Low-Code: A strategy for innovation
According to the "Global Technology Leadership" study conducted by Deloitte in 2023 with more than 1,100 information technology leaders in companies spread across more than 42 countries around the world, the IT budget forecast for 2024 will average around 5.85% of revenue, representing a growth of more than 50% compared to the pre-COVID 2018 figures (3.64%).
Unfortunately, this same study points out that only a small fraction of this budget (19%) will be used by companies to generate value by fostering innovation, with the rest being spent on less strategic initiatives, such as maintaining, operating and updating the current technological park.
This is why projects to modernize legacy applications and systems are already in 3rd place in the ranking of IT priorities in the "State of the CIO 2023" study, conducted by Foundry with more than 1,000 CIOs from companies of various segments, sizes and locations, behind only Risk Management/Security and Business/Data Analysis.
Other interesting initiatives appear in the top 10, such as the adoption of Artificial Intelligence, the migration of applications and systems to the Cloud, and Automation. The reasoning is simple: it is necessary to reduce operating costs by adopting more modern technological solutions in order to direct IT investments towards more strategic initiatives, such as innovation.
This is where the recent study "Total Economic Impact of OutSystems", carried out by Forrester Research, comes in, exemplifying the results found by Deloitte and endorsing the priorities listed by Foundry. In this study, the direct savings measured by replacing the licensing of legacy systems with new applications developed on the OutSystems low-code platform represent only the tip of the iceberg (4%) compared to the total possible savings.
The biggest savings come from reducing spending on more operational activities, such as those linked to the development, evolution and maintenance of applications (32%), and those that make business applications available to end customers more quickly (26%) and to meet initiatives to increase operational efficiency (38%).
But it is not only reactively, that is, helping to reduce operational expenses, that OutSystems' low-code platform can contribute to innovation. It can also contribute actively, being used at all stages of this process, from ideation, through prototyping, testing, implementation, scaling, and evolution.
It's very easy to create a responsive web or native mobile application for promoting and managing the ideas funnel, and even use your favorite form of gamification to add some fun to this stage. Application prototyping can be done directly on Canvas in the platform's own visual development interface, reducing additional costs with third-party tools and the creation of mockups; and testing is greatly reduced by using artificial intelligence to automatically detect errors and performance bottlenecks.
The implementation stage has a specific assistant that streamlines all DevOps cycle management activities; and the platform's Cloud Native architecture guarantees the scalability and performance of applications as usage grows. Feedback can be collected directly from end users to feed back into the ideas funnel, thereby reducing innovation cycles.
In addition, the Forrester study also points to application development cycles that are 2.5x faster on OutSystems' low-code platform compared to other development strategies, resulting in cost savings and shorter time-to-market for various business initiatives, but above all, saving time in the talent agenda, which can be very well directed towards innovation-related initiatives.
Although not all companies today can afford to direct a significant portion of their revenue towards innovation, it's hard to imagine any change in this scenario that doesn't involve some strategy for adopting low-code development platforms at the core of application development, evolution and maintenance activities.
In this sense, it's good to understand right away that not all low-code platforms on the market are the same, especially when it comes to dealing with intellectual property, with OutSystems once again standing out and guaranteeing its customers total sovereignty over everything created on its platform.
A detail that makes all the difference when it comes to innovation.