Does no code in the enterprise create more problems than it solves?
Ten years ago, Marc Andreessen argued that “Software is eating the world,” proclaiming software to be the designated driver of innovation in the digital era. Fast forward to today and we find that the gap between demand for business applications and what corporate IT can supply remains as wide as it has ever been. Efforts have been made to compress the time to value in a variety of ways, principally by rapid application development platforms. Today, these are more widely known under their rebranded monikers of no code and low code. The burning question is this: have these no code/low code delivered on the promise of easily created, rapidly deployable applications, The answer is yes and no.
On the one hand, we see platform-specific examples where low code tools help developers deliver clear value in quick time. Check this story out.
Yes, in the context of this article you can argue that it is self-serving but there are many others that tell a similar tale. We invite you to validate then against your own use case.
On the other hand and to date, the underlying promise to democratize software development hasn’t happened on a large scale. Quite the opposite: the hype, inflated expectations, and flawed attempts of the past have given some platforms a less than stellar reputation. Why is that, and what has changed to convince us that the next generation of no code/low code platforms makes a difference?
First, it’s important to understand that no code/low code platforms come in various shapes and forms and that the targeted use-cases (and personas) vary between empowering non-technical people (aka citizen developers) to develop apps on their own and making professional engineers more productive. These are two entirely separate use cases but equally important to understand is that no code/low code platforms substitute for traditional coding. They can only complement, if and when done the right way.
Fundamentally, it’s a question about balancing complexity and flexibility. Despite the perceived promises of the no code/low code movement, no platform can ever remove complexity, only hide it by defining defaults and restricting flexibility. For an interesting discussion on this topic, check out leaky abstractions. Once this fundamental fact of development is understood it’s worthwhile identifying value-adding use-cases and only then think about how to best incubate such platforms into the enterprise.
Let’s start with the use-cases; it’s not about tech-savvy businesspeople building the next killer app, but rather about empowering them to ‘scratch their own itch,’ or provide small integrations that smooth out the running of a particular process, A trivial example might be linking content from an email system to a CRM system or automatically routing customer-specific messages to an AR system.
In hindsight, the first breed of no code platforms that allowed business people to visually compose applications were over-engineered. Maybe we can file this under lessons learned and that developers building tools for non-developers following antique waterfall methodologies was bound to produce the 21st century equivalent of Henry Ford building faster horses.
We have come a long way since those early offerings. Nowadays if one wants to build feasible, desirable, and viable products, you start with design thinking and with identifying the target personas and their use-cases. An example might look like this:
With that in mind, think about how to embed no code/low code platforms within the enterprise; once again using a human-centric approach.
