Whether you’re a software developer or someone who uses technology for their job, the way we work has changed over the last year. Much of the workforce was working remotely. Serving customers became a challenge. Organisations needed to transform basic pen and paper processes done in an office environment and digitise them quickly with minimal business disruption.
This massive shift required fast answers, and low-code apps were an obvious choice to fulfil the new demand. If you are looking for ways to enhance your developer approach and get work done in this new environment, you should consider low-code adoption as a component of your strategy.
Developers were already slammed with a long technology to-do list before the pandemic—now they are being asked to fundamentally reinvent how the business works. To bridge the gap, many developers and organisations relied on low-code and automation.
In the next five years, 500 million more apps will be created. That’s more than all the apps built in the last 40 years, according to the IDC. There simply aren’t enough professional code-first developers to go around for the volume of work ahead to modernise businesses. However, the good news is low-code technology is here to empower more people, regardless of coding ability, to create apps.
So, what trends and insights from 2021 can we carry into the future?
Use of collaboration and communication platforms like Microsoft Teams became astronomical during the pandemic. Currently, the Daily Active Users for Microsoft Teams is over 115 million. Many workers were suddenly remote, and needed easy ways to collaborate to keep the business moving. Teams is the perfect platform for collaboration, and the next step is to bring the apps they need the most and put them right within Teams, where workers are spending more and more time.
Something we are hearing from customers is the need for data-driven insights on their business, a self-service way to have those insights available to them anytime they want, and being able to easily communicate the actions they could take on those insights.
The American Red Cross is doing this incredibly well. The American Red Cross provides emergency assistance and disaster relief in the United States. Their workforce is widely distributed and when they respond to a disaster, they need simple, clear communication and collaboration tools. To communicate amongst themselves, they use Teams. When they need to collaborate and act on a disaster response, they use Microsoft Power BI within Teams to show data using whatever filters and pivots are needed for a specific insight, and they use Microsoft Power Apps to help people act on that data.
If you work in IT or know someone who does, you know there is a lot of manual work on a day-to-day basis. There are updates to install and configuring to do for various servers, machines, and apps. Once IT teams discover that they can automate many of these tasks, their life becomes much easier. In fact, every month Power Automate takes more than 25 billion automated actions on behalf of its users.
For example, an IT worker could create a basic automation to check for Windows updates and have them installed using our new Microsoft Power Automate Desktop automation toolset, saving hundreds of hours every month.
Fusion developer teams are a new industry concept. In short, these are teams (or virtual teams) of code-first developers, citizen developers (people creating low-code apps without a traditional developer background), and IT developers working together to solve business problems.
We have observed two interesting ways that fusion developer teams are working together. The first one is where the code-first dev writes backend APIs and connectors and realizes they can help others in their company use these in Power Apps. They store their API in tools like Azure API Management so low-code devs can use them to build what they need. The second way is where the code-first dev acts as an “architect” to plan all of the app-building work so that app building projects are more strategic and planned rather than one-off solutions.
This new way of working is a new normal. Most importantly, these unusual circumstances are creating innovation opportunities to shift how developers and tech users think about their work, and low code is an increasingly important part of that new thinking. To learn more about how to build low-code apps using Power Platform, contact sales@spanishpoint.ie
