Enterprises’ growing need for quality Data Management and productivity tools has led to an explosion of interest in emerging technologies, such as low-code and no-code platforms, to accelerate their digital transformation objectives. Businesses encumbered by legacy infrastructure must make significant investments and decide whether to buy their technology or build it internally. With both options, fast assembly and agile implementation are essential. 

In the U.S., the pressure to get this right is mounting. U.S. labor productivity has run well below its long-term average of 2.2% in the last few years.  

What Is the Productivity Dilemma, and How Can Low-Code and No-Code Help?

Complex new technologies introduced into an industry rarely yield immediate productivity benefits. This is because there is a deficit in efficiency during the adoption phase to account for learning costs, developing new infrastructure to support the technology, and other factors. Two factors in particular – training and education costs and restructuring at an organizational level – take significant time before optimal results can be achieved. 

However, low-code and no-code technologies are bucking this trend by boosting productivity in various ways. Most importantly, low-code and no-code’s intuitive user interface drastically reduces the learning curve. This means that employees can take on the role of “citizen developers” without formal training, which speeds up the time to develop new applications, digitize processes, and adopt these platforms.  

For instance, a production manager at a large manufacturing company can digitalize the data collection, visualization, and maintenance of daily production information for its staff, eliminating any manual processes. Similarly, an HR officer can develop his or her own applications to streamline the recruitment process of candidates, without any coding skills. 

Other ways that low-code and no-code help industries increase productivity: 

• By design, low-code and no-code platforms are built on pre-coded reusable components. This eliminates the need for repetitive coding work and accelerates application development by focusing on customizations or integrations. According to McKinsey, low-code and no-code technologies can speed up development time by up to 90% and double deployment speed. This represents a considerable saving in time, money, effort, and opportunity costs. Industries such as fintech are leveraging no-code platforms to build new services, connecting web front-end applications to accelerate their time-to-market. Additionally, the financial services sector is increasingly deploying no-code to manage evolving business rules for processes such as onboarding, know your customer (KYC), and customer due diligence frameworks, which might differ across territories. 
• Workflow automation is another area where low-code and no-code applications offer many opportunities for enhanced productivity. With these technologies, application programming interfaces (APIs) and webhooks triggers can be automated to trigger actions consistently, without manual human intervention. For example, project managers can expedite their onboarding processes by designing no-code forms to activate a set of actions such as document access and platform account creation. This process can be scaled up to onboard thousands of accounts, saving teams time and resources. 
• Using no-code databases can also improve productivity. No-code is proficient at eliminating manual data reconciliation, alignment meetings, and correction due to human error. Instead, no-code creates a single source of truth, wherein data is captured consistently and shared across teams. For example, a large retail bank can deploy no-code tools to keep a single source of record for treasury departments across several international groups and regulatory territories. This ensures that internal information is consistent across the organization, wherever that may be. 
• Because no-code platforms allow employees without developer skills to structure data and build applications, they can help distribute the IT workload across broader teams. This empowers companies to accelerate their digital transformation without hiring more developers.

In short, low-code and no-code platforms can boost teams’ productivity by reducing the amount of code they have to write, allowing them to automate repetitive tasks and focus instead on value-added work that directly builds the company’s bottom line.