Accelerate the ROI of low code with enterprise reuse

At Pega, we continue to drive transformation in unprecedented ways. And this is being accelerated by many factors like low code and generative AI, as we are always trending toward more agile apps and application development.

Our low-code platform for AI-powered decisioning and workflow automation can be used across the low-code continuum, from low complexity and less critical apps built by citizen developers to fusion IT and business teams building more complex apps for their line of business, all the way up to high complexity and highly critical apps built for the enterprise by professional Pega developers.

The benefits of an enterprise reuse strategy 

Enterprise reuse is critical to accelerate your ROI and lower your TCO for low-code development across the continuum. Here are the top five ways that your business can benefit from enterprise reuse.

1. Accelerate time to market. Increase velocity in delivering business value by leveraging pre-built, reusable assets.
2. Reduce effort and costs. Eliminate the need to reinvent the wheel for things that are difficult or are highly reusable.
3. Ensure quality. Codify design patterns in your application and ensure consistency organization-wide.
4. Increase control and agility. Any change or update to an asset is reflected in enterprise applications as part of a defined governance and change plan.
5. Improve alignment. Facilitate collaboration between different departments and teams within an organization, making it easier to share reusable assets.

With Pega, building for reuse just means identifying your reusable needs up front so you can build them into reusable building blocks from day one. Because Pega is built for enterprise reuse from the ground up, it’s easy to package and start leveraging those reusable assets out of the gate, with no impact on your delivery velocity.

Adopting a “Build the blocks, assemble the blocks” model

Pega’s guiding principle for enterprise reuse is all about building and assembling reusable building blocks, leveraging the Pega Studio that is best suited for each configuration task. Pega’s reusable building blocks have these characteristics:

• Interoperable: Leverage the same building blocks across authoring experiences and across applications
• Updateable: Seamlessly update individual building blocks without impacting overall applications
• Configurable: Control behavior without refactoring or rewriting business logic
• Modular: Avoid monolithic layers that are too large to maintain or upgrade
• Governed: A Pega Center of Excellence should build, deploy, maintain, and monitor the use of reusable building blocks

This “Build the blocks, assemble the blocks” model will increase velocity in delivering business value while reducing total cost of ownership (TCO). Here is a breakdown of benefits:

1. Building and assembling blocks with a modular mindset will provide more flexibility and opportunity for reuse within AND across applications. A Tier 1 financial services client saved 16,000 development hours reusing modular processes.
2. Leveraging consistent field best practices focused on encapsulation and extensibility of reusable assets will increase delivery velocity, lower TCO, and support continuous delivery and autonomy of distributed teams. LeasePlan achieved 4X faster time to market compared to competing approaches.
3. Resources can be optimized by focusing pro devs on building reusable blocks while other Pega architects and citizen developers can assemble blocks in a curated low-code experience, truly democratizing enterprise low-code development.

New in Infinity ‘23: Reuse Library

Our Infinity ’23 release introduces a Reuse Library to help organizations achieve higher enterprise reuse. The Reuse Library allows you to:

• Discover reusable assets available to be used in your application, such as case types, data objects, and logic
• Seamlessly add or remove assets in your application
• View components installed on an application or browse the Pega Marketplace
• View details of the published assets, such as layer, updates, etc

Getting started with reuse

It’s never too late to improve your reuse practices! Should you throw away your existing Pega architecture immediately and adopt this approach? You can, but we wouldn’t recommend it. 

Instead, consider how your existing applications can be broken down and moved into reusable modular blocks. If you already have isolated functionality into its own ruleset, you’re in a great position. You can gradually move those rulesets into new modules. Have you already created reusable parameterized data transforms or activities? Great, wrap them in process rules and publish them into smart shapes! Working on a new application and want to harvest reusables rules from another Pega application? Consider what you can refactor (by class) into a new ruleset using the out-of-the-box refactor tools. These can then be moved into new modules.

And remember, as a rule of thumb, use Dev Studio to build and package the blocks and use App Studio to assemble the blocks!

Finally, check out the NEW Mission and Badge on Pega Academy: Modular Enterprise Reuse Foundation!