By Amber Wise, Low-Code/No-Code Business Analyst
In today’s fast-paced and rapidly evolving digital landscape, organizations continuously seek innovative ways to optimize operations, streamline processes, and reduce costs. Low-code/no-code (LCNC) platforms rank high among the emerging solutions gaining significant attention. These platforms empower individuals – called citizen developers – to build applications and automate workflows remarkably easily, irrespective of their technical expertise. But beyond the appeal of their accessibility, LCNC platforms hold immense potential for cost savings, making them an imperative option for businesses. Let’s explore three strategies your organization can take to reduce costs by harnessing the power of LCNC platforms.
1. Maximize Your Resources
Rightly so, skilled developers and IT personnel are in high demand, and their services come at a premium. However, with LCNC platforms, reliance on specialized coding skills is diminished. LCNC platforms offer reusable components like intuitive drag-and-drop interfaces, pre-built templates, and visual elements, enabling individuals without extensive technical backgrounds (called citizen developers) to rapidly create applications and workflows. This reduction in development time directly translates into cost savings, as businesses can allocate their resources more efficiently.
Understanding that skilled, specialized personnel resources are expensive, strategically reallocating work to citizen developers using LCNC development techniques allows IT to work on more critical projects, thus mitigating the underutilization of skilled developers and reducing costs. Specialized developers can focus on mission-specific projects requiring domain expertise, problem-solving abilities, and knowledge of intricate coding concepts. Simultaneously, individuals without as much technical training, empowered by LCNC platforms, can address simpler or more routine tasks and greatly contribute to application development. Bringing in citizen developers will increase your output while reducing your cost.
2. Empower Citizen Developers
Citizen developers can contribute to cost reduction to the extent they are empowered. This means training them and strategically aligning them with development processes.
Experts in their own rights, citizen developers empowered with LCNC platforms can take ownership of routine tasks, make direct changes, or create applications using intuitive LCNC tools. To expedite development, they can leverage pre-built templates, drag-and-drop interfaces, and visual modeling tools. By lessening the demand for IT team involvement, organizations can significantly speed up development timelines, leading to cost savings and the ability to produce more applications while reducing backlog.
Additionally, empowered citizen development increases agility by allowing users to make quick application adjustments or modifications demanded by evolving business needs. It encourages iterative development and experimentation without the wait for limited IT resources or delay of lengthy change request processes. This increased agility enables organizations to adapt faster to market demands or internal requirements, potentially reducing costs associated with missed opportunities or prolonged development cycles.
Empowered to use LCNC platforms, trained citizen developers aligned with development teams enable organizations to achieve a more streamlined, cost-efficient process.
3. Weigh Licensing Costs
Pricing models for features and licenses vary among LCNC platforms. Therefore, when evaluating these platforms, it is essential to have a clear understanding of the specific features and licensing requirements necessary for your project. Doing so will help mitigate unnecessary expenses.
Some LCNC platforms offer comprehensive feature sets encompassing a wide range of functionalities. If your project demands utilization of most or all of these features, investing in the platform’s inclusive offering can prove advantageous and justifiably cost-effective. However, if your project’s needs do not encompass the entirety of a platform’s feature set, it is beneficial to selectively pay for the functionalities that align with your project’s objectives. This approach optimizes your investment by avoiding unnecessary expenses, as you only incur costs for features and licensing essential to your project.
Alternatively, certain LCNC platforms follow a unitary pricing approach, granting access to the entire spectrum of features with each purchase. Instead of paying for individual features, these platforms typically determine their pricing based on the number of users. This pricing structure can be advantageous if your project necessitates a broad range of features, as it enables you to leverage the platform’s complete capabilities without incurring additional costs for each functionality. By aligning the licensing costs with the size of your team, you can ensure cost-effectiveness while capitalizing on the extensive feature set offered by the LCNC platform.
It is imperative to meticulously evaluate your project’s requirements to determine the most cost-effective pricing model in the long run. By doing so, you can make an informed investment decision while leveraging the benefits of LCNC platforms.
Takeaways
Incorporating LCNC platforms into your organization’s operations presents significant opportunities for driving cost efficiency. Organizations can make strategic decisions that optimize their investment by reallocating resources, empowering citizen development, and considering licensing costs.
In Part II of this series, we will explore top cost benefits of adopting LCNC platforms that have undergone strategic evaluation.
For questions on choosing the LCNC platform right for your organization, reach out to a member of Octo’s LCNC team.