Zero Impact: The Biggest Impact of All
BLOG: App development software innovation is required for businesses to remain competitive
Craig Sproule — 7 October 2017
As the world economy transforms by adopting more digital modes of operation and delivery, software innovation is now at the heart of what businesses require to remain competitive. Digital-first strategies are what sets those companies reinventing traditional business apart from their more traditional competitors. Amazon, Uber and Airbnb are examples of the new class of technically driven businesses.
The difficulties businesses face keeping pace with required market demand can be largely attributed to the complexity associated with software creation and its ongoing management. Software is complex, changes are often difficult to implement (typically a change can ripple through an entire system), current improvements in modern application lifecycle tools and techniques are inadequate given the pace of business. Demands made to update existing systems, and deliver new ones, continue to outpace existing capabilities.
Given the above, a new model is required: a new systems approach to application design, requirements gathering, development, testing, versioning and deployment. A model, or environment, that accelerates time to market, decreases costs, and lessens the critical dependencies on engineering resources. In other words, a new technology that allows for digital transformation at market pace. Packaged application vendors created products that could be configured to meet exact business requirements. Those packaged applications have been the solution staple for most modern businesses for the past thirty years. For many, however, these packaged applications have become the limiting factor in enabling business transformation. In an effort to meet the evolutionary needs of the business in which they are deployed they’ve been heavily customized. Customization has occurred to such an extent that it is unviable to further customize them to meet the rate of change required by the business line. They continue to play a critical role in the enterprise but are quickly becoming expensive data repositories.
Delivering agility has once again become a function of application development. The world is awash with development projects focused on moving solutions to the Cloud and blockchain is quickly becoming an important factor in delivering new forms of commerce. The pace of reinvention required is being underserved by the software industry’s ability to deliver.
As their name implies, low-code development technologies require developers to write code to address the more complex aspects of a requirement. At this point in the development process, the business is back in the traditional development paradigm which brings with it the many well documented and understood flaws in the model. Simply stated, the traditional development model has a very real impact upon a business’s ability to achieve digital transformation, and as such, introduces competitive risk.
The challenge therefore is to create a technology that disrupts the traditional development model. What is required is a zero code capability without limitation with respect to the level of application complexity that can be achieved. In removing the need to write code, such a technology also invariably empowers a greater demographic of creative expertise. This enables the business to leverage a broader skill set and bring solutions to bear much more rapidly and in closer alignment with requirements.
At Crowd Machine, we developed a systems wide approach to address the constraints of the current software development and delivery models. With Crowd Machine, modelling the solution requirements results in a functioning app and deployment of the app is a one click process. Crowd Machine can be used to rapidly create and modify sophisticated mission critical apps that are secure, scalable and robust at rates up to 45x faster than conventional development methods.
