The burgeoning Low-Code/No-Code space has become an extraordinarily disruptive page in the enterprise digital story, leading to extensive confusion among enterprises and vendors alike. Is there a place for it in your enterprise, and is the promise of this disruptive movement real, or just another tech fad?
As published on forbes.com Jul 20, 2017 written by Jason Bloomberg
The burgeoning Low-Code/No-Code space has become an extraordinarily disruptive page in the enterprise digital story, leading to extensive confusion among enterprises and vendors alike.
The big analyst firms aren’t much help: Gartner calls it High-Productivity Application Platform-as-a-Service, while Forrester divides the world into Low-Code Development and Mobile Low-Code Development – merely adding to the confusion.
But even the Low-Code and No-Code terminology itself is misleading, as the distinction isn’t about whether people need to code or not. The distinction is more about the types of people using these platforms to build applications.
In the No-Code corner are the ‘citizen developers’ – business users who can build functional but generally limited apps without having to write a line of code. The Low-Code corner, in contrast, centers on professional developers, streamlining and simplifying their work – delivering enterprise-class applications with little or no hand-coding.
So far so good. Confusing, yes – but focusing on personas rather than coding provides a useful frame of reference. “You shouldn’t have to choose between No or Low Code,” explains Chris Obdam, CEO at Betty Blocks. “Innovation starts with Citizen Developers often, but after the first phase, IT should be able to continue the work.”
True enough, but even this emerging model of the Low-Code/No-Code marketplace is itself ripe for its own disruption. And you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Taking Low-Code/No-Code to the Next Level
In fact, there are two fundamental trends that are both bringing new disruption to the already disruptive Low-Code/No-Code story.
First, continued innovations with the model-driven, declarative approach at the core of Software-Defined Everything (SDX) are bringing unprecedented levels of usability and power to these platforms.
Today, vendors are implementing such capabilities piecemeal across a variety of disparate products – but the trend is clear: before we know it, the distinction between tools simple enough for citizen developers and powerful enough for professional development teams will disappear.
At that point, Low-Code and No-Code will merge into a single market segment – both ‘enterprise-class’ powerful and ‘citizen developer’ easy to use, at the same time.
The second trend is even more disruptive: artificial intelligence (AI). Some vendors are already incorporating AI into their Low-Code/No-Code platforms for a variety of purposes. For example, AI can help with the knottier challenges of integrating with semi-structured and unstructured data sources.
AI can also provide ‘next best action’ advice for various workflow scenarios, essentially giving application creators an autocomplete-like capability for building a quite complex process logic.
Some vendors even build out branching conditions, exception handling, and many other situations that have heretofore required seasoned professionals to hand-code.
And we’ve only scratched the surface of how AI can help enterprises build great software quickly.
Market Forces Impeding Disruptive Innovation
You might be wondering at this point why we haven’t already seen more innovation in this market. After all, declarative and model-driven approaches aren’t new, and AI is moving forward at an increasingly rapid pace. So, what’s keeping the vendors from innovating more quickly?
The answer: such innovations are too disruptive – so disruptive, in fact, that many different constituencies are resisting, each one sticking its thumb in the dike, hoping to hold back the ocean. “This statement [about holding back the ocean] pretty much summarizes everything we’re experiencing now,” says John Sarazen, Business Development Executive at VorpalEdge.
Who, then, is threatened by giving every knowledge worker in every organization the ability to create powerful enterprise applications?
If we take a traditional enterprise app that might require, say, six months, a dozen people, and two million dollars to build and deploy, and reduce those figures to two weeks, three people, and fifty thousand dollars – and end up with a faster, higher quality, more flexible app to boot – then who suffers?
Consultants, to be sure – especially the big system integrators, whose business model depends upon keeping throngs of junior developers busy and billable.
Low-Code/No-Code is poised to completely disrupt this ‘school bus’ business model. “Especially large system integrators are unconsciously slowing the human capital transformation necessary to equip the workforce of the future with the right skill set,” explains Rajat Vijayvargiya, Sr. Business Technology Advisor at CA CA +1.67% Technologies. “Whereas again if they enable it, they can act as catalyst in helping existing and future workforce transition successfully and serve bigger societal cause.”
IT departments are also pushing back, often with a vengeance. Not only do the various denizens in IT fear for their jobs, but Low-Code/No-Code also threatens their credibility.
