When it comes to technology, among the biggest concerns companies face is the rigidity and inflexibility of legacy platforms. These platforms make it difficult for business and IT leaders facing ever-evolving business needs to seamlessly implement a change.
In some cases, an organization’s current tools simply can’t perform a necessary change or add a new feature. In others, implementing any type of change to a legacy platform can break existing systems. Sometimes a change can be made, but doing so is a tedious process, requiring months to fully implement, a large team of highly skilled IT professionals, and high costs. The change ends up being a major drain on the enterprise’s finite resources.
In today’s increasingly competitive business environment, enterprises can no longer operate in this slow, inflexible fashion. Instead, enterprises must be agile when it comes to change so they can best serve customers and compete. Companies across industries can do this by committing to transforming their technology.
Future-proofing one’s technology means putting in place a modern data platform or technology that provides maximum flexibility. “Companies need a future-proof platform that is modern, scalable, resilient, and flexible,” says Suprakash Das, GEP’s VP of platform engineering.
Modern data platforms can handle many workloads of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform but with different architectures that make them much more flexible, open, and easier to use. It is critical that companies are able to operate their platform or technology themselves, to ensure maximum efficiency. Self-service capabilities ultimately result in shorter time-to-value.
“Modern future-proof platforms provide key capabilities to enable visibility and reduce silos and are flexible and easy to configure to meet specific business requirements, leading to [shorter] time-to-value,” Das says.
According to McKinsey, “building data-rich technology platforms that support growth and innovation” is key to becoming a future-ready company. McKinsey also notes that adaptability is a major success factor when it comes to periods of systemic change or transformation.
No-code/low-code solutions are crucial components of any future-proof modern data platform. These solutions enable the development of software applications through a graphic, user-friendly interface that involves significantly less coding expertise than would typically be required. The drag-and-drop format makes application development accessible to more employees and enables IT staff to focus on more strategic initiatives. At a time when highly skilled IT workers continue to be in short supply, this can be especially valuable.
Changes and new features are easier to implement with no-code/low-code development.
Innovation comes faster as IT and the business collaborate better with each other, and IT departments are freed up for more complex work when IT’s backlog is reduced.
With a modern data platform — devoid of outdated technology — that includes no-code/low-code capabilities, enterprises can better handle any disruptions, including economic ones or even threats from cyberattackers, which are on the rise.
Through 2024, Gartner expects, organizations will intensify their investments in these types of capabilities to improve the speed to change, including making investments in specialized, more modern data platforms.
Overall, by instituting a modern data platform and no-code/low-code capabilities, organizations can help ensure that their business will not only be able to compete but also to thrive.
To learn more about future-proofing your organization with no-code/low-code solutions, visit GEP.
