Transformational Potential with Consumers
There’s no denying the increasing popularity and use cases for RPA, low-code, and no-code development platforms.
Those that embrace these technologies gain efficiency, agility, and more control over their application development and business process automation.
But, adopting new technologies like low-code and no-code is no longer just an IT decision, but also a business one.
Since this decision impacts everyone within an organization, change management and reskilling of employees are key components of the successful adoption of these technologies.
In this article, we’ll explore how RPA and low-code/no-code solutions work hand in hand, the implications for businesses that adopt these technologies, and how the role of IT service providers is changing due to the rise of these technologies. The possibility of transforming consumer experience is also explored.
Why RPA is Now Synonymous with Low-Code and No-Code Platforms
Until recently, RPA and application development were related but separate functions and only handled by IT professionals. But, with the rise of low-code and no-code platforms, RPA is essentially woven into the functionality of these technologies.
No-code platforms unlock and democratize the power of RPA across an organization by allowing non-technical people to build applications or automate processes without formal knowledge of coding. This has opened a whole new world of “citizen development” where any user can accomplish business objectives through intuitive and graphical tools without needing to outsource the project or exclusively rely on the IT team.
On the other hand, low-code platforms are built with RPA ( and more) in mind, allowing trained developers to speed up and automate their development process. Most enterprise software providers have already invested in integrating low code with their their cloud platforms capability and providing enterprise standards for reliability, scale and security. Low-code platforms also make it easy for developers to reuse the applications and processes they build across other parts of their organization which further increases agility.
Implications for Businesses Adopting Low Code/ No code solutions
1) Software development is moved in-house
Enterprise class no-code and low-code platforms are now available for IT teams to make development easier and more accessible. Though it is early days and there are a number of unanswered questions, IT teams can now start thinking of how to build applications and automate business processes in-house instead of relying on software or package vendors for their needs. IT can focus on building the core application while citizen developers can build peripheral and less mission critical solutions on-demand that directly solve their problems based on internal knowledge. This reduces costs, boosts agility, and gives businesses more control over their application development. From a business perspective, business teams now have an opportunity to digitally encode their business strategy and differentiation in process or products right into the application with a similar (or perhaps greater ease) that they do currently with a PPT.
2) Developers can elevate to Core Design, supervisory and governance roles
When you have more citizen developers within an organization using no-code, and developers reducing the burden of coding through low-code, it opens up the opportunity for IT to elevate their focus on higher-level roles of Core application design, supervisory and governance roles
. They will play a more involved role in looking at the big picture of the organization’s objectives and how modernization will support them.
With rapid digitization like we are seeing with many companies, there will always be challenges such as security and privacy. Both of these can receive more attention from IT when most of the development work can be streamlined through low-code and no-code solutions.
3) Businesses need a strong change management and reskilling plan
Implementing low-code and no-code platforms is as much of a business decision as it is an IT one. Not only are new technologies being adopted, but people’s roles in the company will shift. And all these changes need to be accompanied by a change management plan.
For change management to be successful, education of the C-suit will be a good starting point. IT will play a big role in outlining the pros, risks, and challenges that will come with the adoption of low-code and no-code solutions. There will need to be a great deal of transparency between the C-suit, management, and IT about what resources are available, what objectives need to be accomplished, and what the ongoing support for these efforts entails.
The C-suit and management need to be prepared for the rapid development that comes with using these technologies and have a strategy to govern all the moving parts. It will be the responsibility of IT to describe how the adoption of low-code and no-code fits into the overall modernization efforts of the organization. And, if you can get the c-suit to volunteer to take on some of the no-code efforts with their expertise, that’s a win.
Reskilling:
An extremely important part of adopting these technologies is having a plan for reskilling employees whose jobs have become automated. The best way to highlight this is by way of an example:
Due to the onset of covid, and even before, many companies have automated their call centers by deploying chatbots, eliminating the need for hundreds if not thousands of call center agents. Instead of getting rid of these employees, companies need to reskill these agents to be AI chatbot trainers. This can make the chatbots more effective and human-like. It’s also their role to monitor chatbot activity, watching for mistakes or areas that may cause legal trouble.
With the help of no-code platforms, these reskilled employees can make changes on-demand without the help of IT. Part of this reskilling is also making sure managers have models in place to handle the scale of these big changes.
Implications of Low-Code and No-Code for IT service providers
Instead of selling a full suite of development services to enterprise clients, IT providers can now play an important role in educating businesses about how to move development in-house and the change management needed. They also are positioned to help these businesses understand modernization in a way that makes sense for their specific objectives. Businesses don’t need to tackle big projects all at once but can democratize automation in small effective chunks as they gain insight into the value of low-code and no-code solutions.
As a provider, you can still play a supervisory function while helping the organization move the development work in-house and guide their citizen development plan. This gives IT providers the chance to focus on higher-level activities instead of spending most of their time on development.
It also opens the door to provide innovative SaaS IT models for small enterprises and businesses that may still want to outsource their development and automation work. Furthermore, the way IT providers build out IT teams will have more of a business/IT focus instead of exclusively focussing on IT consulting.
Does No Code provide a transformational potential for Consumer Experience- will it usher the era of the ‘Consumer Developer’?
We leave this as an open question- though we suspect that the pandemic may have thrown up the opportunity for such use cases already. Does No Code only apply internally within an organization s? What happens when consumers are able to participate in the choice and experience of their products or services through no code? For example, can consumers now choose the ingredients of their favorite biscuit at the time of manufacturing? A closer example is the non-profit automation tool ‘Upsolve’, which was recently recognized by TIME Magazine for addressing Civil Rights and Injustice. It enabled American users to relieve more than 300 Mill USD in debt by helping users fill out bankruptcy forms on their own ( https://time.com/collection-post/5937723/rohan-pavuluri) . What if Government designed and put up the bankruptcy form on a low code platform that could help Citizen Groups (including differently-abled) to create customized no-code forms for themselves?
We go a step further and explore if citizens can be empowered to use AI. We can take inspiration from Retail investing. The industry has come a long way ( with a lot of room for improvement)- with retail investors now being able to decide their risk profile and automate their investment strategies .If we logically extend that to AI concepts like confusion matrix or the choice of algorithms, then the current narrative of automation can include consumer participation in market creation / maturity . For example a conservative patient on a diy diagnosing kit for cancer can choose the option of false positive, with a high prediction threshold and his or her own preferred ensemble of algorithms and compare him or herself against a menu of publicly available data sets( of course it is not as simple but who can stop us from imagining !)
Finally, what can we reimagine combing RPA, 5G, Edge and the ‘Consumer developer*? It is a bit tricky to give further use cases but we can dare say that we may have a more inclusive way to embrace uncertainties including a next pandemic.
Start Modernizing your Business through Low-code and No-code Solutions
No-code and low-code solutions are going to accelerate business changes and democratize them so that business leaders can really shape the organization without needing a full tech background. This will improve agility and ultimately bring businesses more control of their development and automation efforts.
The key will be for businesses to have a strong change management and reskilling plan in order to adapt to these changes and experience the true value of low-code and no-code platforms.
If you’re interested in learning more about our offerings and how to get started on your next emerging technology implementation, schedule a call at https://go.oncehub.com/SridharKatta or contact us on our website at https://truvs.com/contact.