After businesses were embroiled by operational disruptions throughout the height of the pandemic, Timo has now reflected on his observations and found that his mission to continue encouraging innovation has naturally become embedded in businesses future. 鈥淲ith unprecedented times came vastly accelerated innovation in order to survive.鈥�

Speaking to 顿别肠补迟丑濒辞苍鈥檚 Chief Value Officer, 鈥淣othing is impossible anymore鈥� is simple the new business experience in light of the innovation that has become possible. The downside to this journey stemmed from the elevated pace that businesses were required to innovate, and in turn, ended up doing so in silos.

鈥淚 recently saw some data from International Data Corporation (IDC) that showed, a couple of years ago, 75% of organisations were innovating with a strategic approach, leaving the remaining 25% who were innovating in silos. Unfortunately, those numbers have changed. Organisations innovated in a silo because they didn’t have time to do it in a more strategic way, and now the number of organisations that have a strategic approach has dropped to 50%. So, unfortunately, there’s lots of innovation, but because of all these new silos, it’s actually harder to do even more innovation in the future.鈥�

With these results in mind, analysts are in agreement that to innovate both at a faster pace and with strategic efficiency, there needs to be a solid information foundation coupled with a flexible set of building blocks. What the pandemic shone a light on was an atmosphere of uncertainty experienced by organisations which can be combated with flexibility, agility and the technology foundations to support it. Those organisations that weren鈥檛 able to adapt or differentiate themselves unfortunately were forced to fold.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STDFvPBYW74

鈥淚 think one of the key takeaways, I hope, is that some organisations were a little complacent about needing to innovate. Why innovate? My business is stable. I don’t need to do anything differently. Instead, that thinking is a little bit like standing on a down escalator. You’re slowly moving backwards compared to the rest of the environment. In order to stay still in modern business, you have to be walking up the down escalator. You have to put effort in because the environment around you is evolving. Customers have higher demands, your employees have new expectations, your competitors are upping their game, so you have to do a certain amount of innovation just to stay still.鈥�

Asked on where organisations should begin their innovation efforts, Timo reminds us that because of a high investment in technology solutions that automate the time consuming parts of day to day operations, there鈥檚 a new wave of solutions such as a solutions. How do accelerate innovation this way? By letting business employees do more of the innovative work themselves in their area of expertise without IT and technology being a bottleneck.

Speaking to a customer, they explained to Timo that his 鈥榢nowledge workers鈥� know exactly what’s going wrong in the business and they know what should be done to fix it, but they feel powerless. 鈥淭hey feel like they’re at the mercy of the machine because they can’t fix it themselves. All they can do is point it out to a technology team, but that team don鈥檛 have enough time, there’s never enough resources, there’s always a backlog. So, the answer is no, we can鈥檛. Now, these new tools are becoming really powerful, where business people can create their entire applications, workflows, analytics and do it all themselves.鈥�

There are always some dangers to be aware of with implementing solutions like these, where if you let anybody in your business become involved in the technology, the result is probably going to be chaos. 鈥淣ot everybody’s ready to be enabled. Everybody’s gonna recreate the wheel and get calculations wrong.

So the right approach is not low-code or no-code or pro-code, but co-code where you have a combination of the technology teams putting in place the Lego bricks that reflects the different objects of the business like a customer or an invoice and so on. Employees can then take those blocks and use them, change the order and wire them up in different ways, and have different authorisations and so on in the knowledge that they’re going to do that in a way that isn’t gonna be damaging for the system it’s gonna be scalable, it’s gonna be compliant, follow all of the security laws and so on.鈥�

To hear more from this discussion, dive deeper into business innovation projects and hear more from Tim about his technology predictions for the future, listen to the full episode of The Best Run Podcast .

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Without digital technologies like ERP, Cloud, and AI, pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer and Moderna would have taken much longer to trial, produce and critical vaccines to people. Tools and platforms behind these solutions are often hidden from the limelight. We need the right tools to operate, tinker with, connect, and compose new systems, which has created an unprecedented need for skilled IT professionals.

Passive End Users to Shape-Shifters
Around the world, there are roughly 26 million software developers today – same as the population of Australia – who use an array of programming languages, tools, and technologies. However, there are 100+ million professionals – end users – running critical business processes in banks, airlines, hospitals, retail companies, factories, and government agencies.

In the next 10 years, a vast majority is expected to join hands in building, not merely consuming digital solutions. For them to take a leap across the treacherous waters of full-stack programming, many (LCNC) are being made available. It should help trigger their primal instincts to build 鈥� to personalise, to restructure business processes, design new apps, construct workflows, and deploy machine learning models on data to make better decisions.

