By Matt Heusser – A business wants to develop a coupon generator, a branded calendar or a branded recipe application. Colleges want to track students or courses. An independent car dealership wants to automate part of the scheduling or service process.

These types of projects often raise eyebrows in IT departments. They probably won’t provide the comparable returns to a big ERP upgrade that requires IT’s focus. But for those without an IT department, such projects require organizations to dedicate resources for a programming team or invest in outsourcing the work.

However, these costly endeavors shouldn’t prohibit organizations from pursuing a major IT project. Instead, these organizations should consider a low-code tool that’s geared toward line-of-business (LOB) workers with some coding skills. These employees can use the tool to build applications that are straightforward and important, but perhaps not urgent enough for IT to develop.

The idea of writing less code by dragging and dropping objects is not new. Visual Basic came out in 1991; SQL (originally Structured English Query Language, or SEQUEL) aimed to have analysts — not programmers — design requests to the database in something similar to spoken or written English.

Today’s low-code development comes from a very similar place: Empower LOB workers with higher-level tools that provide 80% of the functionality for 20% of the effort. Employees can point these tools at a database or spreadsheet and pop out a website or mobile app. Such applications have basic create, read, update and delete (CRUD) functionality, and perhaps store the data in the cloud. Read On: