Low Code Collaborative Solution Development; Zoho Releases an Updated Creator Platform
Over the past couple of years low code / no code cloud platforms have become much more available and capable. These platforms can increase the productivity of IT teams and democratize the capability to build some types of applications across the business user community. Empowering end users to customize and build simple applications easily reduces the overall demand on your actual development team, freeing them up to focus on higher value, more complex tasks. User satisfaction, assuming the platform meets expectations, is improved across both teams and end users can quickly solve many business challenges themselves.
One big issue with many of the platforms though, is that they are clearly built and targeted to either IT / developers or business users. The real power of these platforms is magnified if it can serve both audiences effectively. Balancing the usability and simplicity that citizen developers need with the deep capabilities that are necessary to meet the demands of IT developers is no simple task. The competing needs of each team, on first look anyway, seem to be at odds. The design challenge of providing deep development capabilities while keeping the platform easy enough for non-IT users is complex. From an adoption perspective, the steeper the learning curve for end users, the less likely they are to make use of the platform.
Today Zoho announced a new release of Zoho Creator, it’s low code platform offering. I had the opportunity to take a deeper look at the platform and the new capabilities last week. It is one of the few platforms I’ve seen that does a good job of balancing between IT needs and the usability that is essential for business users. Providing a single dashboard for creating, integrating, analyzing and managing custom apps and solutions, the Unified Solution Builder provides the drag-and-drop graphical tools that business users need to effectively map business processes and build business solutions to increase business effectiveness. For IT users the platform provides a complete application development and lifecycle management (ADLM) toolset with centralized governance, collaboration and multiple environment orchestration.
The platform’s latest release adds several features to elevate the capabilities of all users. The use of Zoho’s intelligent assistant Zia to import, clean and transform data from any source with one click including finding data relationships and automating data modeling accelerates solution development. Data silos created by the proliferation of unintegrated applications and other data sources has plagued companies, particularly over the past 2 years as their digital transformation accelerated as a result of the pandemic. Zoho Creator’s robust unified data modeling (UDM) can help the business work through these silos with universal cloud modeling that automated data integration and provides over 650 plug-and-play integration connectors. An integration status dashboard provides complete integration monitoring and management capabilities. Once the data is integrated users can build analytics capabilities to find critical business insights using the platform’s embedded analytics engine.
The potential benefit to the business of deploying a low code platform that enables a collaborative solution development process between business users and IT teams in a single tool is high. Solution development time is reduced by providing automation, integration and effective process definition and management across business and IT developers in a package that encourages adoption through its simplicity and high usability.
