As we approach the end of the year, it’s time to start budgeting for 2022. From an IT perspective, that means evaluating personnel, development plans, and technology needs.

There is a universal truth in IT these days: you can never have too much (or even enough!) manpower. Virtually every part of your organization runs through your IT department in some way.

Technology tasks range from mission critical to mundane, but all of them are important to at least one key stakeholder in your business. The average IT department has more on it’s plate than your Grandma’s Thanksgiving feast:

• New product development
• Tech support
• Server maintenance
• New server acquisition and implementation
• Website maintenance
• Existing product maintenance
• New feature development
• Data management
• Data security

And that’s just the start. With each new iteration of your product or service, new needs arise.

While every aspect of the above IT task list is important, in a constantly-evolving tech landscape, nothing is more important than maintaining an innovative product.

You have critical features that must be added to stay ahead of — or keep up with — your biggest competitors. If your team is too busy with keeping your existing systems afloat, you’re inevitably falling behind.

So how do you solve this problem? Hiring more IT personnel seems like a great solution (if you have the funds for it!), but…

There is a shortage of coders. 40 million globally as of December 2020, according to U.S. labor statistics.

Enter Visual Development

The development landscape is always changing, but recent years have seen the beginning of a massive shift. The growth of software as a service (SaaS) businesses have unleashed the tech potential of companies of all sizes.

The proliferation of serverless infrastructure and cloud hosting makes server maintenance and implementation far easier.

Backend as a service (or mobile backend as a service, aka MBaaS) makes database management, user management, and backend logic development far easier. Add in Codeless programming, and suddenly you can take complex coding projects and making them achievable in a fraction of the time and with a fraction of the technical expertise.

API as a service opens the door for faster API development and gives your business efficient new ways to access data and interact with your backend.

And of course visual UI development, in the form of no-code and low-code builders, open the floodgates for non-coders to start building internal tools and even new products.

No-code is often colloquially called the “democratization of development”, and that phrase is not far off. Suddenly, every member of your team has access to tools that they can learn in months (or even weeks) where it would have taken a year or more in the past.

Barriers To Entry

Bringing Codeless development into your organization will take some convincing. A good number of IT professionals remain skeptical. Visual builders have been around for decades, but always seemed to come with significant limitations.

Times are changing. The technology is advancing. Rapidly.

Where once you were limited to clunky WYSIWYG editors and drag-and-drop, functionless interfaces, you can now create beautiful responsive designs, craft custom components, add frontend and backend logic, easily interact with APIs, and much more.

Add the flexibility of a serverless infrastructure (or on-premise solutions such as Backendless Pro), and you can get a product or new feature built and out the door in record time.

And at record low cost.

Codeless and serverless technology not only speed up development, they take tons of tasks off your IT team’s plate. Fewer “must do” tasks means your team is free to explore those “would be nice” or “we’ll try it eventually” projects that could be the next game-changer for your business.

Less time coding and managing, more time building and growing.

As 2021 comes to a close, the time is now to explore your options. Visual development tools are no longer relegated to the “hobbyist” space — they are ready for Prime Time.

Add visual development to your company’s tech stack in 2022. Your bottom line will thank you.