No-Code/Low-Code Makes Innovation Every Team’s Job
In our latest series, we highlight why brands and marketers alike need to implement low-code & no-code solutions to access data sets that would otherwise be nearly impossible to obtain and use.
Marketers use only 58% of their existing technology capabilities. This data from Gartner is stunning, especially since no one measures the ROI of a critical investment like technology by what it can do in theory. What’s behind the wasted potential? In short, internal teams currently burn significant IT resources to get apps to talk to one another—the very antithesis of agile intelligence. This struggle only compounds as toolchains get more complex. It’s nearly impossible to contest the urgent need to make technology more efficient across every facet of organizations.
Enter no-code/low-code (NC/LC) solutions, which provide marketers with access to otherwise inaccessible data and insights. These solutions make technical tasks more intuitive, enabling ordinary folks to harmonize data sources, activate campaigns, and drive better outcomes without burning IT resources.
“The global low-code development platform market revenue, clocked at $12,500.6 million in 2020, is predicted to witness a 31.3% CAGR to reach north of $190 million by 2030.”
Source of data: Research and Markets, November 2021.
No-code/low-code as a building block in a broader movement
Make no mistake: NC/LC is far more than a workaround or a way to scale engineering bandwidth to meet demand. NC/LC is one building block in a broader movement toward data usability and business agility. It’s an infrastructure investment that enables organizations to get better value from technology, talent, and data resources already at the table. It’s a case study for how technology can make sophisticated marketing easier. The real value of NC/LC has little to do with eliminating an IT support request; it’s really about putting the power to innovate into the hands of the people who are closest to the customer.
If you treat NC/LC like a silver bullet, you’ll be disappointed. If you treat it like a feature, you’ll just keep buying it over and over again. If, instead, you treat it as a catalyst with the potential to bring the idea of “tightly aligned, loosely coupled” into your day-to-day operations, you will certainly build agility into your systems and teams.
Think LEGO Set, Not Model Airplane Kit
Digital transformation initiatives cannot be centralized, monolithic, one-and-done events. We need to enable innovation and adaptation to be dynamic and distributed. Think: If you gave 100 people a model airplane kit, they would all come out more or less the same. If you gave 100 people a box of LEGO bricks and asked them to build an airplane, you’d get 100 different airplanes. Sure, some would look wonky, but some are sure to soar.
You don’t want to use NC/LC technology to build a single source of truth across the enterprise; you want it because it enables individuals to construct their personal sources of truth. That complex new product launch or company-wide system update? That’s where your valuable engineering talent should be spent. Writing a connector script so a marketer can pull data from a CRM into an email automation platform? Not so much, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important to have that capability in the hands of that marketer.
When it comes to enterprise technology, it’s true that sometimes you need the model airplane—precise, controlled, predictable—and the full-stack engineers to build it. But in so many more instances, the LEGO version is not only good enough; it’s better.
Learn more about this trend from this great article by Zeta’s Chief Technology Officer & Head of Product, Christian Monberg. Or reach out to an expert at Zeta today.