Low-Code No-Code Soup

My earliest memory of elementary school dates back to when I first moved to the States-- 1977. I was one of twelve little third graders engaged in a masterful performance of Stone Soup.?I played the role of Boy with Carrots.?I had one line.?And I was brilliant.

If you’re unfamiliar with the story of Stone Soup:

Once upon a time-- during a great famine-- a soldier wandered into a humble little village and asked its residents for something to eat.?

Every villager responded with "No food here. You’d best move on."

Unfazed, the soldier announced that he would make stone soup to share with everyone.?

He filled a giant cooking pot with water and set it over a fire. Then, he pulled a plain gray stone from his knapsack and dropped it into the water.

Curious about the magic stone, the villagers started to gather.?

The soldier sniffed the stone soup, licked his lips, and said "I do like a tasty stone soup. Of course, stone soup with carrots is even better.”

Enter me-- stage left-- holding some carrots. "I have these carrots from my garden"... handing them to the soldier... who cut them up and added them to the pot.?

"You know,” said the soldier, “I once had stone soup with carrots and a bit of beef, and it was delicious”... to which the butcher replied “here are some beef scraps.”

And so it went… potatoes, onions, cabbage, celery, shark's fin, Japanese Kanto sea cucumbers… which sell for something like $1100 for 16oz… making the whole story a bit implausible… but we were kids.??

You get the idea. Soon the pot was bubbling, the soup was ready to be shared and that little stone had made a miracle happen.?

--

Well, it’s been nearly a half century since I was in that play but I still remember the moral of the story: never trust drifters.

Fast forward almost 50 years.??

I’m sitting in on a presentation from a hot fintech vendor pitching one of the sexiest offerings in town-- a low-code/no-code platform.??

And I can’t stop thinking about stone soup.

A Quick Definition (For That One Reader Who Got Here by Googling “Soup”)

If you’re not familiar with the term low-code/no-code, you will be soon, because the tech press is going gaga over it.?Not at the scale of incessant fawning they reserve for machine learning or blockchain but give them time.??

The idea is simple: software purposefully designed to allow “citizen developers” (non-engineers) to create business apps and/or automate business activity without much coding.??

Sounds like chocolate, doesn’t it??Business people sure think so.

And it’s not just them.?With my Ops hat on, I recognize that in large companies (like banks) there will always be business functions that will struggle for automation funding and focus-- the underserved.?And with my empathetic Tech hat on, I want to help every single one of them... without having to rebuild the same workflow app a thousand times.?Because even empathy has its limits.?

That’s why one of my favorite teams in-house actually built a self-service workflow platform.??

Home-grown low-code.?

It’s pretty cool actually.?Feature-rich, horizontally scalable, resilient, performant.?The closest that software can come to that frog that sings “Hello my Baby.“

But… if it's *that* cool, why do I keep thinking stone soup?

Commit to the Analogy

I’m back in the vendor presentation.?It looks alot like what we’ve already built internally.??

Maybe it’s the guy doing the demo. He has a soldier vibe to him.?

Except he didn’t wander into our humble little videoconference.?He was referred.?Multiple times.?By my underserved business partners-- my villagers-- who also happened to know some early investors in a magic stone.

[Minor epiphany.]

What’s great about third grade folktales like Stone Soup is that their villagers inevitably fail to realize that the hardest part of the magic-- the transformation they want-- the transformation they need-- is not the stone.??

Translating that to business speak:

It’s not the code.?It's getting the operating model right-- not for thousands of little processes that sit in dozens of silos-- but for the smallest-number-possible of interconnected enterprise-wide flows that transform the little pieces into a thoughtful whole.?Simplified, rationalized, end-to-end (preferably STP) business capabilities.??

It’s not the code.?It's getting enterprise governance right-- not with the usual SteerCos and senior SteerCos-- but with an operating discipline that continuously identifies a practical, sustainable balance between conformance and performance; between the expectations of external scrutiny and a company’s strategic ambitions.

It’s not the code.?It’s getting the talent right-- not by adding yet another responsibility to the poor citizen who has enough to do without also being a developer--?but by making sure that the self-service platform is designed for overworked citizens, not developers.?That might sound obvious but low-code’s dirty little secret is that it’s best “citizen developers” are actually developers, not citizens.?Which poses serious talent-sustainability challenges.?Because no self-respecting coder is going to commit their career to a proprietary low-code platform… unless they helped build it (hint hint).?Which is also why signing up with a low-code vendor is essentially attaching yourself to a never-ending consulting model that’s masquerading as citizen-empowerment.

It’s not the code.?It’s getting the culture right-- not with hollow quips about putting customers first-- but through courage and agility, transparency and candor, caring and kindness.

Ok… it… might be the code... a little… but not the app code.?It's getting the data and the APIs across the entire enterprise right -- not with a tech mandate but with a comprehensive set of business-led, business-owned commitments to mastering their data, to a common taxonomy that everyone in the enterprise has agreed to that becomes critical to stitching together the disparate process and application landscape.

It's getting your legacy modernization right.

It’s getting your development lifecycle right.

It's getting your process lifecycle right.

It’s getting your risk framework right.

It's getting literally everything other than the code right.

[Deep breath]

Low-code/no-code is a noble goal because its intent-- like our greatest ambitions-- is to serve the underserved.?

But it’s just a magic stone.??

It’s not a solution looking for a problem.??

It's a solution looking for a miracle.?

Multiple miracles actually.

So Here’s the Weird Part

I’m actually a huge proponent of citizen development.?And oddly, this little meditation wasn’t meant to be a case against low-code platforms (although I really do think large companies should build them, not rent).

There is a moral to Stone Soup that’s perfect for third-grade-me: some nonsense about sharing.?The more important lesson that I took away was: if you’re going to champion something that requires miracles, plan for them.

And look... moral or no-- and I don’t want to dwell on this but-- that soup back in 1977 would have been nothing without the carrots.

That’s the other learning here.

It’s all about the carrots.