Low-code and no-code is shifting the balance between business and technology professionals
The Covid-19 crisis has accelerated digital transformation, and in the process, pushed more tech-driven work well beyond the bounds of data centers — into executive suites, marketing departments, human resource offices, and even into the front lines. Business-side professionals with a minimum of development experience — beyond creating spreadsheets — suddenly had to become IT departments within their own home offices, not only troubleshooting network issues, but creating or downloading front-end apps and applications to help them in their jobs.
This new phase we’ve entered — low-code and no-code, 2020s style — shifts the relationship between IT and business professionals. In this Q&A, Sheryl Koenigsberg, head of global product marketing at Mendix, provided her insights on where the low-code and no-code movement has taken and will be taking us. Q: In this time with most knowledge workers and managers working remotely, are end-users getting the IT support they need? Are end-users essentially on their own when it comes to leveraging IT capabilities? Are the IT professionals they depend on more consumed with remote infrastructure support issues? Koenigsberg: “I don’t envy anyone who is an IT worker right now. You’re right, they are consumed with numerous challenges nobody planned for. We do see a rising interest among end-users to take matters into their own hands and solve some of their own digitalization problems. At the same time, IT has less time to help evaluate solutions for the business to use, less time to coach novice developers, and less time to oversee best practice deployment of new technologies. It’s a pretty bad Catch-22 for IT teams right now.” Q: What’s the professional developer perspective on low-code and no-code through this? Are they proactively urging greater end-user empowerment? “IT departments are trying to balance two things. On one side, they see a growing interest from business experts to solve their own workgroup-level problems themselves. On the other hand, they want to maintain control and governance over any software created in the organization. It’s often the application development managers, struggling with never-ending backlogs and short-staffing who are most bullish on enterprise low-code — they see a way to address both of these sets of demands. With low-code and no-code, they can give business units skill-appropriate tools to solve some of their own problems, while ensuring that anything they build goes through a centralized process for quality and security – the same process their enterprise software development goes through.” Q. What are the main development tasks that are now within reach for non-technical or non-developer personnel?
“This is an interesting question, because the definition of ‘who is a developer’ is changing as no- and low-code become more prominent. People who just five years ago would have opened a ticket to request the creation of a dashboards or workflow are now empowered to create those things themselves. People who would have had no visibility into how to connect to a core system like SAP or Oracle can drag-and-drop data sources like that into applications today. People who we would have thought of as just BI data analysts are creating custom software today. Given all this, I’d say it’s less about what development tasks are accessible to non-technical people, and more about what capabilities individuals can create on their own through software, and that universe just keeps growing every day.”
Q: Historically, only a small percentage of technically skilled people were able to create software – No-Code is changing this drastically. What groups of people do you think are benefiting most from that development?
“We are seeing adoption of low-code across many different job titles, from people with obvious adjacent skill sets like data analysts and electrical engineers to perhaps more surprising roles like attorneys and underwriters.
