The question; "What keeps you up at night?" is a commonly used executive thinking exercise that is revered and reviled in equal measure. Sure, it's a good way to focus attention and conversation on the things that are most mission critical. It's also a demotivating assumption that there are elements of your business that should give you stressful sleeplessness! This question can feel like an attack on our management skills. Perhaps even more frustrating is that for most of us, those stressful projects are real - and really do keep us up at night.

For many CIOs, the stress points are those projects that have ballooned out of control - and now suffer from feature creep, budget depletion and missed deadlines. The business awaits a savior, and the technology team is struggling to master a white elephant. Does something like that keep you up at night? We've been there, too.

Time to put low-code on your radar. A low-code development platform, or application platform as a service (aPaaS) to be specific, infuses a rapid development methodology that allows for constant incorporation of user feedback into apps during development. The ability to involve users in a rapid, agile cycle both improves the turnaround time and keeps projects on track and on budget.

If customer-facing applications are on your radar, low-code should be as well

Particularly if you have some customers - internal colleagues as well as paying customers of the business - who are not sure exactly what they want. (For some CIOs, these kinds of customers might be what keeps you up at night!)

It's a huge benefit to be able to listen to someone articulate a dream - no matter how unfocused - and quickly show them how such a dream might be realized in a working application. It helps them focus, and helps you formulate the specs and keeps the dialog open during the development project. One of our clients, SoftGear, even uses Flowfactory to create model apps in the planning meeting.

Don't give your senior developers and architects the day off, however. While they minimize hand coding, simplify the configuration of data models and speed up application delivery by providing visual tools for the quick definition and assembly of forms and the rapid build-out of multistage workflows, low-code platforms do not eliminate the need for intelligent architecture, integration and specialized code. You will focus your team on design, vision and business value, rather than the headaches of hand coding and data integration.

Low-code platforms do not eliminate the need for intelligent architecture, integration and specialized code.

Sincelow-code platforms are available as a service, they are easy to test in your environment. Many CIOs use them for business team applications - like helping the salesforce connect to the customer database via mobile devices - as well as for customer-facing enterprise applications that sit on top of legacy ERP or CRM systems.

IT teams can also use low-code to get projects started that would otherwise never make it onto the strategic agenda. What unexplored, cool ideas are floating around your organization that you'd love to tackle for some of your internal users or key customers? Low-code platforms shorten the front end of development, so that you can get projects started, see them in action and fine tune them from there.

What unexplored, cool ideas are floating around your organization that you'd love to tackle?

This is particularly helpful when you are innovating to lead the market - something most CIOs feel they don't have time or space to do often enough! Imagine hearing a wish list from an important customer, then coming back to them within a week with a working beta of the idea. Since the customer doesn't really know what they want yet - it's just an idea for them and doesn't exist anywhere else - you've now empowered them to think big, and to be more specific about what features would make your early application viable and helpful.

Next thing you know, you've got a new product or experience, a happy customer, a leading edge market innovation... and a potential new revenue stream for the business. At that point, the only thing keeping you from a good night's sleep is the excess of a celebration party with your team.

Maybe the incorporation of a low-code platform and methodology into your development mix won't instantly change your IT department into the freedom-driven, rapid campaign development model at Zappo's, celebrated in this CIO.com article. However, it can bring you closer to some well-rested nights - and the freedom to think big and execute well on all your business' needs.

Low-code minimizes hand coding, simplifies the configuration of data models and speeds up application delivery by providing visual tools for the quick definition and assembly of forms and the rapid build-out of multistage workflows

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