Co-innovating with Genio
João Simões de Abreu, November 15, 2021
Competing in today’s fast-paced business world has become increasingly complex. Unfortunately, few organizations are equipped with the right tools to keep up with the pace of technological change. The new reality, compounded by the COVID-19 crisis, expanded the number of use cases technology needs to fulfill.
Even though it was clear we were living in disruption times during lockdown, the world was already living in times of constant change – so much so that the signs of disruption came a few years before the pandemic (e.g., trade wars, Brexit, legislative changes, GDPR, etc.)
Therefore, it is predictable the “times of disruption” are here to stay. Changes will happen more often, and organizations are either quick to adapt or fall behind their competitors.
Here’s the problem: organizations are still operating under outdated models and strategies that assume a slow-changing and predictable reality. Yet, teams must be ready for continuous change, which is impossible in the current (and most likely future) scenario where there are few developers to fulfill all the technological needs. In fact, data from various sources estimate there are around 25 million developers in the world – a number that will only increase 2% per year, which is not enough for the number of use cases technology will need to fulfill in the upcoming years.
So how could an organization keep up with its digital and innovation needs?
Enter low-code and AI-assisted development
New times require innovative approaches. And the new method is to empower field experts to develop their own digital products or services. As a result, what was once an area where only technology experts (those with hundreds of hours of software development training) were able to prosper is now at the reach of everyone.
So much so that Gartner predicts that, by 2024, 80% of technology services and products will be built by non-IT professionals, anticipating that 30 billion USD in revenue will be generated by products and services that did not exist pre-pandemic.
The new reality is only possible due to low-code and artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted development platforms. “Growth in digital data, low-code development tools, and AI-assisted development are among the many factors that enable the democratization of technology development beyond IT professionals,” says Gartner’s distinguished research vice president Rajesh Kandaswamy in a press release.
Empowering non-IT
One of Quidgest’s missions is to give people outside IT the ability to develop software without prior experience or knowledge in programming. This mission is accomplished through Genio, an extreme low-code, business-driven, AI-assisted platform that enables people from all areas and backgrounds to develop their applications.
Its underlying objective is to leverage field experts’ value in companies by giving them the right tool to develop perfect-fit software according to their needs – no more Chinese whispers game between the innovation team or other departments and the IT teams.
With a one-week, 40-hour tailor-made training, ingenious people are ready to deploy solutions in their field of expertise.
Facts about Genio
- Up to 10 times faster developing new project
- 1/10 of the employees to achieve the same results
- Productivity is 8 times higher than low code platforms
- 160 million lines of code per day in a single instance
- Zero errors in code generation
- 98% of automation of a solution’s code
- From tech-savvy to full-stack developer in 5 days
A practical case during the pandemic
But do not take our word for it. The University of Minho Professor and Researcher João Varajão recently wrote about one of Quidgest’s solutions on Communications of the ACM:
“On March 12, 2020, the coronavirus outbreak was officially declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. On the same day, the CEO of Quidgest identified the pandemic as an opportunity for the company and wrote a plan for creating a web-based software product, together with a preliminary list of requirements.
The product, named VIRVI—Health Vigilance and Control Software—is presented as ‘hyper-agile emergency software for global epidemiologic challenges.’ As described by Quidgest, VIRVI is ‘an information system aimed at supporting the monitoring and control of a virus epidemic, like COVID-19, in any country or region, in an emergency timeframe (that is, starting operating in hours). VIRVI is robust, reliable, and capable of continually evolving, forming the basis for good critical management and communication facing virus epidemics.’
The first fully functional prototype of VIRVI was made available on March 22.”
The project was developed on a part-time basis, which corresponds to “3.25 full-time equivalents for the development team and nearly 1.84 full-time equivalents for the marketing and sales teams during the three-week development timeline. Considering the total of 1,365 function points for the final product, the average weekly productivity of the analysts/developers/technology expert was nearly 220 function points,” writes Professor João Varajão (read the article here).
