In today’s digital age, it is essential for organizations to invest in applications that can maximize their productivity and efficiency. Typically, choices are very black & white as one can either buy prepackaged software or build their own customized applications.
In my opinion, neither are very good options as they represent the extreme opposite end of the spectrum. A good third option did not exist before forcing organizations to live in this dichotomy.
The Packaged Software Rabbit Hole
For the most part, organizations tend to gravitate towards buying packaged software as the starting point as the use case, pricing, capabilities and on-going support are well defined. To which reduces the confusion and makes the buying decision easy on the front end.
However, during deployment, inevitably, some usability issues will tend to pop up as most packaged software is somewhat rigid. They also tend to drive the UI/UX and workflow in a certain way that may not fit your day-to-day reality or change in business condition. All of which, adds up to even more downstream costs from both human and IT perspective.
Case and point – One of the previous companies that I worked for standardized itself on Salesforce since day one. They even did a case study on my previous company because we were one of the early adopters.
While the implementation did bring a lot of good from a global customer management perspective, it also introduced a lot of post implementation issues such as:
- Cost
- Low startup to hook the user but quickly adds up if you are not careful with storage or amount of data being transacted.
- Any customization or back-end work tends to be VERY costly. We spent more annually on up-keeping & modification than the cost of licensing by almost 3x.
- Training & deployment
- Monolithic/mass market product is not designed to fit the individual or unique business needs in mind.
- Long initial training cycle and supplemented by monthly followups which takes the people away from their main job.
- Development & maintenance
- Bug fixes and feature enhancement schedule does not align with actual needs.
- Update to the platform which applies to the masses but it may negatively affect your particular implementation. Nothing ruins your workday faster by starting with a broken application after an overnight “update”.
Low Code is Somewhere In Between
With the continual proliferation of cloud, one of the biggest developments which proceeded and tends to be overlooked is the API and the containerization of services. These advancements, when coupled with a low code platform, can effectively mitigate the issues above and address on-going pains around building your company’s application stack.
By deploying a low code platform along side your existing legacy or cloud application, it can provide an OEM+ experience to your existing stack that combines the best of both customized & pre-packged worlds which includes cost savings, flexibility, and scalability.
For any organization that is looking to unlock additional potential from your employee and your application stack, low code application development is a worthwhile investment. It is also an efficient way to meet their unique needs while staying up to date with the latest technology offerings on the market today.
Whenever you are ready to start your journey towards efficiency and success, let us help you. Lonocode offers a FREE 1 hour consultation by filling out this quick form for first time clients.
