As a society, we use apps to manage, connect and augment our day-to-day lives. So, it’s understandable that when we go to work, we expect to have the same. Apps can help organisations modernise processes, create new innovations and uncover opportunities.

According to the IDC, this growing demand for digital solutions means that 500 million new applications will be built in the next five years. And with a shortfall of 4 million developers predicted by 2025, most organisations don’t have enough developers to create the apps they need. We call this the App Gap Challenge:

The gap between the number of software developers you have today and the number of software developers you need to build the next generation of apps.

So how can organisations solve this? Low/no code platforms like Microsoft Power Apps can help speed up app development and democratise it across the organisation.

Empower developers to innovate with low/no code

Low/no code solutions allows the rapid building of solutions that automate and streamline routine tasks. This allows developers to focus on more high-value, complex work. According to The Total Economic Impact™ Of Power Apps commissioned study by Forrester Consulting, Power Apps can reduce app development and costs by 74 percent.

It can also help organisations drive a growth mindset culture in development teams. They can use Power Apps to quickly prototype a new idea and deploy this capability rapidly.

Take, for example, AstraZeneca’s HealthyMind app. The biopharmaceutical company wanted to ensure their employees had convenient, secure access to mental health resources. It took the developer team just four months to build the solution on Power Apps.

“Key to the choice [of Power Apps] was its ease of use. It is low code, so it is quick to develop and deploy. This all meant that we were able to design and build HealthyMind very quickly,” says Matt O’Halloran, Head of Workplace and Enterprise Services at AstraZeneca.

A platform like Power Apps can also connect to hundreds of different data sources including Microsoft Dataverse. This brings all your business data together into a single source of truth. Your developers can easily customise and extend capabilities in Azure and leverage business data from your systems of record such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Surface through Microsoft 365.

“[HealthyMind’s] natural integration with the broader suite that we use enabled us to deliver the application within the context of Teams, which was another game-changing factor,” says O’Halloran.

Drive digitisation with citizen development

With low/no code, development is democratised throughout your organisation. It allows anyone to solve business problems themselves.

At Centrica, citizen developers have built over 1,000 apps.

“We’ve really embraced this technology in Centrica. We’ve made an effort to be on the front foot and use the latest technology first, rather than waiting for it to be embedded and then acting,” says James Boswell, Director, Design and Engineering at Centrica. “It was a conscious risk but it’s worked really well – it’s giving us some great benefits and rewards and we’re well on the way to ensuring all our employees are digital employees.” 

For the energy services and solutions company, Power Apps has changed perceptions and steered to business-led development. Take, their finance team for example, in a couple of months they built an app that simplified and automated coordinating tax returns across different regimes. 

Build fusion teams to digitise and innovate faster

What happens when you combine your pro developers and citizen developers? You build fusion teams and unlock the true value of low/no code. According to Gartner, 84 percent of companies already have a fusion team.

By bringing together people with different experiences and knowledge into a multi-disciplinary team, you’ll build more innovative, inclusive apps, faster.

In a fusion team, citizen developers, with the support of pro developers, can rapidly build more complex applications. Citizen developers can focus on the UI, whilst pro developers can create and manage the APIs needed to enrich the application with key data sources. This accelerates time-to-delivery. Fusion teams can deploy solutions up to two and a half times faster than traditional siloed teams.

Centrica used a fusion team to develop an app that matches Centrica volunteers with people from the Trussell Trust charity.

“We’ve got people from all over the business working together. Some are working on the development work, some on the UI, some acting as scrum masters to manage the project. It’s all being done by people who came to the clinics and volunteered. And it will be a huge help to the Trussell Trust,” says Roy Young, Global Head of Office 365.

Build a fusion team

1. Find your use case

Pick a relevant problem that needs solving quickly and when solved, provides a considerable impact.

• Assemble your team

Have a mixture of proactive employees from across many lines of business, such as customer service, developers, team leaders, business leads.

• Plan your roadmap

Determine how much time it’ll take to create, implement, and produce results. Make sure you have time to troubleshoot and determine which solutions work best.

• Accept mistakes along the way

By working in an agile environment, your team will constantly be testing and may have to be ready to pivot when necessary.

Drive digitalisation and innovation

Power Apps helps organisations increase agility by giving everyone the ability to rapidly build low-code apps that drive innovation, modernise processes and solve tough challenges.

