Trend - Emerging Technology: Low-code is top of the List

BottomUp - Skills for Innovators

Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons in this I'm the CEO of Qualitance and we continue without tech trends. That's right. And we are going to talk about low code. Maybe no code. Uh, but you got it. We are talking about the big technology that is clearly everyone's favorite. It was really quite unanimous.

Uh, When we did our recent emerging trends report to find how many people are considering low code. So it really deserves our attention. In this episode, let's get into the world of no code and low code and unpack why this is such a big deal for companies that are looking to build new products and services.

So, as I said, we were doing our emerging trends report recently. [00:01:00] And if you haven't checked that out, just head over to bottom-up dot IO, it's all free. You can go there, download it and enjoy the full report. But today we're just jumping into the idea of no code and it was amazing. 26% of the respondents that did this global survey over a hundred people participated.

They ranked no-code as the highest short term priority, 26%, one single tech. And that was the choice. And it's really fascinating because when you look at the others, you know, in th in the second place was. Cloud-first solutions, which is pretty, pretty natural, but, you know, for example, AR VR, uh, digital health, all of those way back in the pack compared to no-code solutions.

So let's dig into this and ask ourselves, why is no code so popular and how might we leverage it? Without a [00:02:00] doubt. The promise of no code really comes in the fact that when you're launching a new product or service, or even managing a new product, the effort that it takes for business and design folks to get things happening in the technology, in the application, the software and the data in the UX, it's usually a huge effort.

And what the promise of no code is, is to make that process faster and easier and effectively. What it means is that people who do not have engineering technology skills, who are not developers are able to get products to market a lot quicker and to be more continuous and adaptive as the product is launched.

And you start to learn what customers are liking. So this is the promise of it. And without a doubt, it really is transformative because we know how hard it is to find developers it's even harder to find good developers. [00:03:00] So we're really looking at, um, a solution that really speaks to the deficiency of skills in the overall workplace.

There's just not enough good software engineers. So. It's about this speed. It's a, that's achieved through having a less effort, less blockers to get to launch. But I think it's also equally about the agility to be more in line with continuous development, best practices. So if it's less effort goes faster, I mean, it all just sounds so good, doesn't it?

But I think what was interesting about the report is that we actually had a few insights. That put this into context and give us a sense of what we need to do in order to use no code solutions successfully. Now I think the first and most important thing is that we need what we call in the, in the business world, the configurator, um, persona archetype.

So differently. These are people [00:04:00] who might resemble business analysts are super sharp at understanding the business, the rules, the logic of the business, who are able to then also understand the customer. That's quite a rare role. I mean, these would be almost product owners. If you will. And the reason that these roles are really important is that if you're going to go no code or low code, what happens is a lot of the due process between, uh, designers, uh, business, people and engineering, uh, where there are checks and balances, you create user stories and you do all those sort of things.

They can be bypassed in a no-code solution. You can jump straight into the backend and start. Drag and dropping things around, but the question is who's going to do that work. And it's this idea of a configurator, someone who can really drive the dashboard, the admin, who really understands all of the rules that you have, because not only will you [00:05:00] be dragging and dropping changes in the process, the very best no code solutions, um, have an instant deployment mechanic, meaning when you drag drop and save.

That one is going live immediately. So you need to make sure that it's done correctly. Now in speaking to Jaco, FOC at ONB Pedrom, he had this great expert advice. He said, you have to engage and mobilize citizen developers within your company because they will lead the way they will be these configurators.

And they are the people who are really to understand the systems. From a business logic perspective, they're going to understand all of the implications of thinking, doing a new features, updates, and services tweaks to your product. But they're also going to have the background, the history as to what has worked and what hasn't.

[00:06:00] So. Yes, there is this promise of moving with much more agility, which is very central to the theme of how to work in this modern age of digital transformation. But you need to actually make sure that you don't, uh, Have a skills deficiency in another area. If you're trying to skip over the lack of engineers, you're going to need these citizen developers.

You're going to need these configurators who are really driving the business. So you need to make sure you develop those skills. Now there's another big, uh, learning that we had, which is when you want to go to a low code or no code environment, one of the very important, uh, paradigms. Is to understand, truly understand the business rules, the logic and the flows that work with inside of your product.

Now, what is exposed when you have a no code, [00:07:00] uh, set up is you need to actually. Install and configure the application to respect your business rules, your business logic. And what I often find is that that is easily said. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We've got this, we've got all our business rules, but I cannot tell you after decades of doing new products and services, when you say, okay, give me.

The, um, overall systems architecture of your entire business stack. So I can understand where this new product is going to say, give me all for this particular product. I want all of the offline business rules, uh, logic and processes, uh, all the Gates that it needs to go through. All of the dependencies, the human flows, the automation flows.

I can tell you, ladies and gentlemen. It is rare that an organization is able to provide me with all of those things. This is assuming that they're all sitting there saying, yes, we need to build something new. Let's talk to Mike and [00:08:00] his team. And then we asked for this and they don't have them. You know, usually they have half of them do Thurs, but working.

Honor the system rather than just in the system is actually a far greater challenge. And if you're going to employ no code and get the most out of it, here's the catch is you need to understand those business rules in those business logics in order to apply that otherwise you can't drag and drop. You can't operate no code because there's no underlying rules for which it is going to operate.

And the last thought here. Is, this is the perfect time to ask yourself, well, rather than just copy and duplicate what we're doing offline or what's in our existing digital system, let's take this new opportunity that NOCO presents to ask ourselves what wo...