Such LCNC tools result in faster collaboration across teams, reduced cost of innovation, greater automation, and better user experience. This has been the 鈥� the Finland based aspiring technology leader in the premium electric motorcycles segment, where a small team created new apps in record time to manage evolving business needs.

However, while greater democratisation of software building occurs, it is not as if code has suddenly become irrelevant. Nor has it removed the need for software engineers. In fact, AI infused tools such as promise a future where tools transform into extensions of a skilled worker.

Systems for the Future
The humble axe remained the longest used tool in human history. It took millions of years in our evolutionary past before we built complex structures. Tools and skills are two sides of the same coin, and we achieved speed and scale by sharing knowledge of tools across communities, across generations.

To build digital systems of the future, we need to bring in the community. are already thinking about investing on better technology platforms. The future of work will need a that enables knowledge workers of varying skillsets to compose new business processes and re-shape their digital worlds.

With the collective intelligence, and better tools, what will we build? Bigger, better, faster, cheaper systems. Perhaps also, different, something unimaginable yet.

Steve Jobs told us in 2007 as an indicator: “In the end, we try to make tools for people, “and we’re constantly surprised with what people do with them.鈥�

This article originally featured on

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This has in turn put enormous pressure on IT departments to be able to deliver value for their business in quick timeframes. This increased demand coupled with the scarcity of talented developers has brought the rise of Citizen Developers who know the business processes and could develop fit to purpose apps or automation for their department to use.

According to 鈥淥n average, 41% of employees outside of IT 鈥� or business technologists 鈥� customise or build data or technology solutions. Gartner predicts that half of all new low-code clients will come from business buyers that are outside the IT organisation by year-end 2025.鈥�

Software providers like 麻豆原创 have already started to double down on L Strategy for Application Development and Process Automation[LG1] . With over 70% of the world’s transactions touching an 麻豆原创 system, there are more than 230 million 麻豆原创 Cloud application users worldwide. 麻豆原创 is recognising the importance of empowering business users to close the skill gap and enable them as citizen developers.

With the increased demand and popularity of the LCNC topic, we are seeing many LCNC platforms emerging in the market and organisations are starting to prioritise and evaluate how these platforms would help them accelerate the delivery of apps and automation.

Despite its growth, many misconceptions around the LCNC topic are preventing organisations to take the first step.

Low-Code/No-Code platforms hinder collaboration
LCNC platforms provide an intuitive drag and drop visual interface for any business user to build apps. Like any initiative, having the right governance is crucial. If there is no governance, this would lead to each department installing its own LCNC tools and building apps on their own. Often this results in data silos and risks in security & compliance.

It鈥檚 important for IT leaders to partner and collaborate with different lines of businesses to set up the governance model and offer the right set of tools thereby enabling business users to build apps that meet the standards. Apart from setting up the governance, IT teams need to periodically supervise and provide support around integration/APIs for consumption in LCNC tools to ensure apps developed by business users are real-time and provide the single source of truth.

Low-Code/No-Code platforms do not offer enterprise-grade apps and are relevant for small departments
LCNC has evolved over the last few years. There are many platforms out there today which offer a sophisticated set of capabilities that can be used to build enterprise-grade apps. Many platforms offer reusable components which can be easily integrated to build complex applications that span across multiple solutions.

For example, you can build an that monitors assets that are maintained in an 麻豆原创 system and triggers service requests based on information in the CRM system.

Low-code tools provide no flexibility to customisation and locks you down
Contrary to this misconception, many advanced LCNC platforms do offer the ability to customise the apps. Often there is a need to embed reusable business logic and enhance the capabilities of the apps generated using LCNC platforms. These capabilities give more freedom for businesses to be able to rapidly build apps that are tailored for their requirements.

Portability is an important factor when it comes to selecting the right platform. One needs to select the right platform which enables access to the generated code and customize it before deploying elsewhere.

Low-Code/No-Code is only meant for Citizen Developers
LCNC platforms can be used for different skill levels. On one hand, we have Citizen developers who know the business domain and can use intuitive tools to create applications. On the other hand, we also see professional developers using LCNC tools to accelerate their application development.

As touched on in the previous point, often we see the need to extend and customise the output provided by LCNC tools.

This is where Citizen Developers work in collaboration with professional developers to enhance the application to meet the business requirements. Hence, Citizen developers, as well as professional developers, will end up using LCNC tools but for different purposes.

In conclusion, LCNC platforms play an important role in empowering both line-of-business users and IT developers to accelerate the development of apps and foster collaboration. There is no doubt that the topic of LCNC will continue to evolve rapidly in the coming years fuelling innovation and providing more agility for businesses to meet the changing customer demands.

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