COVID-19 was an unprecedented event in recent times resulting in the widespread disruption of public services. The pandemic highlighted the brittleness of outmoded systems which remain overly-reliant on manual checkpoints and in-person transactions. Yet, even before a global pandemic turned the world upside down, these highly “analog” systems were providing a disservice to vulnerable and underserved communities—the ones who are often most affected by mass-impact events such as COVID.
Many government processes still require in-person transactions for everything from license registrations and renewals to paying parking tickets. Travel to a physical location may be inconvenient for some but can be particularly hard on poor residents who, in addition to shelling out for transportation costs, are compelled to take time away from work and family obligations. These processes are even more burdensome for the 26% of American adults who live with a disability, over half of whom have difficulties walking or climbing stairs.
The good news is that these challenges can, in many cases, be engineered around. Thanks to near-ubiquitous modern networks and widespread distribution of connected devices, many public services can be efficiently, securely, and remotely delivered to residents. The only challenge is the cost and complexity of building the digital infrastructure.
Digitally transformation is not for the faint of heart. Custom enterprise-grade software requires upgrading and integrating legacy systems, implementing air-tight privacy controls, and competing for scarce IT talent. Factoring all these challenges together, it’s little wonder that enterprise-scale application development (regardless of industry) is such a painfully inefficient affair with 85% of projects going over schedule and 70% of large-scale digital IT programs failing to even reach their stated goals.
In order to circumvent these challenges, governments at all levels are increasingly embracing no-code. This new class of cloud-based development platform eliminates traditional friction points and accelerates the building of scalable, sophisticated solutions.
No-code offers a number of inherent advantages over other development approaches. For one, no-code platforms come “out-of-the-box” (or, out-of-the-virtual-SaaS box) with all the toolsets and sector-specific elements necessary to build and manage a robust application (e.g., front-end UX, workflow, rules engine, analytics, integrations, and maintenance). Since they’re all components of the same unified platform, everything just works together in instant harmony. This means agencies can devote all their resources to addressing residents’ challenges instead of technical ones.
Also, by eliminating the need to write code from the building process, no-code expands the scope of who is doing the development. In a no-code platform, users (or “Creators” as we refer to them at Unqork) build applications by drag-and-dropping configurable elements representing both user-facing features and back-end application logic. While modern programming languages (Java, Python, etc.) can take a year to learn and a decade to master, no-code can usually be learned in a month or two, which makes development more collaborative, and recruiting more flexible.
The Takeaway: No-code empowers state and local agencies to readily explore digital opportunities that would have been inaccessible just a few years ago. In this eBook, we’ll explore how no-code can help government entities inject operational efficiencies and provide services to all.
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