Cara Barratt, Workplace Transformation Lead at AstraZeneca agrees, “…we’re really looking at how we can empower our colleagues across AstraZeneca so those that have great ideas can develop their own use cases.”

Find out more

Accelerate innovation with low-code

Microsoft Power Apps

Join a Power App Microsoft Training Day

Make app building easier

Take the Fusion Development Learning Path

Take a fusion development approach to building apps

About the author

As a Power Platform Technical Specialist at Microsoft, Simon takes great pride in helping companies solve their business problems and generate insight into data, providing rapid answers to business questions through use of the Power Platform (specifically Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, Dataverse and AI Builder). He enjoys working with the people in customer organisations who are helping to drive transformation using this technology and seeing the impact it has on their organisations and their careers.

The post How low/no code solutions can accelerate innovation and digitisation appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

What is App Center?

Visual Studio App Center is a platform that helps you ship apps faster by managing the entire app lifecycle. You can automate the build, test and distribution phases of development and monitor usage and crash reports in production. Recently App Center has been enhanced to provide your app with new data and authentication features, allowing you to leverage enterprise grade, global scale backend services with ease.

Easily Add Authentication Support

App Center will help walk through the required steps when you enable Auth for your app. To start with you link to your Azure account and then create a new B2C tenant. This is a separate AD instance with a custom onmicrosoft.com domain. You create an Application on your Azure AD B2C tenant and this will manage the authorisation of your app users.

Even with limited experience with authentication systems, following the setup guide will have everything configured within minutes.

Once the app is linked the Auth page in App Center will show code snippets that you can paste into your app to enable the authentication. Authenticating users from your app is as simple as a single line of code using our SDKs available for iOS and Android. Once authenticated, the SDK will handle securely storing the token and reauthenticating the users when it expires.”

Store and Sync Data

Most apps need to store some data locally and, at some point, synchronise it with your back-end. The Data feature of App Center allows you to set this up and manage it from the Azure Portal. Underneath it is powered by Azure Cosmos DB which is a global scale cloud database engine. You can start off with very basic throughput levels but know that you can grow the capacity as your app evolves.

In order to support offline use any document you create will be cached locally if a connection is not available. By default, this is retained for one day but you can override this to cache data indefinitely if required.

Cosmos DB is a multi-model, NoSQL database, which provides you the flexibility to decide how you want to model your data. It is common to persist objects as JSON so that they can be serialized and deserialized easily. Your data can be placed in multiple partitions and App Center provides two logical partitions for your app – Public for read-only data which is accessible to all users, and Private which is read-write data accessible only to a specific user. This integrates with the Auth component already described above. Do note that if you’re using Cosmos DB with a Graph model, it will work differently to this.

The App Center API for Data is very simple as it handles serialization and deserialization for you. It supports the standard operations of Create, Read, Update and Delete. Each individual document is uniquely identified by its document ID and partition, which helps with scaling and keeping data organised. You can list all items of a particular type and use pagination to read them progressively. Currently the list operation only returns accessible documents so when offline it doesn’t have a cached copy of all documents.

Push Notifications

A well timed notification is a proven strategy for increasing app engagement, however a poorly timed notification can also be attributed to many app uninstalls. This is why it’s important to ensure you’re sending notifications to the right people at the right time. To do this App Center allows us to send notifications to both individual users and specific segments.

However, to utilise them from your app you could potentially end up creating a lot of code and supporting services to address all the different platform implementations. App Center comes to the rescue again with a standard API which you can use to send notifications across all the major mobile platforms.

App Center allows you to send notifications both to individual users and also to specific segments called Audiences. These are based on a set of filters around properties the App Center API can identify such as app versions, countries and languages. Each custom audience can have a maximum of 1000 devices. This service allows you to quickly setup push notifications both to prompt the user and to kick off synchronisation in your app without interrupting them.

Learn more about setting up notifications.

Getting Started

If you’re already using App Center then you’ll see the new functionality within the portal. If not, you can sign up for a free App Center account and create your first app. To use Auth and Data functionality you’ll also need an Azure account but you can start with a free trial. Currently these new features are available for iOS and Android, with SDKs available for Swift, Objective-C, Java and C# developers.

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