Rapid digitalisation and the adoption of next-generation technologies — catalysed by the pandemic — have heightened competition in the technology space and opened the door to a new challenge for Singapore’s enterprise ecosystem.
To remain competitive, the country needs to add 1.2 million digital workers by 2025. This ongoing shortage of tech talent has also caused the average salaries of software engineers to reach an all-time high last year.
Moreover, evolving consumer demands have led most consumers to become increasingly digital, preferring shopping with businesses that deploy technologies to improve the overall customer experience.
With increasing expectations to deliver new digital experiences and allow enterprise systems to manage market changes, Forrester Research estimated that 75% of app development would use low-code platforms by the end of 2021.
Besides gaining the ability to deploy applications faster, there are other quantifiable returns on investment (ROI) for deploying low-code platforms. A Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) study commissioned by OutSystems found that the investment in high-performance low-code can be paid off in less than six months and deliver a 506% ROI over three years.
Boosting cost savings and performance in app development
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With a tech talent crunch accompanied by hefty and rising salaries, businesses in Singapore need to maximise the productivity of their existing developer teams. They must also boost collaboration between businesses and developers to get software delivered more often, just like digital native organisations.
Using high-performance low-code features, developers can accelerate software development by reusing prebuilt components or creating reusable ones. Capabilities and automation can help teams push new software versions into production within minutes while minimising human error. Additionally, teams could flexibly use high-abstraction coding for high-level visual modelling and low-level coding.
The TEI study also found that applications developed with a high-performance low-code platform saw fewer costs to maintain and introduce design changes, with such savings accruing year-over-year. These savings were typically above 7% of total customer benefits and reached US$1.2 million ($1.5 million).
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Benefitting from early launches and faster operational efficiency
Companies that leverage a platform with a fully-integrated, low-code approach to app development will spend less time developing projects. This means they can deploy new and impactful business initiatives to the market faster, such as customer-facing capabilities.
Case in point: Organisations surveyed for the TEI study could enjoy roughly 26% incremental income from these initiatives months earlier than they would have had they approached those projects through traditional development methods. This, in turn, allowed those companies to launch internal initiatives that improve the company’s agility and enhance efficiency at a much faster pace.
They also saved over US$700,000 of ongoing vendor fees by using high-performance low-code to develop new applications to replace legacy systems and infrastructure. Such advantages benefit enterprises in Singapore, which is home to a crowded tech landscape and ranks fourth in global digital competitiveness.
Enhancing competitiveness through multiple touchpoints
Other benefits of using low-code platforms include scaling applications faster and more efficiently while benefiting from security, access control and authentication checks across every application created with the platform.
For instance, a Singapore-based enterprise digital service provider leveraged low-code to successfully deliver over 200 web and mobile applications for government agencies and large enterprises across multiple domains in industries ranging from manufacturing to telecommunications and education. With a simplified development of mobile applications, companies further found that a higher-quality code resulted in fewer bugs, security holes, and overall errors.
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Additionally, a high-performance low-code platform enables a more iterative approach to development that better supports innovation, thus improving business agility and customer and employee satisfaction. It also allows firms to leverage staff with technical experience that did not come from traditional development backgrounds, which provides an elegant solution to tech talent shortage and promotes new ways of collaborating.
To tackle the scarcity of tech talent and effectively navigate new consumer demands, companies in Singapore should use the best tools and technology to adapt, innovate, and transform current socio-economic conditions to their advantage. By doing so, they can be more efficient, stay on top of changing business landscapes, and ultimately strengthen the resilience of Singapore’s economy in a post-pandemic digital world.
Mark Weaser is the vice-president for Apac at OutSystems
