The Low-Code Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Never mind the chill image in the low-code meme, a parody of  the iconic album cover (remember those) for "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" (circa 1970) recorded by the late emcee Gil Scott Heron. The relaxed image belied the urgency of Heron's soundtrack for the cultural revolution of the early 1970s.

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Fast forward to the age of hyperautomation and the low-code revolution has inspired a new generation of CIO looking to inject Agile development processes into their IT organization to liberate companies from a software development crisis that has held back innovation for decades. The crisis is so serious that:

Half of all business applications don't get delivered on time or fail to meet expectations and 40 percent of development cycles are lost to technical debt.

Low-code automation is the opposite of that.

It's a better, faster way of building business applications. It's a productivity multiplier for developers and non-developers alike. It empowers us to turn ideas into applications 10 to 20x  faster than writing code. With a modern low-code platform, you don't code an application. You draw it like a flow chart instead. You simply draw what you want your new application to do. Drag and drop interfaces, rules, and integrations and the low-code platform does the rest.

Getting Ahead of the Curve

All you have to do is look around to see that software is everywhere and connects everything. Perhaps this is why the overwhelming majority of IT developers (86 percent) feel like they're in a pressure cooker of never-ending demand for new applications and integrations with legacy systems and data. On the flip side, though, 80 percent of developers and IT execs rate low-code as the best way to get ahead of the application development curve. And stay there.

Here's why that matters: With the blistering pace of digital transformation, competitive advantage can evaporate in a flash. Your biggest threat might not be in your industry at all. In fact, you may not even see it coming like many of the incumbents blindsided by big tech in retail, financial services, and healthcare.

Playing it Safe Is Risky

Something else to consider: Digital disruption is killing off large companies faster than ever before.

We now have a situation where the lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 has plummeted from 60 years in the 1950s to less than 20 years today, according to Credit Suisse.

So, how do you survive and thrive in this volatile environment? How do you get to market faster, serve customers better, book revenue faster, and turn ideas into business applications faster than you ever imagined?  Which brings us back to the low-code meme. To paraphrase Gil Scott Heron:

The low-code revolution will not be televised. You will not be able to stay in your application development comfort zone, my friend. You will not be able to tune in, zone out, and skip out for snacks during commercials. Because the low-code revolution will be live.