Web, Mobile&IT
4 Reasons Low-Code Tools Will Never Replace Software Developers
Low-code tools are evolving as companies build applications to meet their needs. Its flexibility and scalability have become a go-to solution for companies and businesses. Companies can now create custom applications with ease and meet customers’ demands. But it’s logical to imagine that low-code tools will replace developers.
However, low-code tools will never replace developers, especially those working with C++, Python and Java languages. Though low-code tools could replace handwritten codes, companies and businesses need developers to optimize the software and its applications.
Why low-code tools will never replace developers?
1. High-level of flexibility:
With a team of developers, you can easily add in-depth functionality to a solution and maintain it without worrying about outages. Sharing responsibilities and allowing professionals to connect and share their ideas is the best way for a business to grow.
Besides, it becomes easier to implement the requested functionality with a dedicated team of developers. Low-code platforms cannot provide this flexibility, especially when creating complex software solutions.
2. Collaboration:
The emergence of low-code tools doesn’t mean everything built by then will get destroyed; its emergence is due to increased demand on the market. Generally, low-code tools came to make old coding methods fast, efficient and exciting to both developers and businesses.
These tools push developers towards collaboration. They are forced to improve their communication skills, interact directly with clients, sharpen their skills and channel their skills to meet business needs. It brings together businesses, engineers and developers. It invites all developers to teamwork and closes the gap between departments.
3. In-demand low-code skills:
Businesses always have issues to solve. This means that developers with low-code skills will remain in demand. Companies always have improvements they can make. Companies will not only need developers who can use low-code tools, but they may also need written code in areas where low-code does not solve complex issues.
According to IDC, the global population annual growth rate of low-code developers is expected to be 40.4% in 2021-2025. This is an increase of 3.2 times the general developer population growth rate.
4. Avoid repetitive tasks:
On average, developers spend lots of time dealing with technical debt. But the low-code platform handles loads of work, making it easy to introduce the debt. For instance, developers must refactor the code every time an operating system update is needed. Low-code platforms can handle such types of tasks. Also, it means developers will focus on inventing new code rather than repeating the same code multiple times.
The odds favor the developers because they did not come to the industry to fix and maintain the old but to build new things. They will have enough time to focus on more complex software solutions and applications, eventually improving companies.
With business competition increasing, there is an urgent need to develop new software solutions fast. But developing complex software is time-consuming. Writing code takes hundreds of hours and even more time to customize and improve efficiency. And since low-code platforms need minimal handwritten code, developing an app on low-code platforms will take a few days.
Developers will now spend less time creating new codes and focus on developing responsive software that meets customer needs. This means businesses will now have sufficient time to predict customers’ needs and develop new software based on that data.
Source: Enterpreneur
Marketing&Sales
Bridging The Gap Between Event Marketing, Sales And Data
Marketers have created new ways of connecting with end users through in-person, virtual and hybrid events, as well as social media. The next challenge is effectively scaling their growth with limited access to proper data that helps determine which channels or sources have had the most significant impact. Through integrated omni channel solutions, marketers have slowly overcome some of their resource gaps. But a few still remain.
For example, along with data, sales performance drives the volume of budget investment in events, yet sales forecasting is still siloed from events. The solutions to this disconnect aren’t necessarily easy. After all, event marketers can’t loop sales in without integrating them into the entire process from the beginning.
Without a unified ecosystem or a true understanding of the full suite of data, gaps develop between marketers’ approaches to digital marketing and event marketing. Combining all three is necessary to close the gap and connect the entire customer journey, which will help provide better content recommendations for event attendees, accuracy and overall profitability for marketers.
Silos Weaken Events And Data Utility
This approach isolates events and their role within core marketing initiatives, weakening the potential for technology to improve attendees’ and customers’ experiences. Disposable events continue to the issue of separating sales and marketing, ultimately rendering data useless. These shortcomings have since led marketers to understand the importance of connecting—not disrupting—marketing, sales and data.
