The delivery model assessment is the approach of gathering evidence and reaching a decision on whether your borough should deliver a service, or part of a service, in-house, procure from the market or adopt a hybrid solution.
The Cabinet Office's Outsourcing Playbook contains a detailed and thorough set of guidance on how to best conduct a delivery model assessment.
However, that playbook (and comparable guidance documents) do not refer explicitly to the use of low/no-code tools in your delivery assessment, despite the fact that they are becoming more popular in government and enterprise applications. This section provides a framework for how to think about low/no-code when scoping projects.
<aside> <img src="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/9bd8e31c-ea80-42d1-82dc-0f68f808a8e5/Ellipse_2_(3).svg" alt="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/9bd8e31c-ea80-42d1-82dc-0f68f808a8e5/Ellipse_2_(3).svg" width="40px" /> Low-code development tools enable the visual modelling of the user interfaces, business logic, algorithms and data handling that make up a typical application, without the need to describe the controlling code. This allows non-technical teams to build and iterate scalable web and mobile apps, and internal workflows.
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The growth in low-code tools
Low-code has been around in government for some time, with a fairly traditional supplier base, including tools such as Appian and Microsoft Power Apps (here is a list of all 'no-code' suppliers on G-Cloud 11). Recently, the low-code startup sector has grown considerably, with significant venture investment and enterprise adoption of new low-code players. Gartner's 2020 report in low-code estimates that 'by 2024, 75% of large enterprises will be using at least four low-code development tools for both IT application development and citizen development initiative'.
Some of the recent tools with growing levels of enterprise traction include:
Low/no-code tools can provide significant delivery benefits to teams, as well as cost savings, when compared with traditional in/outsourcing models. These benefits of a low-code tool will vary on a case by case basis, but they can be broadly summarised as follows:
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