No-code, a desire for freedom!

Let's pose a hypothesis: There is a dichotomy between the feeling of the managers and the staff on the technological effort made by the company, the efficiency of this technological effort, its very perception.

Adapting has a cost, whatever the scale of the company. But the larger the scale of the company, the more the difference between technology and efficiency can have consequences on the productivity and the enthusiasm of the staff. In short, top management sees the field from above, the target from afar, and the technology decided, chosen, and therefore imposed from above, deviates more or less from its goal. And the bigger the difference, the bigger the frustration.

In fact, in a small company, where theoretically it is easier to exchange ideas between colleagues, whatever the position, role or function, where there is no top management yet, frustration can be managed more easily, and processes can be found to compensate, even if one regrets having to do so at the cost of the purchased or rented technology. Because even if it is not a firm purchase, it is still necessary to make a minimum return on the expense before changing, since it is necessarily with the use that one notices the defects of the chosen tool, etc.?

But as the size of the company increases, it will become more difficult to change course, or even to tackle the subject. Indeed, the mass of the entity means that any decision taken necessarily has an inertia. Then, there is necessarily an administration that structures the company itself, and it therefore takes time and energy to coordinate all this. Finally, at the top management, the vision can be biased, by blindness on the choices made (Windows phone is the future!), the convictions deployed, the misinterpretation of the data and the reports having preceded the decision, or the power stakes.

Human relationships before being digital

And on this last point, a company is first and foremost a society, with social interactions and issues that can be in total contradiction with productivity, quality, staff well-being or even, too often forgotten, customer satisfaction. It is often easier to tinker in one's corner by adapting, by forcing, the purchased technology, often to the detriment of safety standards, than to hope to change the course of the Titanic. So who to blame? The IT department?

If its role as a consultant is fundamental in helping to make decisions, the technical aspect is not necessarily understood by the people in charge of making decisions. Conversely, in the IT department, the company's global strategy is sometimes difficult to grasp, of which IT is only one aspect, even in an IT company. In short, there is a greater or lesser degree of misunderstanding, so we think that the average employee of a large group may have been consulted by means of a closed-question survey, but it is difficult in any case, on certain scales, to take everyone's opinion into account.

So what do you do? What can you do when you realize that a technology that has been deployed, that is costly, that you have committed to and that has taken time both upstream and downstream, is more and more like a ball and chain that you are dragging along than a tool, a lever that multiplies your action? And this can go very fast if your market is very fluctuating, the super solution can already be very cumbersome. Blame it on the local IT guy or the IT department? After all, the shaman who solves your technological problems, if the magic doesn't work anymore, it's probably his fault, right?

On a more serious note, we must not forget that in this constantly evolving field, and it is an understatement to say so, the local IT specialist or the ISD are notoriously overwhelmed with various and varied requests to make everything work. So yes, just like everyone else in the company in the end, you might say. Except that their problems you can't understand, they don't have time to explain them to you, and unfortunately they go viral if they don't fix them. So your new platform, whose friction points they had pointed out to you six months before, and whose maintenance service you paid to the provider, not only do they not have a hand in it, but they don't even have time to open the hood to see what's inside the engine, if they ever had the right to do so. ?

The no-code, a human solution first

?But since the first confinement, teleworking, and all the digital tools that come with it, has increased the need for technology. And everyone, from the top management to that famous lambda employee, has had to adapt their daily life, their practices, their very skills, and therefore develop their own productivity research. It's not consciously formulated this way, but when you look for a digital tool, digital if you prefer, that will make your work easier, you get productivity even if your first concern is a search for personal satisfaction to relieve you of a task. And there can be many tasks, and very often they overlap, combine, and intersect, which makes the whole thing more complex. And your search for simplicity becomes complex, especially if your job is not to design digital tools, and if your job is not to be a developer.

And that's where no-code comes in. No-code is not new, it is not new because it is part of all this technological development that allows you to program without having to enter lines of code. But we have to admit that since the creation of the first Wordpress blog, for example, the capabilities of "no-code" have progressed significantly. And this no-code, it offers a lot of tools whose handling, if it is not necessarily easy, and often requires training as for any tool, these tools, they can be found, chosen, modified, from top to bottom. The no-code can be decided and used from the top management or from the average employee, in both directions.

Yes, you can smile or sigh, it's not that simple of course, and the company remains a company with its own internal and strategic issues. But we have to admit that if all these no-code tools exist and multiply, it's because there is a need, a need for everyone who is not a developer to appropriate a bit of technology, a bit of this magic, in order to work more efficiently, and thus live better this "digital reality" that the world of work has become.