be the silver bullet for organizationstraversing their digital transformation journeys in a constantly changing market. Below are five reasons why low code is the foundation towards accelerating digital transformation.

1. Closes the gap between demand for apps and developer talent
Low code application development platforms are aimed to bridge the shortage of skilled developers in an organization. Today, the demand for app development is growing rapidly; beyond what enterprise IT departments had envisaged or can keep pace with. A study by Gartner predicts the demand in the market for app development will grow to at least 5x faster than what IT is capable to deliver by 2021.

Advanced, low code platforms are readyto deploy and less expensive for inhouse customization, reducing the need of an army of programmers. On the other hand, professional programmers are in high demand, teams are short staffed on this resource, making them overworked. It leads to bottlenecks in the innovation workflow. Instead of relying only on the professional

coders,such platforms enable non programmers such as business analysts, marketers, and departmental specialiststo contribute to application development. These'citizen developers'can use their experience with visual tools to work collaboratively with IT to design and modify operation-specific applications.

True organizational collaboration and digital transformation depend on enhanced agility, speed, and productivity that are backed by next-generation low-code environments

2.Encourages Cross-functional knowledge sharing
How do IT, operations, business, marketing, and sales collaborate with coding? Visual models. These give everyone a common language they all understand. Disparate teams can work together to build apps that improve both customer engagement and drive operational efficiencies.

Low code enables every part of the organization to contribute to application development. Frontline workers can create apps that provide nextlevel customer experiences. At the backend, CIOs and IT leaders can tap into knowledge from various departments to create better internal apps that drive operational excellence.

3. Delivers a more agile environment for collaboration
The Agile methodology is a favorite among today’s organizational leaders who preach the virtues of building apps iteratively, with constant feedback and collaboration. By bringing citizen developers into the development process, organizations enable an agile environment for collaboration.

As opposed to the old way of creating huge requirements documents, lowcode platforms make it easier for business users to enter their requirements directly into the application development environment. Therefore, business requirements are not lost in translation by IT. Stakeholders move the project forward in manageable chunks and quick victories instead of an all or nothing proposition that can delay time to market. And, just as important, the firm’s skilled developers will be able to allot more time on higher value work, instead of constantly chasing down business leaders for business requirements.

4. Enables scalable and rapid innovation
Low-code platforms help organizations rapidly move from starting small to evolving and scaling to drive digital transformation. Organizations can quickly build out Minimum Viable Products(MVPs), deploy these apps on the fly, learn and optimize, and scale development cycles, and foster continuous innovation. Without the need to write complex code, today businesses apps can be executed in more channels DIY-web modules, mobile chatbots, etc. Additionally, cloud based low code platforms enable organizations to easily move between cloud options like private or hybrid platforms, enabling greater flexibility.

5. Offers limitless and continuous business transformation
Low-code strategies aren’t merely futuristic or aspirational; they are already being implemented. The next generation of low code solutions offers role based authoring environments aimed at offering tools to anyone who interacts with enterprise applications. These could include intuitive or visual authoring experiences for professional developers, citizen developers, or data scientists.

Slow and expensive, code heavy app development had its day. But that day is over. True organizational collaboration and digital transformation depend on enhanced agility, speed, and productivity that are backed by next generation low-code environments. Leaders who take the time to put the right app development infrastructure and foundations in place will find greater successes as they move along their path towards digital transformation.