The Essentials of Low-code/No-code Trends

Recently, I had the chance to give a lecture at the Hasso Plattner Institute to present the latest trends in the Low-code/No-code (LCNC) space. Based near Berlin, HPI is academically structured as the independent Faculty of Digital Engineering at the University of Potsdam: it unites excellent research and teaching with the advantages of a privately financed institute and a tuition-free study program. I had great discussions with the students there, and I am happy to share my key takeaways with you.

3 Reasons why Low-Code / No-Code

In a nutshell, the reason why Low-Code / No-Code is rising is because companies are struggling to innovate at the speed the market demands. At SAP, we’ve seen how organizations have to face increasing pressure, and not only because of the pandemic:

1.??????In fast-changing markets, business requirements are constantly changing and evolving: the pandemic is accelerating cloud demand, with 59% of enterprises expecting cloud use to exceed plans due to COVID-19, per Deloitte.

2.??????With limited resources and developer scarcity, companies are also under increasing pressure to “deliver more with less”: 77% of companies see ‘talent gap’ as a major handicap for their digitalization, per Capgemini.

3.??????Finally, with complex IT landscapes, leveraging investments whilst innovating remains a challenge: large companies maintain 129 different applications on average, with the total number increasing by 68% since 2015, per Wall Street Journal.

Juergen Mueller, SAP CTO, explained how Low-Code/No-Code development and citizen automation are the future of enterprise resilience. In similar lines, Bhagat Nainani showed how SAP already helps various customers to achieve higher business resilience with Low-Code/No-Code Process Automation and Application Development tools that are already available in SAP portfolio.

Who will benefit of Low-Code/No-Code?

Our customers have about 5-10% of their workforce being professional developers working in Central or Business Unit IT teams. In order to face developer’s scarcity, they consider that about 15% to 25% of their workforce outside of IT could be “citizen developers”, i.e. employees who reports outside of IT and customize or build data or technology / solutions. By empowering these employees with appropriate tooling, companies could then leverage up to 20-35% of their workforce for application development and process automation.

Let’s go a bit deeper into the 3 "key players" in LCNC:

A Citizen Developer has deep knowledge of the business, with little or no computer science skills. He / she builds apps with close links to business contexts using LCNC tools and makes use of easy to use and learn tools for Process Automation to improve business processes. Citizen Developers also create simple apps that work both on mobile and desktop with drag and drop user interfaces. So, a Citizen Developer defines & optimizes task flows and processes and provides data-based insights and innovations.

A Professional Developer, usually in Central IT, has deep expertise in programming but limited knowledge of the business. He / she designs, develops, tests apps and ensures their productive implementation and writes code to develop apps, including complex business applications. The Pro Developer understands important concepts such as development lifecycle, testing, versioning. He / she is fully aware of permissions & roles, able to cover governance and security and directly interacts with IT admin to ensure processes & go-live. So, a Pro Developer builds LCNC apps, extends already hard-coded apps and automates processes.

IT Administrators have a different skill set for keeping systems running and managing security and performance. He/she governs, operates, upgrades and controls IT services. His / her activities range from basic checks of processes & apps to publishing to coordination of the overall process to get assets into productive environments. IT Administrator ensures alignment with stakeholders, manages development lifecycle including testing. He/she transports the app from development/test to productive system and covers versioning, access rights, permissions, go-live and termination. So, an IT Administrator plans & strategizes the LCNC development process and publishes apps created by professional developers & citizen developers while ensuring compliance and stability of the enterprise IT landscape.

The aim of the Low-Code / No-Code industry is to serve all of these stakeholders with tooling that fits their specific needs. LCNC platforms also need to address some governance challenges.

Governance Challenges

Letting 20% of business technologists work as Citizen Developers could potentially pose some risks around your IT landscape if the LCNC platform is not fully equipped with governance tooling. What problems could occur when a Business Process expert starts developing applications? Given you are an IT leader, what challenges do you see when "everybody" starts developing software assets? As a Citizen Developer, is IT Governance good or bad? Does it help you, or hinder your endeavors?

Here are my recommendations for governance in the low-code / no-code era: ?

Any LCNC platform must provide flexible enterprise-grade Governance with built-in enforcement of corporate security and compliance policies that can be configured to each company’s unique IT landscape capabilities and requirements.

• Citizen Developer knowledge about Security, Roles/Permissions, Product Lifecycle has to be seen as optional, the LCNC platform has to assure those qualities.
• To encourage innovation and not stifle productivity, governance processes supported by the platform should provide guard rails that keep developers safe, but don’t get in their way until they do something wrong..
• Think about either teamwork or a button that pops-up when the Citizen Developer clicks Deploy which says that the app will now be tested by IT Admin (before it goes live).
• This is a growing area for the application of artificial intelligence to look for patterns that introduce compliance or security risks

?What outcomes to expect from Low-Code / No-Code?

The purpose of Low-Code / No-Code is basically to maximize the value of your IT investments,

while providing a new level of agility. This implies:?

• Maximizing speed and agility?through accelerated delivery and?reduce total cost of development.
• Bridging the gap?through partnership between business and IT, and?increase adoption
• Enhancing ROI?by leveraging existing investments through seamless IT integrations
• Accelerating time to value?by using best practices with pre-built content packages

?Read about our existing offering in our SAP TechEd 2020 press release how SAP empowers developers with Low-Code/No-Code tools and further enhancements to SAP Business Technology Platform. More to come soon...

Discover more from SAP at TechEd 2021!

At SAP TechEd 2021, you will learn more on how SAP’s Low-Code/No-Code offering: you will be able to take advantage of a comprehensive set of lectures, hands-on workshops, roadmap presentations

Stay tuned, and register now to join us!