What is the Role of IT When Everyone Codes?

In an era where a whole generation is entering the workforce equipped with basic coding skills, the landscape of technology is undergoing a seismic shift. As coding becomes a universal language, frustrations may emerge within organizations when projects seem to take longer than the swift solutions crafted by individuals. Delving into the wide array of responsibilities of Information Technology (IT) in a scenario where everyone codes, we explore how firms navigate the delicate balance between harnessing employee’s creativity, satisfying immediate needs and the need for enduring scalable, traceable, tested, and integrated solutions.

1. Everyone's Role in Prototyping: Imagine a marketing professional with a knack for design proposing a new user interface. You want to harness their creativity and domain knowledge. In a universal coding environment, IT acts as a facilitator, providing tooling, guidance on coding practices and how to integrate the design into the existing stack. The prototyping phase becomes a collaborative effort, where IT ensures the seamless integration of the marketer's design with coding standards, fostering innovation across departments.

2. Scalability and Infrastructure Support: Consider a scenario where a sales team, equipped with coding skills, develops a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. As the project gains traction, IT role is not only to integrate the software but also to collaborate with the sales team to ensure the shaping of the infrastructure to accommodate the growing demands of the organization.

While individual departments may create effective code for specific tasks, these solutions often function in isolation or within a small team. Scaling these solutions firmwide poses a unique challenge, requiring the expertise of IT to ensure that the code can seamlessly integrate across the entire organization. IT plays a pivotal role in transforming departmental successes into scalable solutions that benefit the entire firm, bridging the gap between localized coding endeavors and enterprise-wide efficiency.

3. Using IT as the Role of Maintainer in the Open Source Paradigm: Corporations can take a lesson from the Open Source Community even while developing their proprietary software. ?In Open Source, any developer can suggest a change to a project. Successful Open Source projects have the role of a maintainer (or a team of maintainers) to ensure code quality, as while many can contribute, all contributions aren’t necessarily worthy of rolling into a production environment.? Maintainer’s responsibilities include reviewing code submissions, ensuring adherence to coding standards, and maintaining the overall health of the project. IT, in this context, becomes both a facilitator of collaboration and a guardian of code quality.

Moreover, IT establishes a sandbox environment within the pre-production setting, allowing employees to experiment with new ideas and contribute to firm projects in a controlled and monitored space, with a tested auditable version coming later, after all the kinks have been worked out.

4. Testability, Auditability, Access Control, and Security Requirements: Consider a scenario where a trader at a financial institution, not part of the IT department, proposes a new model or risk framework for their trading desk. The trader can test for numerical accuracy while IT takes the lead in establishing comprehensive testing protocols, working collaboratively with trading to ensure the testability and reliability of the proposed feature. Simultaneously, IT ensures that every change made to the codebase is auditable, providing a clear trail of modifications for transparency and accountability. Access control and security requirements are paramount in this process, with IT implementing robust measures to safeguard the integrity and confidentiality of the codebase and sensitive information.

5. Supporting Systems and the Challenge of a Growing Code Base: As all organizations become progressively digital, a firm’s code base constantly expands. IT's role extends to supporting existing systems, a task that becomes increasingly challenging as the code base grows. While it may be relatively easy to create a small program, supporting the legacy code base of an entire organization demands meticulous expertise. IT professionals navigate this complexity, ensuring the continued efficiency and reliability of the systems that form the backbone of the organization.

Conclusion: While individual code solutions may offer swift resolutions to immediate needs, and should be embraced for those purposes, the comprehensive roles of IT, focusing on scalability, traceability, testing, security and integration, often take longer. However, the long-term value of software lies in the robustness and efficiency of the solutions implemented. In the evolving landscape of universal coding, IT serves as the steward of a firm’s long-term growth, using their expertise to guide the organization toward a future where innovation and scalability come together.