When Low is More
It's not uncommon for the same word to have several meanings and applications, and that's exactly what happens with the words High and Low. Since in the everyday world we are surrounded by concepts that begin with these two little words, it's important to take a closer look at them in order to get a proper understanding of what exactly they mean to us.
In general, the words High and Low can be used either as an adjective or as an adverb. In the first case, they are used to qualify or classify something, and can be replaced by the words High and Low, for example in High-Quality. In the second case, they are used to give an idea of intensity, and can be replaced by the words Very and Little, as for example appears in Low-Sugar.
When used as an adjective, our association of value is almost direct, i.e. something Low usually means something inferior, but when used as an adverb, a more in-depth analysis often needs to be made. Let's take the case of the word Low-Sugar, for example, which we see so much of these days printed on the food we eat. Is eating something with Low-Sugar good or bad for us?
Sugar has a high glycemic index and, when consumed in excess, can cause serious damage to health. This is because it increases blood glucose levels and hinders the production of the insulin hormone, which can cause numerous diseases and even type 2 diabetes. Low-sugar, in this case, doesn't mean low quality sugar, but rather a low amount of sugar, and when we find it associated with the foods we eat, Low-sugar means more health for us. Here, Low is More.
At the beginning of this century, information technology saw the emergence of a new approach to application development. Led by OutSystems, development platforms began to emerge that use a predominantly visual interface and allow developers to create, combine and reuse pre-developed and pre-tested components in an orderly and logical way to build systems and applications to meet the most varied uses and needs, using few, if any, lines of code. This new approach has been called Low-Code.
Developing applications using this approach allows companies to meet their business needs faster, with better quality and security, and at lower costs. It also makes it much easier to train new developers, maintain, update and evolve existing applications, integrate and migrate legacy systems, and speed up the adoption of innovations.
Low-Code, therefore, does not mean low code quality, but rather little code quantity, allowing the Low-Code approach to be used in the creation of applications for departmental use and also for Global use, low criticality and mission critical, with little or a lot of complexity, meeting the needs of a few employees to millions of consumers.
Western-Union uses OutSystems' Low-Code in its Digital Banking application, Humana and Unimed-BH in their TeleMedicine application, Medtronic to monitor its patients with heart defects, Nimbi to manage the Supply-Chain processes of more than 130,000 customers, KeyBank in its customer credit operations, and the US Department of Defense to manage the benefits program for soldiers and their families.
It's no coincidence that Gartner estimates that, later this year, the Low-Code development approach will already be present in around 75% of the applications developed in the world. This is also why, in this year's study by 4Network Research of more than 100 Brazilian companies, 2 out of 3 CIOs surveyed are already conducting application development projects using Low-Code.
That's why Low-Code is More.