High Ambitions For Low Code

by Hannah M. Mayer & Luca Vendraminelli

Technophobia, the fear of advanced technology often paired with a dislike of learning about such technologies, is a phenomenon particularly widespread among older generations, limiting the benefits senior citizens derive from modern technologies. Even in the younger generations, a fear of data and the technologies needed to perform data analysis is commonplace. Paralyzing individuals and teams unable to bring their best selves to work in the face of such fears, the latter can place immense productivity burdens on companies, while also reinforcing the digital divide between IT-savvy people and those unable to tap into the benefits of AI. What if there was a way to rid people off their IT-related fears and thus unlock the power of AI to the fearless masses?

Enter low code. Low-code development platforms allow users to program their own software through an easy-to-operate visual interface, foregoing the need to hand-write code. This enables less experienced developers to create applications using model-driven logic rather than having to invest months or years perfecting their proficiency in a given programming language. The visual interfaces, often composed of drag-and-drop menus, act as translators from human to computer language. No-code development platforms are closely related in that they expedite the development process even further and make it accessible even to “citizen developers”. For instance, sales staff could build a machine learning-powered tool to feed them product recommendations based on up-sell opportunities for individual customers. Low-code and no-code development platforms, which are both cloud-based, thus democratize data science, making programming accessible to non-professionals, while also relieving professional software developers off the need to write code line by line.

Lowering entry barriers to coding and speeding up the delivery of business apps are hot topics for companies, especially in the face of the current remote and generally increasingly mobile workforce. The limited supply of competent software developers in combination with ever increasing amounts of requests to IT departments poses an additional threat to swift software deployment. This problem is exacerbated by Covid-19, which puts a greater premium on flexibility and the ability to respond to disruptions more quickly. As a result, low-code platform providers, such as Appian and Boomi, have seen significant increases in adoption since the onset of the pandemic. For example, educational institutions have been nudging teachers to develop the tools they need themselves, thus overcoming IT budget constraints. Meanwhile healthcare establishments have created telehealth platforms using low-code, speeding up deployment of the application as compared with traditional development approaches. It took one US healthcare provider less than a day to build an application for their doctors to submit Coronavirus patients for treatment with a new drug using Appian.

A recent report by Harvard Business Review and low-code platform Quick Base found another benefit that applies irrespective of the raging pandemic: More than half of 450 global executives surveyed by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services saw the primary benefit of low-code platforms being their encouraging of business professionals to engage more in innovation and idea generation. This points to the transformative role that low-code and no-code platforms can play in democratizing not only the software development process but innovation as a whole. Half of the executives in the same survey said that such distributed, rapid-cycle innovation that happens outside of IT departments is key to expediting responses to competitive pressures, making low-code an enabler for increased business performance. The result: a decentralized structure where each employee is empowered to build their own AI system in order to innovate their way out of the problems they face daily.

But low code doesn’t keep a low profile. Its benefits have been so widely understood that spending on the category is expected to hit $45.5 billion by 2025, up from $13.2 billion this year. No wonder Big Tech is out to gain a foothold in a market so far characterized by fragmentation. Google Cloud acquired AppSheet, one of the biggest players in the market, in January this year, while Alphabet’s growth equity investment fund CapitalG invested in no-code player Unqork, which has illustrious customers like Goldman Sachs, in early 2019, leading the start-up’s $80 million Series B funding round. Microsoft expects 500 million new apps to be built in the next five years, with 450 million of those being built using a low-code tool. They also have hopes that their own Power platform will be a major hit and future revenue driver, particularly thanks to integration with Office 365, Azure and the rest of the Microsoft suite. Amazon has made a move into the market as recently as in June, when they launched their own low-code development platform Honeycomb. Though Apple has long had its own low-code platform, FileMaker, it does not compete in the enterprise cloud services market and is thus expected to play less of a role.

Though providers for good low-code and no-code development platforms abound, companies looking to use them need to beware of some pitfalls. One, when opting to use low-code or no-code solutions, expectations matter. Customization is understandably limited when code is not hand-crafted but comes in predefined functionalities, so low-code should not be seen as a replacement for native programming but rather as a method to be employed to maximize developer time on more value-adding parts of the business or customer experience rather than on time-consuming apps with low customization needs. Two, when scanning the landscape of providers, corporate customers need to make sure their chosen platform does not lock them in. Some providers may not allow further edits to the applications once the tool is no longer used, making it impossible to maintain the app without the tool, so organizations must do a proper due diligence on providers to avoid vendor lock-in. Three, once these platforms are being used, organizations must beware of the risks associated with shadow IT, meaning all IT developed outside the central IT infrastructure and with limited IT oversight. Making sure that the right protocols around control, documentation, security, reliability, testing, deployment and updating are in place is key. Finally, ensuring proper integration with legacy systems, including other apps used in the same organization, will matter.

With all this technology in place to make the “how” of coding simpler, the “what” still has to be borne by the coder. If everybody can code, the key question that remains is what to code.

This piece is based on a cooperation between Forbes.com Contributor Hannah M. Mayer and Luca Vendraminelli, PhD Candidate at the University of Padova (Italy) and Visiting Fellow at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH).