Low Code No Code frameworks
What are we trying to solve?
A view, empowering the business user (generally non-programmers) to easily create applications on their own. An added advantage, the application code is production deployable. For end users (enterprises) it is a major reduction of time to deployment, leading to high interest in these frameworks/ applications and a spike in funding or buy outs by enterprise product companies.
This begets a question, did the “business user” ask for it? Let’s take a step back to get a perspective. My sense, we are looking at the moon and photographing the sun.
A game of Chinese whispers drives home the same point. Many have seen this picture and more may have seen it happen. To avoid such divergence we introduced “newer” product build methodologies, to ensure a closer coordination between the business and development teams. The emergence of such tools, obviously indicates, that we are still in search of a better mousetrap.
These tools enable ease of prototyping and creation of “almost ready for deployment” applications. The first chasm that we need to cross is will the business user take to it? Let us for a moment tell ourselves that they “will”. So let us extrapolate from here….
We have the business user taking time from their regular work routine to create applications. Really? Oh, yes, because it’s as simple as scribing a spreadsheet. Let us take it as true. So now we have a plethora of “spreadsheets” that are available as applications running in our production system.
Because we find many similar applications in our production systems, we ask the business user, please visit this marketplace where you can search for “similar” applications before creating a new one. So we now need a marketplace that saves an user from writing another, however does not prevent them. As we have seen the burgeoning of reports in our enterprise systems, we may face a similar scenario.
Ok, so now we have applications, how to ensure that the information it delivers is correct? Some use available APIs while others access the database through queries. So we now need a set of guiding principles to ensure that these are followed. And every time and anytime a business user decides to create an application, s/he must go through these guidelines. Also, stay abreast with any new changes and principles.
So now a business user is accountable for business outcomes and for the applications. Is under-performance of business KPI acceptable? One can go on discussing the compute power requirements, federation of applications and changes, and so on, pointless to stack more when the point is clear.
So are these tools and frameworks doomed? No. These are powerful tools, but decide, who gets the nuclear weapons launch code.
Let us not attempt fungibility of roles with these tools. These are extremely powerful and useful tools in the hands of existing IT teams. So let’s look at the moon and photograph it.
What do you think?