After all, IT has been telling business stakeholders for years that the six month/million dollar plan is the only way to build enterprise software.
Now it turns out they aren’t just wrong, but not even in the right ballpark. “20 years ago, enterprise systems were implemented by 100s of consultants and experts at a multi-million dollar cost,” points out Simon Chan, Founder and CEO, DigiVue Consulting. “Now with No code/low code, the same systems can be implemented by smaller players at a fraction of the price and in a fraction of the time. Internet, Cloud and social media, has leveled the playing field.”
The third group is the most surprising of all: enterprise DevOps teams. You would think that because DevOps is all about delivering quality software rapidly that DevOps folks would be all over Low-Code/No-Code.
On the contrary: peel back the layers of any DevOps effort and at the center, you’ll find software. Hand-coded software. And yet, the more mature Low-Code/No-Code becomes, the less hand-coding will ever be necessary.
Sure, building software will be faster and easier than ever before, but coders want to code – whether it makes sense to crank out software by hand or not. “While I really appreciate hand coding for very specific things, for a lot of other things it just seems dumb and irrelevant work,” says Jan Bolhuis, IT Regiemanager, Master Software.
If you’re a coder who loves to code, all is not lost – but as this trend takes hold, there is less likely to be a place for you on an enterprise development team.
Instead, you are more likely to find a home at a vendor. “Coders would definitely get opportunities to code at a software vendor, but it is not just for building Low-Code/No-Code platforms and tools; it would also be for the business functionalities to be implemented for that business domain,” explains Parameswaran Seshan, Principal Consultant, C C & C Solutions. “This would only mean taking the level of abstraction of coding to another level above where it will be more declarative and friendly to the business, but still the citizen developers would not do it themselves.”
There will always be a need for hand coding after all – since someone has to create the Low-Code/No-Code platforms and tools themselves.
Over time, therefore, enterprise software development will focus almost exclusively on AI-supported, model-driven, declarative application construction, while vendors will remain relevant by focusing on underlying platforms and tools. “In principle, there seems no evident reason why more advanced no-code solutions could not be applied to their own development, and eliminate the need for human coders altogether, or at least nearly so,” says Lewis Perelman, Principal of the Perelman Group.
Have We Been Down This Road Before?
Predictably, there are plenty of Low-Code/No-Code skeptics as well, as the general approach has been around for decades – most memorably with Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE), Rapid Application Development (RAD), and Business Process Management (BPM) tools.
The track record of such tools, however, has been decidedly mixed. “This has been going on with CASE tools, objects, and BPML [Business Process Markup Language] for a very long time,” Chris Pehura, Practice Director, C-Suite Data points out. “I don’t see the ‘killer app’ happening anytime soon.”
In retrospect, many people refer to these older generations of tooling as No-Code or Low-Code as well. “I used lots of no-code and low-code systems in the past and they just locked businesses into unmaintainable systems,” says Stephen Deakin, Interim CTO at Eccton.
Today’s Low-Code/No-Code vendors, however, are quick to point out the differences between the current generation of technology and those that came before. “The speed of change and agility required in today’s world is identifying the legacy BPM providers as past their sell by date,” says Owen McKee, Sales Director at Bizagi. “No one has total vision of the future direction of their business, so speed, flexibility and the ability to fail fast all come in to play. Low code no code is changing the market.”
In fact, today’s modern tooling is more about the future of application development than the past. “The shift is happening no matter how hard IT tries to block it,” opines Trish Kennedy, COO of Zudy Software. “This ain’t no CASE tool – this is the future of AppDev.”
Disrupting Digital Transformation
As today’s enterprises undergo digital transformation, they become software-driven organizations – and thus having developers on staff who can hand-code software has become an increasingly strategic necessity. After all, this need has been driving the rise of enterprise DevOps across all industries.
Low-Code/No-Code will disrupt this entire pattern, as enterprises realize they can be even more successful with their digital transformations if they do away with hand-coding altogether, adopting Low-Code/No-Code across their organizations instead. “No-Code is here, and it doesn’t care about making your IT organization more efficient,” explains E. Scott Menter, Chief Strategy Officer at BP Logix. “Its only purpose is to turn your business into a digitally integrated, audit-defying, silo-resistant object of their customers’ desire.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2017/07/20/the-low-codeno-code-movement-more-disruptive-than-you-realize/#289daa00722a