Can the movement towards low-code and no-code software development lighten the workload of IT pros? Absolutely. But a problem remains. New types of workloads are going to emerge and consume this freed up time, forcing companies to provide guidance to prevent all these user-created applications from overwhelming the organization.
Admittedly, a investigation published a few years ago by Mendix suggests that low-code and no-code effectively free up professionals’ time.
Two-thirds of developers using low-code and no-code recognize that low-code is their workaround. At least 90% of them report having less than five application requests per month in their backlog. Additionally, the survey suggests that the average company “avoided hiring two IT developers using low-code tools.”
In times of tight IT budgets, the time has come to embrace low-code and no-code approaches
Too good to be true ? Mendix is a low-code tool provider. He therefore has good reason to highlight these results. This data validates the movement to allow business users to focus on their domains while freeing up IT to worry about more important things. Equally important, they highlight the fact that developers themselves are consumers of low-code and no-code tools.
Experts and industry leaders agree: In an era where IT budgets are tight, technical talent is hard to find and retain, and business users are more eager than ever for additional capabilities, the time came to adopt low-code and no-code approaches.
“We are seeing enterprises adopting low-code and no-code platforms for multiple reasons, including automating processes, modernizing the application landscape, and decentralizing application development to reduce the backlog of applications. demands within the IT department,” says David McIntireDirector at Capgemini.
“While these platforms still require some level of IT support, enabling companies to build simple applications within a standardized platform helps solve software development recruitment challenges. ‘apps.
Business users, on the other hand, “want to focus on developing applications that simplify the business processes they use every day,” says McIntire. “They seek to automate specific workflows or business processes. They also use low-code, data-driven platforms to improve visibility into business operations through the creation of new reports and analytics.”
What roles will IT professionals have to play in the face of the proliferation of low-code and no-code?
One of the most important emerging roles today is to serve as stewards or curators of burgeoning no-code and low-code environments. “We live in interesting times,” says Mike Loukidesvice president of emerging technology content at O’Reilly Media.
“It’s great that business users can build software that they can use without having programming skills. But we’re still trying to define the appropriate relationships between those developers and more formal IT processes. Is there a better web app to manage the sales team than a bunch of IT developers who rarely talk to sales people? Probably. But can that same manager deploy the app, verify that it’s secure, and do all the other things we expect from computing? Probably not. So we have to find a way to make those relationships work.”
Low-code and no-code approaches “are most effective when the visual constructs of the platform used by business management align very well with business concepts they are already familiar with,” says Pete Bonney, executive general manager of product, application and service engineering at Xero. “Otherwise, they will need to develop the skills of a professional developer, such as understanding general concepts such as data structures, algorithms and complexity, i.e. the fundamentals of computer science.”
Low-code and no-code “consist of reacting to a certain situation by taking a well-understood and reproducible action”
Freed from the need to constantly create and maintain reports and analytics, “IT professionals can focus on maintaining the platforms themselves and integrating the platforms into the larger ecosystem. wide,” says McIntire. That doesn’t mean IT people are losing interest in the plethora of apps that business users — or their fellow IT people — are building and using. “The IT staff often becomes the centralized manager of the applications being developed,” says McIntire. “Professional developers also play a key role in setting the coding standards used by citizen developers and in training new citizen developers.
To successfully capitalize on no or insufficient code, IT pros must “spend time early in the engagement to define the structures and processes that govern the use of the platform,” says McIntire. “Defining the training required for business departments, security and data standards, new application delivery processes and the review process are all key elements for using low-code/no-code in order to ‘balancing speed of delivery and suitability of application’.
Low-code and no-code “are about reacting to a certain situation by taking a well-understood and repeatable action,” says Bonney. “This is a do-it-yourself method that typically doesn’t require professional help. However, for particularly large, complex, or custom workflows, it’s best to hire a professional. For example , if a business has grown rapidly and large volumes of data are causing issues with performance and data timeliness, this is a situation where professional help is usually needed.
Mitigate “the risk of proliferating applications in the environment that are not developed to company standards”
Part of that role is to mitigate “the risk of proliferating applications in the environment that are not developed to company standards,” he continues. “Applications that are implemented without adhering to appropriate development standards risk introducing security or regulatory compliance issues into the environment.
Additionally, CIOs will constantly have to contend with the complexity that can result from a rampant proliferation of low-code and no-code applications. “Allowing individuals to work in disparate business units and geographies increases the risk of developing multiple applications with common or overlapping functionality, which unnecessarily increases the size and complexity of the application landscape,” says Mr. McIntire.
Ultimately, IT professionals need to stay on the ground when it comes to guiding business departments to meet business and technology standards. “There are tools for building websites, business intelligence, and using a spreadsheet model to work with databases,” says Loukides.
“On the one hand, these are radically different tools that often don’t require writing any code at all. But the same applies: The user will not be able to use a websites if he doesn’t have a good idea of how he wants his site to look, including design, usability, etc. The tool takes care of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but the hard decisions are up to the user to make. The same goes for business intelligence: business intelligence tools can help a lot with data analysis, but the user has to always know what it wants to get out of that data. A tool can’t give you information if you don’t know what you want to know.”
Source : “ZDNet.com”
