The minute you create custom code, your journey to digital transformation stalls. With custom code, you’re signing on for ongoing maintenance and regular troubleshooting, just to keep your applications functioning at their intended level. When it’s time to respond to business needs with a change to your business applications, you’re looking at even more time and costs.
Custom code is seldom future-proof. As your underlying cloud platform naturally evolves (a good thing), custom code will break. Sometimes, due to poor documentation and employee turnover (usually associated with older customizations), teams are left trying to untangle undocumented code written by an employee who left long ago.
That’s why when it comes to digital transformation, creating custom code should be your last resort when delivering transformative functionality.
Digital transformation is about enabling the enterprise, so shouldn’t we select a method that removes restrictions? It’s true that with enough time and money, custom code may deliver a branded, process-driven user experience. But most businesses don’t have that kind of time, or budget for that matter. Code is a perishable asset, and an automatic liability.
Why did we start writing so much code?
If code slows us down, why are we writing so much of it? As new technologies appear and evolve, organizations are writing code frantically to try to keep up. It’s so valuable to today’s companies that Microsoft recently acquired GitHub, the popular Git-based code sharing and collaboration service, for $7.5 billion.
While it’s true that developers are invaluable (we love them here at Skuid), is it necessary for them to be writing so much code? Many businesses haven’t yet stopped to consider that there might be much faster, more efficient ways to get things done.
If you have to call your IT department or a systems integrator to make basic changes in your business application, it’s safe to say that your solution is not sustainable. However, many business and technology leaders do not invest sufficient time into researching alternative ways to solve this problem.
To be fair, “research” entails a lot of work and cross-departmental collaboration. You have to study and experiment with the product, implement proofs of concept, and convince stakeholders in IT and the business to support the new solution. But the returns on this research investment can be huge.
Take United Capital, for example. When they chose to deploy a no-code platform as a replacement for Visualforce development they saved 56.75 initial person weeks after the rollout. One of my favorite quotes from the SVP of Technology:
We don’t talk about two week sprint cycles any more. Our sprint cycles are in days now.
Brandon Gage, Senior Vice President of Technology
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Discover the power of no-code.
Even for developers, too much code can be the enemy. By not investing in tools that help developers work faster and code less, you’ll end up with a gruesome backlog that your IT team will never get through, or an unplanned expense from your consultant.
As a disruptive technology, no-code and low-code platforms help developers plow through backlogs and create business applications up to 10 times faster than traditional development methods. Because less technical skills are required to use a no-code platform, businesses can also leverage citizen developers to build apps, a critical feature for companies short on IT resources.
Whether you have a developer or a citizen developer building your app, the cost of failure is low with a no-code platform. If the app you deliver isn’t exactly what the business needs, or if requirements change along the way, changes can be made in minutes.
But with code, the cost of failure is often months of rewriting requirements, writing, testing, and troubleshooting before the business can get what it wants. By the time the application is delivered, it might not even be relevant anymore. Learn why our customers say, “Technology is not a discussion point in a strategy meeting when using Skuid."
Conquer the fear of the unknown.
There’s a very real, visceral reaction that organizations often experience when it comes to mass change, fear. Fear that a solution won’t deliver what it says it will. Fear that choosing the wrong solution could blow the budget and cost us our jobs.
Fear that all of our work and investment will be for nothing.We all bought into the promise that enterprise software would make our lives easier, but it’s only made everything infinitely more complex. That’s why the key to a digital transformation that produces real results is not just about those technologies, it’s about the people who are using them.
Only by partnering with the right people can businesses actually transform, and continue to transform in the future. Fortunately, and I might be a little biased, the team at Skuid is highly experienced at coming alongside clients to help them get the most out of our no-code platform. With Skuid, people are coming up with creative, innovative, and positively transformative solutions and bringing them to life up to 90% faster.
Now is the time to focus on easy-to-use, code-free tools that any business person can use, and that engineers can extend without frustration. It’s time to issue a cease-and-desist letter to all high-cost, proprietary code. Ready to learn more about the tech you can use to transform your business? Download this free step guide to evaluating aPaas solutions: Get the guide
