Time-strapped IT teams can use low-code software to drive quick growth

Published April 19, 2021

Tim Heger
Contributor

Tim Heger is the CTO/CISO of HealthBridge and an experienced IT veteran, having guided companies like Harley-Davidson, Kohl’s and ASICS on digital and e-commerce transformations.

Many emerging and mature organizations survive or die based on their ability to scale. Scale quicker. Scale cheaper. Scale right.

Typically the IT team bears that burden — on top of countless other demands. IT teams move mountains for their organizations while scaling the tech platform as fast as possible, putting out the latest infrastructure fire and responding to countless day-to-day requests.

The most helpful gift any chief information officer or chief technology officer can give their IT teams is more time. Many people think that means adding another team member. Maybe it does in some cases (if you can find a developer in this tough job market), but giving my team Boomi’s low-code integration platform was one of the best strategic moves for HealthBridge.

The best time to use low-code is when you need to add something to your organization that isn’t unique or doesn’t drive significant business value.

As the least skilled coder on the team, low-code let me develop and deliver four customer-centric self-service portals a year ahead of schedule while my team focused on building and scaling our revenue-driving, custom platform by hand-writing code.

Low-code is quickly becoming commonplace and a popular topic among IT decision-makers. Over the last few years, the market has exploded. Gartner expects it to total $13.8 billion in 2021. That means low-code technology, which we’ve been hearing about for years, is ready for widespread adoption. Today, low-code enables you to streamline (and scale) everything from integration to artificial intelligence.

It’s a secret only some organizations are clued in on, but it’s a great way to scale fast, save on resources and give your team more time. Here’s how.

When to use low-code and when to write code

The best time to use low-code is when you need to add something to your organization that isn’t unique or doesn’t drive significant business value.

For instance, a customer portal is not unique; don’t waste time hand-coding it.

While it’s certainly an extremely helpful feature for our customers, it’s unlikely to drive significant shareholder or investor value. However, it’s key for scaling. Using low-code for a must-have but undifferentiated feature will allow your team to work on more important projects while scaling.

When we started working on the timeline for a customer portal project at HealthBridge, we estimated it would take several sprints per portal to develop, but more pressing development work kept pushing it down the list in our backlog. Waiting a year for a basic feature didn’t seem reasonable to me, so we looked for a workaround.