Marketers Must Prioritize Data Integration
Data serves as the glue between marketing and sales. We already see this fusion occurring in omnichannel strategies, which can be most successful when data, sales and marketing flow into one location. Introducing an integrated platform from the start of the customer journey eliminates uncertainty. It also allows marketers to track customers’ actions, previous purchases and preferences so they can optimize the experience in real time.
Centralizing marketing, sales and data processes in a single platform has vast capabilities. For example, it can host project management and data exchanges, create data standards and provide reference architecture—all while securely collecting and analyzing first-party data. Rather than using separate tools to address disparate data needs, marketers who utilize a platform housing a CDP can help reduce friction throughout the customer journey.
In 2023, event marketers who bridge the gap between marketing, sales and data can avoid falling victim to disorganization and a lack of usable insights. One option for creating a seamless customer experience is combining first-party behavioral event data with best-in-class marketing technologies. Doing so allows marketers to drive personalization at scale, accelerating qualification, lead conversion and closed sales deals.
Source: Forbes
Business & Consulting
Management consulting firm Cognitute takes an ethical outcome-driven sustainable approach to consulting
Inherited from its core philosophy, Cognitute has taken an innovative approach to provide business consulting services by leveraging its unique delivery model that’s anchored on the ‘Build, Operate, Transfer’ Consulting 4.0 framework– Empowering organisations to achieve sustainable growth, which in turn amplifies the socio-economic status of all their stakeholders and community as a whole. This philosophy also embraces an ethical approach to consulting which will allow clients flexible contracts and zero-obligation retainers until the outcomes reach their levels of expectation.
“Post rigorous testing and building successful case studies, we are excited to introduce and expand our Outcome-Driven Flexi Consulting Practice to the market,” said Ashok Deepan, COO and Consulting Partner of Cognitute. “Our goal is to empower organisations and leaders to achieve their full potential by challenging the status quo and leapfrogging to lead new frontiers.
“By deploying a central strategy tower, our team of experts become an integral part of an organisation’s workforce and culture, making it frictionless to deploy ideal frameworks and data intelligence tools and mitigate change barriers to delivering sustained results. We are confident that our clients will see the benefits of this innovative approach similar to our existing ongoing projects,” he added.
By leveraging deep insights Cognitute will frame key performance indices, own core business metrics, take calculated risks, and seamlessly change core business levers. Their expertise comes from advisors who have spent years in the industry and have deep functional knowledge and experience, which is a boon for businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs looking either to reinvigorate their strategies or set a new path to drive business metrics as opposed to getting high-level advice.
“A reasonable organisation will adapt themselves to the environment and thrive, while a spark-driven organisation will challenge the status quo and change the market environment to be an enduring stock. Our consulting 4.0 outcome-driven framework is crafted to drive spark whilst achieving numeric growth,” said Ms Bhargavi Agrawal, CEO of Cognitute.
Source: Mint
Customer Support
The next frontier of customer engagement: AI-enabled customer service
While a few leading institutions are now transforming their customer service through apps, and new interfaces like social and easy payment systems, many across the industry are still playing catch-up. Institutions are finding that making the most of AI tools to transform customer service is not simply a case of deploying the latest technology. Customer service leaders face challenges ranging from selecting the most important use cases for AI to integrating technology with legacy systems and finding the right talent and organizational governance structures.
But done well, an AI-enabled customer service transformation can unlock significant value for the business—creating a virtuous circle of better service, higher satisfaction, and increasing customer engagement.
Leaders in AI-enabled customer engagement have committed to an ongoing journey of investment, learning, and improvement, through five levels of maturity. At level one, servicing is predominantly manual, paper-based, and high-touch. At level five—the most advanced end of the maturity scale—companies are delivering proactive, service-led engagement, which lets them handle more than 95 percent of their service interactions via AI and digital channels (see sidebar, “What AI-driven customer service maturity looks like”).
The most mature companies tend to operate in digital-native sectors like ecommerce, taxi aggregation, and over-the-top (OTT) media services. In more traditional B2C sectors, such as banking, telecommunications, and insurance, some organizations have reached levels three and four of the maturity scale, with the most advanced players beginning to push towards level five. These businesses are using AI and technology to support proactive and personalized customer engagement through self-serve tools, revamped apps, new interfaces, dynamic interactive voice response (IVR), and chat.
