Democratizing App Development with No-code

Businesses today face significant and varied challenges. From streamlining production and communication in an always-on world to satisfying diverse customers, partners, and employees, companies everywhere are grappling with new challenges and pressures. Companies need to do more with less, stretch existing resources, and immediately respond to changing conditions in a world where bad (or even tepid) reviews can spread rapidly. 

In today’s environment of disruption (technical and otherwise), the urgency around digital transformation is palpable, and a failure to embrace digital transformation can quickly lead to a failure to stay in business. In response, many enterprises are turning to the cloud, machine learning, and other new tools like no-code application development to maintain velocity, gain control, and improve resilience and revenue.

But digital transformations don’t always happen in a vacuum — that is to say, in the IT department. Success depends on empowering every employee with the tools, resources, and knowledge to solve problems at both a team and company level. 

No-code development platforms extend the power of software development beyond IT to allow non-technical employees to create customized business applications without writing a single line of code. Equipped with no-code development platforms, “citizen developers” can play larger roles in building apps that help move their teams and companies forward.

Unlike low-code development platforms that abstract away most of the complexities of software development, no-code platforms remove all of the technical complexity to allow users to focus on the task at hand – not on writing the code that powers the solution behind the scenes. In this sense, no-code platforms expand the definition of who can be a developer; Gartner predicts that by 2023, the number of “active citizen developers at large enterprises will be at least four times the number of professional developers.”

This democratized problem-solving approach can unlock a variety of possibilities for enterprise, including the ability to: 

• More effectively reuse existing technical assets for new purposes: Value from digital assets is variable, and the same data set can deliver different value depending on how it’s used. For example, data that sits unused, in a database has no value until, for example, an app is created to mine that data for strategic trends and actionable insights. No-code platforms make it easy for all employees to create new applications that recompose existing (and potentially unused) data in new and innovative ways.
  
  
• Combine legacy and modern technologies: Beyond reusing technical assets, no-code development platforms allow users to easily combine legacy and modern technologies to solve existing problems with new insights. For example, information tracked in a spreadsheet can be mined for value — without IT intervention — by using machine learning technologies to produce predictions and trends that can inform and impact strategy. With no-code platforms, anyone can use advanced technologies like machine learning without ever encountering actual code.
  
  
• Unleash untapped workforce talent: Embracing no-code development as an enterprise means embracing the untapped problem-solving potential present in all employees. From marketing and sales to HR and finance, no-code platforms can empower everyone to solve problems at an unprecedented scale by thinking creatively and building their own solutions. When employees can solve their own challenges with customized business applications, IT is free to focus on more complex tasks with overarching needs for the business.
  
  
• Build secure solutions without straining IT: No-code platforms give enterprises the ability to dramatically expand their problem-solving capabilities without putting a strain on IT. But providing employees with tools to create their own apps shouldn’t come with a trade-off that compromises security. Unlike apps that fall under “shadow IT,” no-code platforms like AppSheet ensure enterprise security protections and compliance oversight with administrator control over functionality, documentation, management, and more. When companies provide their employees with IT-sanctioned, no-code development platforms, they empower the entire organization to create secure solutions without relying on IT or putting company data at risk.

When the people closest to everyday business challenges are given the tools and resources to solve them, the speed at which a company can move and the number of people working on solutions can both dramatically increase. It’s time to get moving with a no-code development platform like AppSheet.

Appsheet Blog