With Delta still prevailing, and Omicron in the midst, we welcomed the new year with a new COVID variant, Florona. They say these variants are less fatal and on the verge of making COVID a common virus.

Or is it so?

Countries continue to resort to lockdowns, and economies are still getting hampered with the slightest hint of an increase in new cases with the new variant. Businesses have quickly realized that we have to live with it, and the only way to survive the unexpected is to become increasingly digital.

Achieving Digital the Low-Code Way

Digital, in today’s terms, has become superfluous; it changes by the day, and so do business realities. The only way to keep pace with the rampant change is by approaching digital the low-code way. Today, it seems that every software company calls itself a low-code provider. But the difference is in the way the whole solution is architected.

“The only way to eat an elephant is to cut it into bite-size pieces” – these were the words once shared by a wise guru, an industry stalwart, an individual who digitally transformed a bank using the power of a low-code Application development platform.

Allow me to clarify; it is not that one is really interested in eating an elephant or cutting it into bite-size pieces. Here, the elephant represents the business problem at hand, and the bite-size pieces represent how it needs to be broken down into manageable pieces. Low-code application development software is the ideology, and just like the business problem, low-code application development solution itself has to be flipped on its head.

Let me try and explain this a bit more.

We all view low-code application development platform as a tool or an all-encompassing application that would have answers to all our questions. It should, however, be looked at as an orchestrator of components.

The components here represent services that have their own APIs and data sets. There can be various types of services – internal or external. Internal would mean something that the tool presents, and external would mean something that the environment/ecosystem provides.

Internal services could be interfaces, rulesets, masters, etc. Each of these services has its own API and data sets and is independent of each other with minimum dependencies. On the other hand, external services would be something like core banking, ERP, core insurance, loan management system, or even simpler systems such as MS Word. Again these would have their own APIs and data sets. These services would simply do their part at the relevant stages of the application and processes as demanded.

The process or application has to be looked at as an amalgamation of these services into relevant stages by a concept referred to as an ‘orchestrator.’

Depending on the organization and its current state, the internal services may be heavy (more utilized), or the external services may be heavy. However, these are just orchestrated to provide the end state.

For instance, if we take the example of banking and lending, the lending application stages remain the same. Depending on a bank or a financial institution, how and what components are called for can vary, making each application different. An organization with a portal may not require investing in a portal service, but another one may need to subscribe to an internal portal service. Similarly, a financial institution that invested in a credit scoring and credit underwriting may plug in its own external credit service compared to another that subscribes to an internal credit service.

The end objective is to understand how an organization componentalises or servicifies the entire application and orchestrates them together to deliver the perfect made-to-order, custom-fit app. That, in turn, helps the organization transform and get that leverage to address the ever-changing business environment.

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