To achieve the promise of AI-enabled customer service, companies can match the reimagined vision for engagement across all customer touchpoints to the appropriate AI-powered tools, core technology, and data. Exhibit 1 captures the new model for customer service—from communicating with customers before they even reach out with a specific need, through to providing AI-supported solutions and evaluating performance after the fact.
AI-powered does not mean automation-only. It’s true that chatbots and similar technology can deliver proactive customer outreach, reducing human-assisted volumes and costs while simplifying the client experience. Nevertheless, an estimated 75 percent of customers use multiple channels in their ongoing experience.2 A reimagined AI-supported customer service model therefore encompasses all touchpoints—not only digital self-service channels but also agent-supported options in branches or on social-media platforms, where AI can assist employees in real time to deliver high-quality outcomes.
To leapfrog competitors in using customer service to foster engagement, financial institutions can start by focusing on a few imperatives.
Envision the future of service, keeping customers and their engagement at the core while also defining the strategic value to be attained—for example, a larger share of wallet with existing customers? Expansion of particular services, lines of business, or demographics?
Rethink every customer touchpoint, whether digital or assisted, together with opportunities to enhance the experience while also increasing efficiencies.
Maximize every customer service interaction, to deepen customer relationships, build loyalty, and drive greater value over the customer’s lifetime.
Leverage AI and an end-to-end technology stack, to provide a more proactive and personalized customer service experience that supports self-service and decision-making for customers as well as employees.
Adapt agile and collaborative approaches to drive transformation, comprised of SMEs from different business and support functions of the organization.
Source: McKinsley
Engineering
Why software engineering continues to be a safe career bet
In fact, 532 tech companies globally have reduced their workforce to the tune of 155,462.
The good news is that these rounds of restructuring haven’t affected all tech workers equally; software engineering continues to be a robust field that is not only weathering the storm but actively hiring as organisations continue their scramble to attract top talent.
According to recent data, backend, full stack, and frontend engineers are still highly sought after by employers and were the top three in-demand roles, in that order, compared to other software engineering roles.
And while frontend engineers are the third most in-demand, the overall number of roles requiring frontend engineers has increased—up 3.5% in 2021 and 1% in 2022. This compares to a 2.5% drop for backend engineers, and a 7% dip for full stack engineers.
Additionally, software engineering salaries in Europe are holding steady, with Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Germany and Sweden all ranking in the top 10 list of countries that pay the most.
From a skills perspective, JavaScript-based skills, Redux and Typescript are the most in-demand.
Redux, the relatively new open-source library developed by Meta has been found to be the most commonly used scale applications in front-end development. Elsewhere, Typescript, developed by Microsoft in the 2010s, is proving popular with employers with software engineers receiving 1.43 more interview requests for this compared to the marketplace average.
There’s also little difference in the demand for technical skills based on work location with both in-office and remote software engineering roles requiring Typescript and Node.Js. Redux is more in-demand for in-office roles, whereas React Native applies to a greater number of remote jobs.
If you really want to give yourself a competitive edge, a tech bootcamp or refresher course is a great option to get yourself up to speed on the latest programs and processes.
Codesmith offers online courses including a 12-week course and was ranked as the number one best coding bootcamp in 2021 and 2022 by SwitchUp and Course Report, respectively.
Alternatively Tech Elevator offers 14-week courses, and uses its relationship with hundreds of Fortune 500 companies and startups to place its graduates in employment upon completion.
Closer to home, there’s Code Institute, the world’s first credit-rated coding bootcamp, located in Dublin, Ireland. Ironhack, a top-ranking school has locations in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Lisbon, Madrid and Paris. Finally, Generation, a global organisation with bootcamp-style training programs operates across 17 countries and has a global reach of 72,214 graduates.
Source: tech.eu
Writing&Translation
Document Translation now available in the Language Studio
We are excited to announce the release of a new UI feature to translate documents in language studio without writing a single line of code. Enterprises can deploy this solution across their organization, enabling employees to translate documents on demand. The feature is powered by Azure Cognitive Services (ACS) Translator document translation API, which can translate documents in variety of formats preserving the original structure and format as in the source document.
