Avoid Geological Time to Market for Change on Legacy Systems
Historically, companies built their success using expensive central systems developed using custom software that required deep coding skills and expertise.
The time to market for change was, at best, monthly and the pipeline of work tightly controlled. Business agility required the use of spreadsheets and Rapid Application Development tools to build on solid process backbones while still enabling the business to react to change, add value and differentiate services.
Central systems continue to be the backbone of many large companies and, instead of being a barrier to entry to the market, they can be a competitive disadvantage as new players layer high value services by cleverly combining off the shelf solutions.
Low code provides a way of wrapping legacy services so that the value of the investment and reliability of service is maintained while the services that provide can be used as building blocks that support reacting to change and a quicker time to market.
How Can Low Code Help?
- Process Freedom: Layer new processes on legacy components that does not requires them to understand the business process or hold new data.
- Quicker time To Market: Build on the strengths of enterprise solutions internally and externally without locking you into the change cycle
- Single Process Interface: Present any process as a single end to end process to users regardless of the number of underylying systems
When you Trim the Nails of a Tiger: Wrap it in a blanket
Problem statement:
- Payments Failure:International payment services were unreliable due to data issues across 2 international payment systems and correspondent banks.
- Controls: There was a high failure rate and lack of end to end visibility and monitoring of the process created delays identifying and rectifying the problem.
- Process: Cancelling and correcting the payments was complex and time consuming.
Solution
- Wrap Complexity: Low code provide a way of wrapping underlying systems with process models and data that can be held outside the systems to provide the user with a single view of the whole process.
- Transparency: A single screen allowed tracking across 4 international payment systems and cresspondant banks.
- Transparency: Failure was monitored by tracking status through each system through APIs where available and end of day downloads.
- Inspection: Any issues we identified earlier and the users were able to provide end to end process ownership, contacting the payment service providers directly to address any (initially many) issues with data.
- Adaption:The benefit was that it was possible to provide users with a reliable international payment systems with an single process owner who would ensure any issues are addressed quickly
Links to Useful Low code Resources
The remainder of this article provides links to some useful cases studies and overview of low code.