Grab a seat, CEO

Gone are the days when software development initiatives were siloed in the IT departments. Recently, leaders started realizing technology is too important to be left to the hands of the few professionals who have the training on how to build software.

The solution is not that hard: adopt a platform that can be used by IT professionals (without restricting their work) and people from other departments.

Quidgest’s GENIO, for instance, makes it possible to develop errorless software 100 times faster than the average manual coding programmer. This is especially significant for two main reasons:

1. it enables a swifter time-to-market experience;
2. empowers modern IT leaders with a tool that helps them get more results without depending on a larger team.

But both of the features are just the tip of the iceberg of the potential of a low-code platform. Below water, there is the often-unknown possibility of expanding the development capabilities to other branches, making the transition from the ordinary organizational operation to a more agile reality. One where multidisciplinary digital business teams reduce duplicate work and focus on delivering products rather than projects.

Gartner defines these multidisciplinary squads as “Fusion Teams” – crews who blend the technology’s hands-on know-how and other types of domain expertise, enabling the cooperation between technical and non-technical professionals in the development process of a product.

This new reality mitigates the constant overwhelming ambient in the IT department, fosters internal development of IT solutions instead of relying on third-party providers, and fixes the “broken telephone” between departments (IT does not understand what other business areas really want and other business areas do not know what is possible or not to do by the IT department).

The fact that internal stakeholders outside IT are now able to either develop their own solutions or understand what is possible to create means they will easily be able to bring their knowledge directly to the solutions. In turn, the released products are more aligned with market’s needs and the backlog burden is relieved.

The positive outcomes are clear. According to Gartner’s research on “Fusion Teams: A New Model for Digital Delivery”, 84% of companies and 59% of government entities have set up Fusion Teams. And from the interviews with nearly 1,000 companies who already set up fusion teams, Gartner indicates 43% of the respondents already report outside corporate IT to be closer to the point of value delivery.

Gartner also believes low-code platforms are fundamental to nurture the Fusion Team’s reality since they are often easier to understand and more suitable for non-technical people.

An extreme low-code platform such as GENIO, which can deliver almost 10 times faster development capacity compared to the average low-code platform, is able to leverage this to a whole new dimension. This is due to three main aspects:

• Business-driven development instead of (regular or visual) coding: instead of traditional or visual coding, GENIO enables you to model. In models you can find all the knowledge, the right concepts, the advantages, and the business rules of an organization – such features are often embedded or hidden in the code of solutions built using the old-fashion development process.
• Weeks of learning instead of years: Through GENIO, business leaders and people from other departments outside IT can get hands-on projects without 500+ hours of training. They are only required to understand GENIO’s base concepts and develop from that point forward. This takes one to two of weeks of training and a couple more of practice.
• Future-ready instead of technology bounded: models developed with GENIO are above programming languages. This means that the systems can be easily transformed to adapt to the latest languages without completely renovating the operation. Business capabilities remain the same or are augmented by the latest tech trend. By developing a GENIO-powered solution, decision-makers will not need to fear obsolescence since their operation will permanently be future-ready.

Learn more about GENIO’s key features in this article.

Gartner analysts go further in their “Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms” research. One of the critical capabilities is the aptitude to develop composable solutions through Fusion Teams, something that Quidgest’s GENIO excels at.

What are often named citizen developers, we like to call Digital Champions. As stated above, these are people who understand the business areas and the market as no one else and can develop applications that surgically reach their clients’ pain points.

Tech solutions – whether to sell or use internally – are too important for businesses and public institutions to be left to the teams with hands-on traditional development knowledge. It is time for leaders to proactively grab a seat, develop applications side-by-side with programmers and deliver valuable solutions.