Document translation experience in the language studio enables customers to easily evaluate and adopt the service by simply configuring their Azure Translator and Storage resources. Customers could scale and control the usage through Azure Active Directory (AAD) authentication.
This new experience leverages the full capabilities of the document translation service and offers more. You could translate documents from either your local system or Azure blob storage. Likewise, the translated documents could be either downloaded to your local system or stored in Azure blob storage. Optionally, you could specify the glossary or custom models to be used during translation.
Why should I use the language studio to translate documents?
- Enterprise ready UI solution to translate documents securely.
- Language studio does not store customer data.
- Scale and control the usage through AAD authentication.
- You can use your existing Azure account and translator resources.
- Since it is a web app, you can access the feature from any operating system.
How do I use this feature?
- Sign In into the language studio using your Azure credentials.
- Click on ‘Document translation (Preview)’ tile.
- Configure your setup by choosing your Translator resource and Azure Storage account.
- Select source and target language(s).
- Choose the source document(s) from your local system or blob storage.
- Choose the destination for translated files as either blob storage upload or local system download.
You can monitor the status of current and previously submitted jobs through the ‘Job History’ page.
Source: Microsoft
Design&Creative
Wikipedia’s new sound logo had a seriously ambitious design brief
Most designers will have received some tough briefs in their time, but Wikipedia’s call for proposals for a sound logo was a particularly tall order. The community-run online encyclopaedia wanted nothing less than “the sound of all human knowledge” for its new audio identifier.
And it thinks it’s found it in a sonic logo that will be rolled out from mid-year. So what does the sound of all human knowledge sound like? Well, it’s a mix of traditional and contemporary sources of learning: a flutter of pages turning and frantic typing followed by some chirpy electronic chimes (see our pick of the best logos for inspiration for visual identities).
Strictly speaking, a logo is a visual identity, but sound idents are frequently called sound logos or sonic logos, since they serve much the same function. And they can be hugely effective. Just think of Apple’s start-up chime, Intel’s signature ‘bong’ or Netflix’s ‘ta-dum’. Hear them, and you instantly recall the brands (see our pick of the best audio logos for more examples).
Wikipedia wanted something similar to serve for “projects when visual logos are not an option”. True to its collaborative community-sourced nature it opened the quest up to the public through a contest, which opened in September. Six months on, it’s picked a winner from over 3,200 submissions received from 2,094 people in 135 countries.
The winning audio logo was created by nuclear scientist Thaddeus Osborne, who wins $2,500 for his creation and will be flown to a professional recording studio in London to help produce the final version. He says that music has always been a huge part of his life and “a way for me to ‘travel the world’ from my small town backyard.”
Osborne’s creation sounds both novel and somehow familiar. The combination of fluttering pages and clicking keys feels apt to communicate the concept of a digital encyclopedia, while the rising synthesizer chimes feel optimistic and comfortingly, almost like something we already know. The Wikipedia Foundation says it hopes to have the final sound ready for use by June.
Source: Creative Bloq
Legal&Finance
Trump Indictment Is a Perversion of Campaign-Finance Law
In choosing to convene a grand jury to pursue the Donald Trump-Stormy Daniels affair, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg faced two big problems—one political, one legal.
The indictment of Mr. Trump will address the first, likely at the expense of the second.
Mr. Bragg’s political problem is that this charge is chump change, merely a misdemeanor under New York law. To ratchet it up to a felony indictment, the district attorney has to show, among other things, that the falsification was designed to conceal another crime. That crime is believed to be a campaign-finance violation—an illegal corporate contribution by the Trump Organization to the Trump presidential campaign—which the false business reporting was meant to conceal.
