The future of software development and the unstoppable role of low-code

By Hans de Visser, Chief Product Officer at Mendix, a Siemens business

Gartner has predicted that by 2025, 70 percent of all new enterprise software will be developed using low-code. The future of software development will therefore be massively characterised by low-code. This will have a significant impact on how and by whom enterprise software will be developed going forward.

The prevalent use of low-code is already manifesting itself today in large and medium-sized companies as well as start-ups. In times of a worsening shortage of skilled labour, corporate decision-makers should therefore create suitable structures to ensure their ability to innovate and remain competitive.

Organisations across the industry are under enormous pressure. The reasons for this may not be new, but they are no less pressing: advancing digitalisation, rapid developments in artificial intelligence, the shortage of skilled workers and increasing climatic and geopolitical events that have led to unstable supply chains or have called previous production locations into question. Each organization is working to address its own unique sword of Damocles forged from any combination of these issues. Corporate decision-makers are working not only to prevent the proverbial disasters that sword may represent, but also drive the goals of their business forward. Software will be at the heart of the strategic management of these challenges and play an even more decisive role in the future.

Application development as the linchpin of digital transformation

Many decision-makers now realise that application development flows through the veins of an entire organization and that the solutions that are developed and deployed fuel everything from HR, finance, marketing, and sales to production, warehousing, supply chain and customer experience. A significant part of a company’s success stands and falls with application development.

For example, if the aim is to increase efficiency and expand innovative capacity: this requires applications for process optimisation and automation, which ultimately ensure a significant increase in operational efficiency. When basic, repetitive tasks are automated, the workforce can focus on higher-value tasks and projects. This leaves more time to create innovative products, solutions or services, yielding a clear competitive advantage.

Software also plays a decisive role in the design of customer experiences: By developing user-friendly applications that create added value, companies can increase customer satisfaction, intensify customer loyalty and build long-term customer relationships. Customers who already benefit from digital offerings from a wide range of service providers in their private lives expect B2B applications to offer comparable intuitive functionality and rich, modern interfaces.

In order to create a customer journey that is as seamless as possible and ensures an optimal customer experience, customer touchpoints and customer behaviour must be evaluated. Software is also used to collect, analyse and ultimately democratise the data and insights already available in the company at a central location. Making this data easy to access and evaluate for all stakeholders allows organizations to derive the most value from its data.

The backbone of a thriving software development lifecycle is a thoughtful data strategy. Well managed data leads to insights about your customers and end users that can reshape your existing products and services as well as inform and define new ones. The growing use of AI in enterprise development also demands an organized data landscape.

Transformation here and now – digitalise faster with fusion teams and low-code

What do you do when, on the one hand, new applications constantly need to be developed for areas such as customer experience or data management? And if, on the other hand, the IT department cannot be staffed to cope with its growing tasks – a situation that is being cancelled out by the prevailing shortage of skilled workers? Then the workload is unmanageable, the IT backlog grows and increasingly slows down companies in their digitalisation efforts. Especially in view of the ongoing shortage of skilled labour, which, according to Bitkom, is expected to lead to up to 663,000 unfilled IT positions by 2040. Company decision-makers must therefore be prepared for the fact that there is no easing in sight on the labour market and that the “war for (IT) talent” will continue.

Companies that now hope that the solution to the problem lies in the use of commercial off-the-shelf solutions (COTS) will quickly realise that this approach is rather counterproductive. The acquisition of individual solutions creates further data silos that make scaling more difficult. COTS also almost always require significantly more IT resources than what is advertised to implement. The allure of “out-of-the-box” COTS functionality is more pipe dream than promise.

The development of enterprise applications requires a holistic approach with goals that are tailored to the company and its specific requirements and needs.

Does this mean that corporate decision-makers are faced with an unsolvable problem? Not at all. Enterprise application development with low-code offers a way out of this dilemma and is therefore the decisive step for many organisations to counter the personnel and time limitations of software development with classic high-code.

Thanks to its visual character and drag-and-drop functionalities, low-code development also enables people without a development background to make a significant contribution to the software development process. Fusion or BizDevOps teams, which are made up of professional developers and technically minded people from other departments, not only allow significantly more software products to be launched, but also increase the quality of the software developed, partly because the future users are involved from the outset.

Fusion teams accelerate every phase of development by breaking down silos and facilitating the exchange of knowledge and feedback. The collaborative approach eliminates bottlenecks and streamlines the development process.

A global survey of 700 Mendix users from 2023 shows that the concept of fusion teams not only looks good on paper, but is a real trend: 47 per cent of developers stated that they already work in cross-departmental teams.

The Lünendonk 2023 “Cloud, Data & Software” study speaks even more clearly: 76% of the companies surveyed stated that they wanted to dissolve their previously separate organisational structures and transfer holistic responsibility to BizDevOps teams.

Democratisation of software development for greater corporate success

It is therefore time to restructure teams or even entire departments in order to accelerate the change in software development and ensure that the digitalisation of companies keeps pace through the use of fusion teams. This relevance must also be anchored in the minds of corporate decision-makers, who should quickly begin to identify talent within the company, support them with concrete upskilling offers and arouse interest in digital skills, be it with low-code workshops or further training on the potential of AI tools.

If you look at the latest global surveys, the analysts at Gartner also recognise in the “CIO Agenda 2024″ that shared responsibilities should be cultivated. Not only in the form of fusion teams, but also at C-level. According to Gartner, when CxOs pool their resources, CIOs are twice as likely to achieve or exceed their goals compared to CIOs who leave IT delivery to their department alone.

The establishment of fusion teams and initial positive experiences with the resulting better distribution and utilisation of available resources as well as the increase in quality in software development can demonstrate how worthwhile the concept is. Establishing collaboration not only across departments, but also at different hierarchical levels of an organisation is therefore very promising.

The collaborative nature of low-code can provide the impetus for further changes in the organisation. Decision-makers no longer have to be held back by staff shortages and backlogged IT projects; instead they can enable their employees to acquire new skills, think outside the box and work together on new things. Software, as a driver of corporate transformation, is therefore no longer developed by one for all, but rather by all for one – the entire organisation. This supports the change that many companies are still struggling with. It is therefore time to get started.