The Pandemic is Driving The Low-Code/No-Code Movement But It Won’t Benefit Everybody Equally
It happens every six years. Like Haley’s comet, Michael MacGrath has come to expect this behavior from his leadership at Piguet Manufacturing. “At least it’s predictable,” he tells himself. After experiencing this four times in his 24-year career at Piguet, he knows what these initiatives mean for him: more work, disgruntled teammates, and without fail, new leadership. You see, every seven years, executives will introduce a “productivity booster” initiative. This time it’s called “no-code/low-code.”
The promises of the low-code/no-code revolution are appealing: democratize application development for your organization. Some are speeding away with this new technology, and others are putzing along the freeway with their feet hard-pressed on the gas pedal and the brakes. And manufacturing companies like Piguet are the latter. The idea of automation with low-code/no-code isn’t new; it’s been around for decades. But due to the pandemic, it’s reached an inflection point and continuing to soar past anybody’s expectations, but not all will equally benefit from this movement.
Didn’t We Say This Was A Thing in the 90s?
Yup. We did. We’ve forever promised the world the idea that any employee can create and distribute applications merely by pointing and clicking your mouse away until you create workflow nirvana for you and your peers. Tools like Microsoft Access allowed your average accountant to build applications that tabulated and aggregated financial reports. The use-cases this fulfilled were simple. You couldn’t connect to many third-party systems or join disparate datasets living in other departments datasets.
Hell, during the smartphone revolution, I, along with my co-founders, created a DIY platform to create applications with no-code/low-code called AppMakr. We generated 1,000s of applications to help SMBs take advantage of the smartphone market. Everyone has experience with a low-code/no-code solution, even if by another name. We always knew these technologies would be critical to our jobs, but the explosion of demand we’re experiencing today is unlike before. It’s real.
Yah, But Now It’s Happening
Expectations are that the low-code/no-code market will grow from $13.2B to $45.5B in market-cap in the next five years. This predicted growth is due to a few factors which I believe are foundational to getting no-code/low-code to grow at its frenetic pace:
- Digital Transformation/Cloud Migration
- Distributed Workforce
- Big Data
- HTTP API ubiquity in software
In the last decade, each one of these areas has experienced tremendous growth, become the standard way of integrating disparate software applications, or due to the COVID-19 pandemic experiencing a surge in workstyle.
Digital Transformation/Cloud
If you haven’t heard, “software is eating the world.” Starbucks is not a coffee joint where you can loiter and do work; it’s a software company that happens to serve you overpriced lattes. Capital One is not a banking company that exploits lower-income individuals with predatory lending practices; it’s a software company that happens to exploit the less fortunate. Software is now at the heart of all organizations, and developing differentiated software means that building data-centers so longer what the cool kids do. The software-era has optimized manual workflows through automation creating greater efficiencies. By transforming into a software organization and moving to the cloud, companies have finally had the budgets and resources to buy low-code/no-code solutions.
Data, Data Everywhere
Big-Data is everywhere. It’s in warehouses, lakes, ponds, and rivers (i.e., streams), and whatever other water analogy can come up with are readily available within the enterprise. We’ve only recently passed the big-data era. There exists an abundance of tools to manage and extract value out of customer or operational data. Salesforce is an excellent example of making data readily available, combined with a flexible platform, for users who are less technically savvy to build custom applications with their data. Their market dominance is due to the strength in their data ecosystem.
API Availability & Ubiquity
APIs are nothing new to programmers. They’ve been around since the first operating system. The difference today is their purpose and ubiquity. True software-nerds only spoke about APIs, typically as afterthoughts of the “real” product features. But as SaaS, hosted, and cloud products conquered the other software consumption models, APIs became a tier-1 priority. APIs became a channel to increase the adoption of your tools through other more popular front-end applications such as Salesforce. These integration points are a foundational element to how low-code/no-code can produce a tremendous amount of value to the enterprise; Not by working within your own domain’s data but by stitching together data across your organizational silos.
Distributed Workforce
Since the global pandemic arrived at our doorstep, there are armies of workers at home with their lawless children. Connected only by the internet, our ability to collaborate is primarily determined by how quickly we can have our remote practices resemble our in-office workflows. When we were all co-located in the same office — and weren’t aware that it was a petri dish of communal bacteria — workflows consisted of a neverending stream of shoulder taps to complete various tasks or respond to e-mails.
We now sit miles apart from each other we have to think about how to get work done with the proximities of shoulders. Low-code/no-code enables creativity to continue by placing responsibility and power back in the distributed workforce’s hands. The individuals at the edges can now solve problems that are not easily seen by a central organization.
It’s About Collaboration
What is clear about this movement is that it’s breaking down walls like Gorbachev in the 90s. As we become more distributed, our ability to work traditionally is forever gone. Even if your organization is not dispersed geographically, guess what? Your partners and customers will be. You have no choice but to participate in a distributed workforce.
Disparate teams can collaborate through custom made applications that magically convert shoulder taps into asynchronous workflows that stitch data and actions together.
The Benefits Will Not Be Equal
What slows down progress has never been technology, but in fact, humans. As scary as it might be to your self-preservation, our inability to accept change is what slows down technological progress, not technology itself. William Morrisson introduced the first electric car in 1890, but it’s only now becoming popular — 130 years later. Michael MacGrath has experienced this phenomenon first hand as a part of Piguet manufacturing. Change in any enterprise is too often corporate Jenga: leadership takes turns pulling out blocks until everything topples over; Then start the game again with new executives where the only losers in the game are the spectators. The history, values, and culture will affect the adoption within a given industry. These forces make the idea of incremental change painful and sometimes impossible. Introducing new technology turns into a gauntlet of approvals and more politically challenging than the New York mafia.
We already see manufacturing lagging in this space. We see similar lags in industries such as consumer products & goods. This industry’s technology stack is outsourced to third parties, making access to data and APIs difficult. As others in this industry figure out that the biggest obstacle to leveraging this technology is people, it will pressure existing leadership to push low-code/no-code through a door like a battering ram — Causing employees to reject the change, stress about their job safety and leaderhsip to show no progress. Just like Michael MacGrath has seen through his 24 years at Piguet.
