Lean IT in Practice:
Low-Code Rapid
App Development
Business process heads tasked with drawing out operational efficiencies across firms are progressively more driving discussions around important technology choices. Their exceptional vantage points across sections and alignment with the business enable them to offer solutions that make a real impact. Nevertheless they often struggle to provide technological solutions, notwithstanding a deep understanding of business needs, due to their incapability to write code and traditional process methodology improvements distribute decreasing marginal returns owing to snags in translating unstructured data into measurable, actionable data points.
In tandem, process leaders’ technology requests are piled onto IT’s mounting backlog, which is never addressed quickly enough. Even if process leaders find apt point solutions among a growing number of options, they face the technical challenge of deploying applications, which they may be unprepared to handle. The evolving processes of business stakeholders auxiliary add to difficulties, often requiring combined, incomplete iterative customization of applications, and requiring costly reserves and time.
As technology solutions and data propagate across sections, geographies and unconnected point solutions, process leaders must offer a single source of truth to make certain that they can enable stakeholders with actionable reviews based on accurate, fresh data. The pace of market insists and rising customer expectations position mounting demands on process leaders to enable their organizations with technology faster than ever.
At the centre of the perception of “lean IT” is eliminating waste, focusing on constructing value for the end-customer either in the business or outside, utilizing customer demand to drive process activity, and turning a flywheel of continuous improvement however these principles cannot live in a vacuum, devoid of understanding the business processes permitted by the IT solutions created to support them.
Effective provision of IT resources, coupled with managing the processes enabled by IT-sanctioned solutions is key in aligning those resolutions with customer expectations and saving more money while developing them. Lean thinking — both in IT and, more roughly, the business — develops an environment for innovation and iteration around the configuration and deliverance of processes.
A educational enquiry to set the stage for lean IT thinking: What is the best result that should be delivered to IT’s customers? Evaluating each step within the process supported by a given solution — and working backward from required outcome — will lead to insights around how IT teams can optimize app development and delivery to bring down costs, enhance operational efficiency and effectively meet the requirements of customers.
Traditional programming techniques and application development platforms cannot remain up with growing demands on IT teams. The swiftness of development on legacy systems is too measured, and the cost of technical talent and internal resources is too high. IT teams facade a mounting backlog of applications requests from increasingly digital-savvy stakeholders in the business. As they deem potential solutions, progressive IT leaders are seeking the right balance between productivity and control whilst it comes to managing the development and deployment of apps.
The occurrence of “shadow IT” initiatives, scattered app islands with loads of data, and increasing demands for a widening diversity of applications for processes with varying levels of maturity are convincing innovative IT leaders to search for platform solutions that facilitate the business to put in to servicing its own app requests, collaborate over process and app iterations, and help app builders turn into more effective and productive. Concurrently the right solutions for IT must provide the precise level of customizability, robustness extensibility, and governance.
IT leaders are gradually more turning to rapid application development solutions as extremely productive alternatives to traditional development settings and low-code to no-code RAD platforms is displacing less flexible, resource-draining applications characteristically hand-coded in traditional development languages by limited, expensive aptitude nevertheless as a broader, non-coder business-savvy pool of app builders are occupied and enabled by IT, potential risks around app administration and lifecycle management enhancement.
