BrainBlog for Quickbase by Jason Bloomberg
Low-code tools enable both professional software engineers and non-technical ‘citizen’ developers to build their own business applications with little or no need for coding by hand.
Departmental requirements often drive such efforts, as individuals within each department can collaborate with their IT departments to create customer and employee-focused apps in a lightweight, iterative manner.
In many cases, the focus of such applications is on simple automations – freeing people within the department (or in some cases, customers) from having to complete various tasks manually.
Scaling up such simple automations to cross-organizational processes, however, is more of a challenge. Organizations struggle to scale small-team departmental efforts to the cross-departmental and enterprise-wide levels.
Here are some tips for overcoming these challenges.
Are Scale and Agility at Cross Purposes?
It seems that scaling up departmental low-code efforts can take two paths, both of which lead to problems.
One approach is to spread the love – empowering many individual departments to leverage one or more low-code platforms to build their own applications.
All too often, spreading the love in this way leads to shadow IT – where departments build apps outside the purview of a common governance framework, leading to redundant efforts, uneven quality, and security vulnerabilities.
The other common approach to scaling up departmental low-code efforts is to bring in established, traditional enterprise software development and operations practices.
Such practices apply a ‘heavyweight,’ waterfall-centric mentality that extends the timeline of projects, adding to their cost and inflexibility.
While traditional management techniques can institute effective governance, such processes and procedures come with an expensive cost: the loss of agility.
Neither shadow IT nor heavyweight enterprise software practices lead to the desired outcome: flexible, customer and employee-focused software that responds nimbly to changes in business requirements while maintaining necessary governance and compliance strictures.
There’s got to be a better way.
Read the entire BrainBlog here.
