Driving IT innovation forward: 3 imperatives for success

In many companies, when leaders decry slow-moving projects and a lack of innovation, they often blame IT without understanding the underlying causes.

The fact is that the more innovative technology that comes down the pipeline, the more broken traditional approaches to software development lifecycle (SDLC) management get. Business leaders demand innovative apps that digitize processes, wow customers, and beat the competition to market with generative AI and cloud-native software. Yet, IT organizations are already juggling a huge digital backlog, mounting technical debt, extremely complex IT landscapes, and a perpetual talent crunch.

How can IT unbury itself to make software development and management once again sustainable? How can IT fulfill its innovative potential and restore business leaders’ faith? This blog post explores the answers to those questions.

Three challenges that hold IT—and innovation—back

It’s not just you—app delivery is slowing. In fact, in the OutSystems 2023 State of Application Development report, it shows that 58% of companies are reporting slower app delivery or no noticeable improvements to app delivery speed in the past year. It’s no wonder when, according to the same report, 71% of organizations spend more time maintaining legacy apps than on innovation. Let’s look at what’s standing in the way.

1. People problems

People often unintentionally slow the application development process down. Many IT teams have been unable to move beyond legacy waterfall practices to agile, DevOps, or DevSecOps approaches, usually due to time constraints, a lack of leadership buy-in, or a reluctance to change. Differing priorities—such as IT struggling to keep older apps functioning and secure while business leaders demand new ones—can lead to frustration and finger-pointing. And compounding every issue is the struggle to staff the skilled developers that IT needs.

2. Time thieves

Inefficient processes devour time and cause backlogs that drag IT down. With inefficient tool stacks, developers waste time. They are replicating project setup processes, fixing errors caused by poor documentation and spaghetti code, and managing infrastructure—all in addition to actual traditional coding. App development without the advantages of components and pre-built templates, AI assistance, and back-end automation remains tedious, slow, and behind the competition.

3. Cost crunches

Finally, the first two issues, combined with siloed legacy systems and processes, drive up costs. When legacy systems haven’t been modernized, projects require customization and the specialized skills and knowledge of more seasoned, in-demand developers. And these are just the direct costs. Businesses also suffer from the indirect costs of continued inefficiency, lost opportunities and competitive advantage, and the inability to scale operations and app development.

3 ways to drive IT—and innovation—forward

To escape the morass caused by traditional development and SDLC approaches, IT and digital teams need the power to:

• Build highly customized apps at scale.
• Automate key phases of the app lifecycle.
• Provide enterprise-grade security, stability, and performance.

IT teams and their business colleagues need a better way to work together to deliver innovative applications faster while becoming more productive, more collaborative, and more focused.

By taking a modern approach to application development—for example, via a high-performance low-code platform—you can do all this and more. Here’s how such a powerful platform helps businesses deliver on three imperatives that drive innovation.

1. Build it better

Businesses must achieve velocity and quality to create secure, performative apps that provide great user experiences, whether they are employees or customers. A high-performance low-code platform helps make that possible by providing:

• A visual drag-and-drop development environment with pre-built UI patterns, templates, and code modules
• Nonproprietary code output that’s easy to understand and customize so that both junior developers and more skilled practitioners can do their best work
• AI-assisted development that accelerates and improves builds
• A modern team-based environment that eliminates the back-and-forth of the traditional app development process
• Automated back-end services—like provisioning and managing microservices and containers—to get developers started fast

2. Manage it better

Reducing the technical debt that bogs IT down and keeps software from delivering on all its promised features is critical to freeing up time for innovation. Then there’s the management of the software development lifecycle that comes with its own set of challenges. A platform like OutSystems helps overcome these challenges with:

• Real-time, AI-assisted architecture governance and performance monitoring
• Automated impact analysis, dependency checks, and bug checks
• A multi-developer build environment with version control and the proper governance and guardrails
• Role-based approval across app pipeline stages and layers
• Comprehensive, enterprise-grade security, governance, and compliance capabilities

3. Evolve it better

Your business will forever evolve, as will technology, your competitors, and customer expectations. Your IT team must be equipped to evolve and scale your apps as well. Here are the OutSystems features and functions that can help you build for now–and the future:

• A flexible and open environment with easy-to-use third-party integrations that are kept up to date
• The ability to iterate and improve with a fully automated CI/CD pipeline
• Vertical and horizontal scalability to handle complex, large-scale consumer experiences
• A roadmap that incorporates emerging technologies like generative AI, IoT, and robotic process automation
• A portable, flexible deployment system that works in any cloud or data center
• Always up-to-date security and compliance features

Low-code experts deliver apps faster and better

In the report mentioned previously, two-thirds of organizations predict they will develop the majority of their apps with a modern low-code platform by the end of 2024. This is all evidence of momentum that is also supported by Gartner predictions, which say that, by 2025, 70% percent of new applications developed by organizations will use low-code or no-code technologies.* It makes sense: Low-code is well known for increasing the speed of application delivery.

To learn more about how a high-performance low-code application development platform helps IT become the innovators they’re meant to be, download Why IT struggles with innovation—and what to do about it.

*Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms, Oleksandr Matvitskyy, Kimihiko Iijima, Mike West, Kyle Davis, Akash Jain, Paul Vincent, 17 October 2023

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The report name was changed in 2019 from 'Magic Quadrant for Enterprise High-Productivity Application Platform as a Service' to 'Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms'.