A major business issue is that operations now need to change at a pace where traditional coding methods simply cannot keep up. By the time IT has a solution to the business problem, it is out of date and obsolete which makes digital transformation challenging, while driving everyone’s frustration levels ever higher. Lean BPM or No-Code platforms are emerging as an effective and fast way to build new business applications, and once deployed, to ensure they are maintained and supported across the organization.
That’s the theory and almost every CIO I talk to is skeptical when you roll out a Lean BPM solution, that is until they see it in action in their live environment.
Once past the skepticism barrier, there are still several issues to tackle and we shouldn’t forget them.
Managing No-Code Workflow Applications
Once you build an application, the urge to build more is uncontrollable – Lean BPM is extremely powerful, very effective and very fast.
That raises a very real concern about the creation of multiple business applications, operating across the disparate parts of an enterprise and typically placed into some form of silo.
So, problem one is management of all these apps, and for that you need to get organized from the get go. This is not a problem of no-code, but rather one of mismanagement and lack of preparation.
The next issue is what happens when your application is wildly successful once deployed to your Orlando, FLorida office, and now the CIO wants it scaled up globally to 20,000 users, 30 countries and 70 locations worldwide? Many IT departments are still suffering PTSD from the aftermath of MS Access, with multiple apps built that can’t talk to each other and then having to handle the scale problem with 10,000 users and no role-based permissions.
HighGear, the pioneer in no-code, Lean BPM solves this problem very elegantly with its role-based permissions feature set. This allows for fast turnaround of development, scaling to enterprise levels internationally and enforcing company policies and regulatory/legislative requirements. Not only will HighGear scale for users, but it will also handle multiple developers and projects, acting as a central repository for project artifacts which can be carried across departmental lines, multiple projects and dev teams without getting lost.
When you are looking at a no-code, Lean BPM solution you should be asking yourself some questions:
Will the BPM Solution Scale for Enterprise Levels of Data?
The proverbial Big Data issue: it is a well-trodden path with HighGear that once you start building, subsequent iterations become more ambitious, more complex and become more powerful, generating lots of data. Make sure your proposed solution has realistic usage caps, especially if deployed to the Cloud.
Will the No-Code Platform Scale for Multiple Projects & Developers?
It is essential that the Lean BPM solution can intelligently handle project artifacts and deploy them across multiple applications. If this is not included as a feature, you will quickly lose the cost and time savings gained from the upfront deployment of the no-code platform. It is also essential that the Lean BPM platform will provide role-based permissions to allow multiple developers appropriate access while enforcing security protocols.
Will the Lean BPM Platform Scale Across Both Systems and Business Platforms?
HighGear customers deploy our solution On Premises behind their own firewalls, in the cloud and in some instances to both depending on their specific needs. HighGear also provides a rich and robust API, effectively integrating with any other business application or system – it is an essential requirement that your no-code solution be flexible and open to integration with all of your systems, otherwise you will simply be creating another silo from which to break free. Dig in to what the cost of integrations is going to do with your license fees and TCO.
Will it Scale for Users?
Building multiple apps will quickly get you into the weeds and mire of dev, deployment and subsequent management. It is all too easy to miss the wood for the trees, and this is where end users are forgotten, or simply tacked on at the back end of app development as an afterthought. If you are developing multiple apps, how will they be deployed to individual clients, whether desktop or mobile? If you have a large number of user downloads, you ought to consider creating a unified front end for users where your application downloads live and this eases user concerns over deploying to their clients.