Here’s where Mr. Bragg’s legal problem comes in: Was the hush money a campaign contribution? The governing statute, the Federal Election Campaign Act, provides that a contribution is any donation made “for the purpose of influencing any campaign for federal office.” The Trump Organization, says Mr. Bragg, paid Ms. Daniels to prevent revelations that would have hurt Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign. Thus the payments were “for the purpose of influencing” a federal election—and, since corporate contributions to a campaign for federal office are illegal, the case is closed.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that because campaign-finance laws infringe on core First Amendment activity, they can’t be dependent on vague, subjective interpretations. Accordingly, the clause “for the purpose of influencing any federal election” is an objective standard. As another section of the statute states, an obligation isn’t a campaign expenditure if it exists “irrespective” of the campaign. In other words, campaign funds pay for campaigning—the campaign manager’s salary, ads, campaign travel, venues for rallies, polling and so on. They don’t pay for personal expenses not created by the act of campaigning, even if the candidate intends for them to benefit the campaign.
andidates with substantial business interests, such as Mr. Trump, will frequently find themselves facing lawsuits—some merited, some not. If such a candidate were to instruct his company’s legal counsel to settle them, the settlement payments would, subjectively, be made “to influence an election.” Legally, however, such payments couldn’t be made with campaign funds and would have to be made by the company or the candidate personally, because the underlying obligation wasn’t created by the act of campaigning.
These restrictions on converting campaign funds to “personal use” may be the one meritorious part of our complex, often destructive system of campaign-finance regulation. They define the difference between bribes—donations for the candidate’s personal benefit—and campaign contributions. Who really thinks that a candidate can—let alone must—use campaign funds to pay hush money for past affairs, and who knows what else? But that’s what Mr. Bragg’s theory would require.
Mr. Trump has a remarkable ability to make both his ardent supporters and his ardent critics abandon long-held principles for short-term satisfaction. If Mr. Bragg is somehow able to make these charges stick, it will betray fundamental tenets of campaign-finance law and those who believe in the rule of law.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Medical&Healthcare
How health platforms can improve healthcare in the Global South
More than half of Africa’s population – around 615 million people – do not have access to the healthcare services they need.
“Healthcare systems in Africa suffer from neglect and underfunding, leading to severe challenges across the six World Health Organization (WHO) pillars of healthcare delivery,” explain physician and public health specialist Obinna Oleribe and his co-authors in their paper, suggesting training and capacity building for health workers as the leading potential solution.
Platforms constitute an efficient and effective way of disseminating knowledge and offering opportunities for upskilling the workforce, including remote or vulnerable communities in the Global South. There is an urgent need to provide continuous education and skills to the most socio-economically underprivileged to equalize access to knowledge.
MedicineAfrica, which won a Tech4Good for Africa Award in 2020, offers a range of courses to medical students at universities in Somaliland and qualified clinicians and healthcare workers. Although these are mainly in English, MedicineAfrica has also offered bilingual (English and Somali) courses, such as a recent continuing professional development course on COVID-19 prevention and treatment.
MedicineAfrica managed to transfer clinical knowledge to participants, filling critical gaps in existing medical curricula. It also exposed students to Western best clinical practices, such as taking patients’ medical history, which they could adopt to improve local practices.
Further, through online, real-time tutorials, medical students would receive instant advice on specific clinical cases they encountered in local hospitals, such as how to treat trauma in the head.
Somaliland-based participants could also compare their clinical case management with a Western peer through discussions with UK-based clinicians, leading to significant learning through comparison. For example, in one of the discussions, a participant recounted how a postpartum haemorrhage was treated and “saw some mistakes that we [made…]. Now we can do much better.”
The knowledge medical students got through the platform motivated them to further disseminate it to their peers who did not experience learning through the MedicineAfrica platform.
Our study also highlights that the platform was unintentionally assuming knowledge that was of less relevance and significance to participants. Specifically, participants described that some of the knowledge they would get through the platform was inapplicable because it relied on locally unavailable equipment and medicines.
In their daily work, clinicians would make do with whatever equipment is available. Because the medical equipment’s availability is dismissed from the platform’s design, participants’ professional identity is devalued. That raises a question about the adaptability of global health platforms to local conditions of work.
Also, participants highlighted the significance of participating in a platform in which participants’ language is used. This issue is independent of individuals’ fluency in English. Our interviews show that the subtleties and rapport are lost when using another language.
Source: World Economic Forum
