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Drive better decision making with low-code and no-code solutions
Nov 06, 2024 · Authored by Rob Long, Chris Wagner
Organizations are constantly striving to develop innovative solutions for their customers and internal departments. Application development – the process of designing, creating, testing and deploying software applications – plays a crucial role in this process and having easy access to building custom solutions is essential for organization looking to enhance customer engagement, improve operational efficiency, reduce costs and stay competitive and responsive to market demands.
However, the journey to achieving these objectives can be daunting, particularly when dealing with the complexities of traditional pro-code development. Conversely, low-code solutions make it easy for these daunting objectives to become simpler challenges that anyone in your organization can tackle with confidence.
What are low-code solutions?
Low-code solutions simplify application development by providing a platform where users without extensive technical skills or coding experience can create custom applications, automate workflows and analyze data. These platforms are primarily web-based and feature innovative drag-and-drop capabilities, making them accessible to everyone across the organization – from new employees fresh out of college, eager to make improvements to their workspace, to seasoned professionals dedicated to enhancing project delivery times.
The transformative power of low-code solutions lies in their ability to keep the focus on the end goal. Tasks no longer tasks no longer need to be added to IT’s backlog as the person who needs the solution can be the one creating it. Just like how everyone can use Outlook, Excel or PowerPoint to create documents and perform tasks, these tools are user-friendly and require minimal training before use – democratizing app development by allowing both pro-code and citizen developers to build applications.
What are the benefits of low-code solutions?
Developing pro-code solutions is often a significant undertaking, requiring a large team of specialists and substantial financial investments. This often results in these solutions being placed in months-long backlogs, awaiting the necessary funding and resources for execution. Once the project begins, the back-and-forth communication between the business user requesting the solution and the IT member developing it can extend project timelines, increase costs and make it more challenging for the organization to justify the investment.
This is where low-code solutions really shine. Instead of requiring immediate funding, users can build their own solutions and demonstrate their effectiveness. This approach allows for a clearer conversation about how beneficial the solution can be to transforming the organization, displaying it’s worth in investing in further to enhance and expand the solution beyond what the low-code platform can do. Although often, many organizations realize that the low-code solution meets enough of their needs to no longer require pro-code development.
By reducing the time and resources needed for application development, organizations can achieve faster solutions at lower development costs, enable smaller projects to be completed more quickly and foster a culture of innovation by supporting employees in experimenting with new ideas and solutions. This efficiency translates into higher return on investment (ROI) as organizations can reallocate resources to other initiatives.
What is the Microsoft Power Platform?
The Microsoft Power Platform is a comprehensive suite of low-code development tools designed to enable users to build custom business solutions, automate tasks and analyze data with minimal coding expertise. Power Platform consists of five key products:
- Power Apps: A robust suite of low-code development tools that enable users to build, customize and deploy business applications
- Power Automate: A dynamic automation platform that automates manual, repetitive tasks, streamlining workflows within an organization
- Power Pages: A low-code website development platform supporting robust external website deployments
- Power BI: A business analytics tool where users can build out interactive dashboards and reports to visualize and analyze data from various sources
- Dataverse: A web-scale cloud-based data platform for security storing and managing data used by business applications
Utilizing this suite of tools can provide an organization with a myriad of benefits. For example, the ability to quickly adapt and respond to new opportunities though increased business agility is now more achievable than ever. Imagine you have a new incoming processer and want to create an app to consolidate the metrics and information in a sustainable and manageable way. With low-code solutions, this is entirely feasible as you can have an app up and running in less than 15 minutes. With the ability to develop solutions rapidly, your approach to problem-solving and innovation changes fundamentally, dramatically shifting the landscape of what types of solutions you might consider developing and transforming how you think about and implement solutions.
Another benefit is the ease of maintenance and strong governance properties. Through centralized administration tools, automated updates and built-in monitoring capabilities, the Power Platform significantly reduces the burden on your IT team. With full visibility into the apps being developed across the organization, their utilization, workflows and integrations, your IT team can monitor these components within the ecosystem, preventing potential issues related to unregulated expansion and ensuring adherence to governance plans. This proactive approach helps avoid future headaches for the technology staff, ensuring a sustainable and manageable application environment.
Example use cases
When identifying opportunity areas, consider processes that are manual, repetitive and/or time-consuming. It’s important to note that not everything needs to be automated. Identify the parts of these processes where an individual can add the most value and let automation handle the tasks leading up to and following the individual contribution. By strategically integration automation, you can maximize productivity and ensure that your unique skills are utilized where they matter most.
Streamline processes with Power Apps
This state system had been using a manual process for monitoring, following-up on and resolving auding findings and needed a digital solution that would simplify and automate the process by increasing review and resolution times.
Read our case study to learn how Microsoft Power Apps was utilized to create a simple dashboard solution that provides users with a website-like interface for adding, editing and resolving audit findings.
Modernize reporting with Power Pages
This state government division, working in collaboration with nursing home facilities in the state, was faced with an outdated Microsoft Access database system and required a swift and secure solution to enhance their compliance reporting system.
Read our case study to learn how deploying Microsoft Power Pages lead to a refined, efficient and secure system for generating essential cost reports while laying the groundwork for enhanced productivity and data management.
How we can help
Low-code solutions can revolutionize application development throughout your organization – enhancing productivity, agility and innovation. By strategically integrating automation and leveraging these tools, organizations can maximize efficiency and ensure effective use of unique skills while driving significant business growth.
Baker Tilly’s digital solutions team, in collaboration with Microsoft, can support your organization in leveraging low-code and no-code solutions to enable users across your organization – improving operational efficiency, innovation and your competitive advantage.
Interested in learning more?
This article was derived from the Drive better decision making with low-code and no-code solutions webinar, watch the full recording below.
