5 Benefits of No Code Digital Transformation in 2024

No code/low code platforms could be dominating companies’ IT stack in the near future. According to Gartner, by 2025, 70% of new apps will have already been developed through no code/ low code tools, up from less than 25% in 2020.

Parallelly, companies are increasingly focusing on company-wide digitization and digital transformation. According to IDG 89% of all companies in 2020 had adopted a digital-first business strategy. Unfortunately, 70% of such digital transformation projects fail.

Using no code tools to power digital transformation efforts – i.e. no code digital transformation – can lower the failure rate and ensure a more streamlined transition rate. This article explains the top 5 challenges undermining your digital transformation efforts, and how no code tools can resolve them.

What are the challenges in digital transformation initiatives?

In our article on digital transformation challenges, we laid out 5 main obstacles hurting digital transformation efforts:

1. Talent shortage
2. Employee pushback
3. Security risks
4. Limited funds and an unclear budget
5. Lack of business agility

Leveraging no code development platforms can address these challenges and help accelerate digital transformation.

What is no code digital transformation?

No-code digital transformation is a process of leveraging no-code or low-code development platforms to automate and streamline business processes without requiring extensive coding knowledge or expertise. These platforms enable business users to create digital solutions, such as web and mobile applications, workflow and process automation tools, and chatbots, among others, without writing code from scratch.

1. Tackling talent shortage

The Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting, and the imbalance between supply and demand for tech-savvy employees, can hurt digital transformation initiatives.

If you’re unable to have professional developers to create apps, low code tools can help. That’s because citizen developers, with no coding skills, can use the drag and drop functionality, user friendly interfaces, and customized templates to create business apps.

Moreover, once you’ve started integrating digital solutions to your stack, you’d be offering a more attractive work proposition to employee candidates. A survey done by Harvard Business Review showed that it’s very important to +80% of a company’s employees to use modern tools and methodologies across its business processes. This will help you battle the current labor shortage better than your competitors.

Learn more about how automation can help with labor shortage.

2. Resolving employee pushback

According to Forbes, “resistance for fear of being replaced” is one of the reasons why digital transformation initiatives stagnate: Employees fear job loss to automation and react by pushing back against new ideas.

However, no code digital transformation can help in empowering teams and minimizing against employee pushback in 3 ways:

1. Involving employees in the process: A no code platform enables codeless app development and automation. This allows citizen developers to actively be involved in the digital transformation, thus making the process less foreign, alien, and scary.
2. Personalizing the workflows: Low-code platforms enables workers to personalize their workflows. Employees that empowered and autonomous to adjust their workflows to their preference can be more likely to participate.
3. Improving employees’ digital skills: Low-code development provides workers with the necessary incentive to upskill and improve their digital literacy. This enhances their skill set and increases their bargaining power in the job market.

3. Mitigating security risks

Digital transformation initiatives pose two main security risks:

• Increased attack surface: Adopting new technologies may introduce new vulnerabilities that can be exploited
• Data breaches: Digitizing business processes means dealing with, collecting, and storing more data, increasing the possibility of data breaches

No-code platforms can help mitigate security risks and ensure that the company is meeting security regulations. Security benefits of no code digital transformation are:

1. Using industry-standard security protocols that are regularly updated over-the-air to address new threats and vulnerabilities. This reduces the risk of security breaches caused by outdated software or inadequate security practices.
2. Centralizing IT management and decreasing shadow IT. Shadow IT—unauthorized software and services used by employees— can pose security and compliance problems. Companies can reduce data breaches caused by unauthorized software by giving staff a no-code application development platform.
3. Helping companies implement secure coding practices by providing visual development platforms for application development. This reduces the risk of coding errors that can lead to security vulnerabilities, as users do not need to write code manually.
4. Providing automated testing and debugging features that can help identify and fix security issues before they become a problem. Parallel to that, low code tools provide real-time monitoring and analytics dashboards for business users themselves to respond to security threats quickly.

4. Being cost effective

Digital transformation projects aren’t cheap. The average digital transformation project cost $27.5M in 2020. But 70% of those projects fail, wasting $5.5M, and having and unclear ROI projection. No code digital transformation can help create new apps, enable easy data integration and customization, and help integrate pre-existing enterprise software at a cheaper cost. That is because low code solutions:

• Have a reduced development time
• Consume less development resources
• Have lower maintenance cost
• Do not need an existing infrastructure

Learn more about how no-code platforms can be cost effective.

5. Increasing business agility

Customer, business, and market factors change frequently. This means that digital transformation requires agility. For example, a successful digital transformation project should have a fast time to market timeline for launching its services and keeping with the competition. Alternatively, if an existing workflow lacks customer centricity, the development team should fix it immediately.

Low-code/no-code platforms allow companies to scale down what doesn’t work and add layers to what does by offering pre-built components. In addition, as no code platforms are SaaS and cloud-based, teams and users can collaborate simultaneously for faster development.

Lastly, no-code/low-code platforms often come with built-in features and tools for scaling applications, allowing businesses to grow and adjust their operations with ease. This can help maintain performance levels and ensure that technology remains aligned with business objectives.

For more on digital transformation

• Top 7 Technologies Automating the Oil & Gas Industry
• Guide to Business Process Automation: Types, Use Cases & Best Practices
• 3 Ways DX Improves Project Management

If you need consultants to advise you on transforming your business, we also have a data-driven list of digital transformation consultants prepared.