Technology that empowers people

Technology is a catalyst for humanity’s progress which – in many cases – has propitiated changes so profound that they have marked a watershed in the economy, in production, and in society itself. There are two transformations that are currently considered to be among the most influential: the shift from traditional programming to no-code/low-code development models, and the leveraging of the organisation’s entire workforce (people, robots, artificial intelligence) to perform the automation of its processes, hyperautomation.

Luis Rodríguez y Leopoldo Colorado
Babel Head of Digital Process Automation and Head of Low-Code and Cloud Services

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The no-code/low-code movement shortens the space between the need to develop applications and the technical knowledge required to implement them.

Applications are an essential part of any organisation, whether to provide a direct service for its customers or to support a corporate or departmental process.

No organisation is free from the need to build its own software if it wants to be efficient and differentiate itself, and yet this is still a technical challenge requiring highly specialised personnel.

No-code/low-code platforms come with a clear value proposition: bringing application implementation capability closer to less technical users, or increasing the capacity of existing technical equipment through tools.

While no-code solutions provide specific tools for a concrete area (marketing, content, sales, etc.) and are aimed at users who are experts in their field to make them more independent in managing their area of responsibility, low-code solutions aim to boost the productivity of teams (generally with technical capabilities) to implement applications with less.

These tools seek to boost the productivity of the teams (usually with technical capabilities) to implement applications with less effort and in less time, since they delegate to the platform many of the more technical activities that they previously had to perform as well.

There is no clear dividing line between platforms, since each manufacturer proposal is different, but all of them try to provide greater autonomy for the company's decision-making and executing areas, increase productivity and reduce the technical gap, right at the moment when a greater shortage of technical profiles is combined with exponential needs in process automation, the most advanced stage of which is hyperautomation.

Hyperautomation as a concept has become very important in recent years. Gartner defined it as “the approach in which organisations quickly identify, examine and automate both business and IT processes in a disciplined manner.”

Furthermore, we need to understand hyperautomation as a support tool for developments implemented by human talent and as a form of operation and control that allows for optimal development in all areas of an organisation.

If not, we run the risk of placing human capital on a fine line between optimising processes and the uncertainty that we might be replaced by a robot, a system, etc., when in fact what this is about is blending and combining the best of automation with the best of people and the knowledge they have of their business.

To navigate the path to hyperautomation there are different stages, such as discovery, analysis and design as well as their automation, measurement and monitoring, supported by the organisation’s training and culture.

There are also some key technology components, namely RPA, which support repetitive common activities involving a high workload. Or iBPMS, representing the point of union between technology and people, facilitating integration with other tools and enabling the insertion of new technologies such as RPA, artificial intelligence (image and text recognition, predictive analytics, etc.) in the organisation.

All this must be supported by the prior optimisation of the processes under study, otherwise we will be more effective, but only as efficient as we have been up to now.

This is why process analysis approaches, with BPA, with process mining, task mining, remain a crucial element in any automation scenario.

This hybrid model that promotes hyperautomation brings with it a transformation in organisational culture and change management, making the training of people and investment in talent development key elements that will give greater added value to any operational efficiency.

In addition, the no-code/low-code movement is causing manufacturers to focus on building applications or digitising and automating processes with the least possible technical effort so that end users can design and deploy the solution independently.

We can therefore say that low-code is the technological partner which organisations can rely on to maximise the talent of their teams and scale up by automating their processes.


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