If you are running a business enterprise and trying to keep up with the competition in today’s tech-driven, fast-paced business world, you either go fast – actually, faster than the rest – or, go home!

Speed, with timing, is the ultimate mantra to survive the great game of innovation and digital business transformation.

However, this need for speed, while continuously staying focused on cutting costs and streamlining operations, creates a lot of pressure for enterprises to adopt, implement, and leverage technology, in pursuit of their transformation goals. And in order to maintain the equilibrium between both, enterprises need to embrace approaches, techniques, and methodologies that are scalable, agile and help design solutions in real time. As affirmed in a study by Gartner, for organizations to succeed in digital transformation, IT teams must modernize tools and processes to deliver high-quality applications with greater agility. Rapid application development (RAD) is quickly becoming a necessity to meet the demands of this new paradigm.

Rapid Application Development – Understanding the concept

According to the definition,

Rapid-application development (RAD) is both a general term, used to refer to adaptive software development approaches, as well as the name for James Martin's approach to rapid development. In general, RAD approaches to software development put less emphasis on planning and more on an adaptive process. Prototypes are often used in addition to or sometimes even in place of design specifications.

In simple words, rapid application development emphasizes jumping right off into working out an application, rather than spending ample time on pre-development r&d. With more work and fewer talks, rapid application development involves adequate testing on the go and delivers high-quality application solutions required for your DT initiatives.

Rapid Application Development for Digital Transformation

Many organizations are still resorting to the old-school application strategy – that is, custom developing every new application from the get-go or reaching out to third-parties to buy off-the-shelf solutions. This involves a lot of time, research, and resource planning – and amidst it all, kills the core driving factor of digital transformation, that is, speed! The result – they end up among the laggards!

Here are some benefits enterprises with a rapid application development strategy in place are reaping:

• Centralized application development – RAD allows you to develop applications on a single, holistic, central platform, thereby tackling IT sprawl head on, with higher efficiency.
• Real-time solution rollout – With RAD, you can effectively design and deliver solutions in real time, for needs and issues as they arise.
• Data and content integration – Through rapid application development, you can effectively minimize data silos by configuring all of your application on a single, central platform, thereby eliminating the loops and gaps within your data and IT fabric.
• Delivering to the continually changing needs of your clients and stakeholders – the solutions designed through rapid application development are highly scalable, with ultra-efficient point-and-click reconfigurability.

Verdict –

The immense benefits of rapid application development will soon make it a requisite for an enterprise’s digital transformation initiatives, driven by the increasing demand for applications with embedded content and intuitive user interfaces. It won’t be long when rapid application development becomes a critical success factor driving the segregation between technology leaders versus laggards.

Rapid Application Development – how to go about?

Like we mentioned earlier, timing is the key to a successful digital transformation. It’s about time you move past the dilemma of ‘to build or not to build’ and adopt a RADical approach to catalyze your transformation initiatives. At Infowise, we leverage advanced technology to create smart tools to help you implement a rapid application development strategy in place. Aside from the ones discussed above, our solutions offer the following benefits to facilitate a soft, segueing transition to rapid application development:

• Code-free development

Our rad tools such as Ultimate Forms for SharePoint makes easy to work fast in an agile method and create a fully operational prototype for rapid testing, disruptions, and execution

• Real-time prototyping and disruption

Our RAD tools facilitate rapid prototyping for business processes and make the best bet for disruptors team to have products out for testing in no time.

• Template stocks for rapid customization and scalability

We have extensive inventories of business solution templates that allow fast-track product testing and can be repurposed or scaled as per the changing needs of your clients, enterprise or stakeholders.

At Infowise, we are serving as a strategic partner, assisting public and private enterprises in their digital transformation endeavors with our scalable, smart and futuristic tools, software and applications. Our product Infowise Ultimate Forms Power Suite contains more than 15 standalone SharePoint applications developed to give you the power to innovate, automate and scale up your processes. Our products have been designed for optimum interoperability and seamless integration within SharePoint. Altogether, they constitute the structural foundation for digitization and facilitate your transition to digital transformation.