Gartner’s 2019 Application Strategies & Solutions Summit brought application leaders, architects, development and integration professionals, and customer experience leaders under one roof. They discussed digital change, IT challenges, and the rising predominance of the low-code application platform (LCAP).
These are the biggest things that we — a field-focused LCAP — took away from Gartner’s conference.
Solving business problems
Field service macrotrends are at the forefront of many organizations’ 2020 plans. To stay competitive, it’s key that organizations tackle increasingly sophisticated integrations and ramp up specialty app building to meet business objectives during a pro developer shortage.
Apps need to be highly customizable and easy to update as usage expands to compliment the rise of composable businesses — businesses that are built to be agile and modular at heart. Due to these growing needs, IT teams are understandably busy going into 2020.
This developer shortage, and the need to democratize app building, was a central theme at the conference. An LCAP solution, according to Gartner, “fills in gaps to meet business demand when capacity is limited.” Or, in other words, is able to solve these business problems using apps that don’t add to IT’s workload.
Changing role for IT
But, as IT transfers app building to process owners, it stands to reason that professional developers will be involved in less app building. How the role of IT is shifting within organizations was another key point of discussion.
IT teams are moving from actively building and coding apps, to serving a “governing” role. This high-level role positions IT as the keepers of security, scalability, and availability.
This sentiment was echoed throughout the conference. According to Inuit CIO Atticus Tysen, “The IT organizations’ primary activities are to scale, protect, and automate, rather than the design or process engineering of new solutions. Our strategy enables us to effectively support business and vendor-led delivery.”
In field service, this might take shape as a citizen developer designing an inspection app on an LCAP platform, while the professional developer in the IT department focuses on ensuring the platform the app is deployed from meets their organization’s security standards and, if proven successful, can be bridged between different business processes to scale.
For this reason, Gartner identified that when evaluating a low-code solution it is critical to engage in-house developers from the beginning to ensure they find a solution that meets their governance requirements.
Conclusion
As IT shifts from app creator to app curator, from enactors to leaders of digital change, it will become a huge differentiator — especially in a field service capacity — to use tools that are built with IT teams in mind.
Arming your business leaders with IT-approved tools that can be customized to solve their field-focused problems, and unburdening IT to focus on value-adding activities and expansion mean more time spent capitalizing on market changes and exciting technological advances.
