As the low-code approach to software development gains popularity, CFOs and finance professionals should gain more awareness of it as it can help them within the finance department and beyond. Brian Sathianathan, chief technology officer, Iterate.ai, discusses four areas low-code can help CFOs
The low-code strategy for software development continues to accelerate digital transformation in organizations across industries. But do not let the “code†and “developer†wording fool you: CFOs need to become more familiar with how the low-code approach can impact the finance department and beyond.Â
CFOs continue to seek ways to enable their teams to flexibly and adaptably harness new technologies that can introduce more automation and escape the technical debt of legacy systems, among other increasingly critical initiatives. Applied correctly, low-code achieves these goals by streamlining and democratizing development, empowering employees without coding expertise to directly create and iterate on the tools they need to do their jobs better.Â
In a recent Gartner surveyOpens a new window , 49% of finance executives viewed the self-service data analytics that low-code enables as a key approach to improving employee productivity, both within their departments and across their organizations. More than a quarter of respondents also saw an opportunity to increase organizational speed and agility by using low-code to harness automated AI/ML capabilities, business intelligence, data preparation, data catalogs, big data analytics, and predictive analytics. The survey further identified that two of every three CFOs have recently increased prices to meet the pressures of inflation but look to low-code productivity gains as an opportunity for long-term competitive advantages and to avoid passing costs on to customers.
Given this capability, users from financial analysts to marketers and beyond can drive beneficial innovations with efficiency and effectiveness. Because low-code also eliminates the cruft and busywork of application development, experienced professional developers also deliver solutions and updates at an accelerated cadence. As a result, CFOs championing low-code adoption position their own departments to implement modernized tooling that differentiates their capabilities while also recasting long-term R&D cost centers to deliver more rapid ROI.Â
CFOs should understand their potential to leverage low-code development as a means of improving outcomes across the following areas:
1. Low-code means predictable total cost of ownership and optimized ROI
As every CFO knows, time is money. Traditionally, CFOs fund application development initiatives and then await the long-term results, hoping they resemble expectations. In contrast, the truncated development time made possible by low-code brings valuable clarity when determining the TCO of developed applications. Low-code’s fast development cycles similarly provide more predictable and amplified ROI, as more sophisticated solutions arrive that much faster than with traditional development processes.
The transparency and simplicity of low-code also allow CFOs to place more certain bets on modernization. Legacy technical debt and applications that are “good enough†but do nothing to drive growth can be challenging for CFOs to displace. Automation that saves time, multiplies employees’ efficiency, and frees them to work on more valuable projects offers a powerful example of the gains CFOs can realize if they are willing to accept the risks that inevitably come with change. While introducing advanced application features that ensure the future competitiveness and ultimately pay for themselves requires meaningful investments, low-code makes those investments closer to a sure thing.
See More: Why IT Security Teams Are Gravitating Toward No-Code
2. Low-code answers CFOs’ data challenge
An IBM study found that by 2025, businesses will need to analyze over 150 trillion gigabytes of dataOpens a new window , with financial services standing as arguably the most data-intensive sector of all. CFOs that see their initiatives bogged down with slow traditional application development processes and legacy systems prone to data siloing certainly risk falling behind when it comes to efficiency and innovation. That said, low-code’s ability to streamline and modernize data management to enable seamless access should prove to be a game-changer for organizations. Low code not only democratizes the ability to create, operate and iterate upon needed tooling directly, but it also democratizes data itself. Just as it simplifies coding, low-code also makes it so that it no longer takes as specialized an expert to perform data analysis.Â
Low-code platforms offer to eliminate all difficulties around configuring data collection, ensuring data quality, and sifting through data, putting actionable insights just clicks away. In this way, low-code empowers any user in the finance department or beyond to easily apply a comprehensive data-driven approach to the task at hand, enabling sparks of innovation and improved practices to originate with any and all employees across the organization.
3. The speed of low-code accelerates the go-to-market roadmap
Low-code is a compelling differentiator in large part because it enables speed. Its enviable pace of application development can deliver positive impacts across the board, from maximizing ROI to minimizing the reaction time with which teams can contour solutions and experiences to better match users’ needs. When compared to traditional development models, low-code platforms can make application delivery up to 17 times faster. That means standing up minimum viable products (MVPs) not in months or years but just weeks or even days. Department and business stakeholders can provide and incorporate their feedback to tweak solutions sooner because, in many cases, those stakeholders are the ones directly doing the tweaking.Â
As a result, new internal or customer-facing features can be iterated to perfection, providing differentiation while competitors’ efforts are just leaving the gate. Low-code’s accelerated pace extends to QA, security, and other crucial aspects of application development. This, in turn, yields greater stability and reduced risk.
4. Low-code fast tracks true innovation without the risk of lock-in
Low-code development utilizes modular nodes that employees assemble into applications, with each node enabling a particular technological service or capability. CFOs that implement low-code strategies equip their teams with hundreds of these nodes. This empowers the teams to harness AI and ML, big data integrations, and third-party vendor services such as ERPs or startup-based SaaS capabilities available as APIs wrapped into nodes. The right low-code strategy will yield maximum interoperability between these functionalities by abstracting the technologies and systems involved into seamless and swappable data connections.
Organizations are therefore all but immune to vendor lock-in, commanding the flexibility to drag and drop one vendor for the next. Most importantly, there is no need for the gigantic investments usually required to harness emerging technologies. Instead, low-code allows teams to instantly access and realize the transformative benefits these technologies have on R&D, ROI, and modernization.
As a CFO or a finance executive, have you implemented low-code tools? What benefits have you seen? Let us know on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .