What's old is new again: Build Beats Buy!

Let's start with a brief history lesson

?A long, long time ago in a galaxy far away centralized IT organizations built and maintained proprietary applications to support the internal operations of individual business departments within their companies.?Departmental computing was dealt a crushing blow by the Y2K crisis which drove many companies to abandon their homegrown applications and opt for monolithic ERP platforms that could support daily operations instead.???

?IT’s software development capabilities were undermined by the move to ERP systems but survived as business executives came to realize that generic ERP platforms had inherent limitations.?These limitations were overcome by an endless series of ERP customizations that maintained the development skills of most IT organizations to one degree or another.

?Development capabilities that survived the ERP regime change were dealt a death blow by the SaaS revolution that flowered in the early 2000s.?Salesforce became a public company in 2004 and served as the bellwether of this revolution.?Eighteen years later there are now reputed to be over 25,000 global SaaS applications.?While all of these applications may not be designed to support internal business activities, there are undoubtedly thousands that do.?

?The SaaS revolution extinguished chronic debates about Building versus Buying business support software.?In today’s world, Buy is not simply the preferred option, it is nearly universally considered to be the only logical way of enabling the internal business operations of a modern corporation.???

?In this new world order, IT groups are responsible for integrating SaaS applications, enforcing security safeguards and managing enterprise data.?Software development skills are rarely employed and largely devoted to customizing major platforms such as SAP, Oracle ERP and (ironically) Salesforce.?In reality, most IT teams spend far more time configuring SaaS applications than building customizations or constructing proprietary software tools.??

?CIOs have largely resigned themselves to their current – and some would argue diminished – roles.?If challenged to re-establish their former software development capabilities many would echo the sentiments of Alice in Wonderland who said “it’s no use going back to yesterday because I was a different person then”.

?Why did SaaS win the Buy versus Build debate?

?The presumed benefits of SaaS applications have been discussed in exhaustive detail but will be briefly restated here.?SaaS applications were advertised as being more innovative in both a functional and technical sense than homegrown alternatives.?SaaS vendors were assumed to be more responsive to marketplace demands for new business functionality and better able to exploit the capabilities of emerging technologies.?

?Business executives were enthralled by the claims of SaaS vendors.?They no longer had to negotiate functional requirements with their IT colleagues.?They no longer had to listen to lectures about tradeoffs between application maintenance and development that fundamentally limited the development capacity of thinly staffed IT teams.?Freed from debates about requirement specifications and discussions of IT labor limitations, they succumbed to the SaaS siren’s call of being ‘better, faster and cheaper’!??

?What’s old is new again

?Low code/no code development platforms provide a unique and viable means of reasserting IT’s role as a key enabler of internal operations.?Sidestepping the discussion of the similarities and differences between low code/no code methods, suffice it to say that these platforms deliver many of the same benefits that drove business executives to embrace SaaS during the past 15 years.

?Low code/no code development is a team effort, involving a high degree of interaction between IT developers and business representatives during the design, testing and implementation of new applications.?Design typically occurs within a digital studio in which business processes can be easily diagrammed.?Resources required during any given process can be represented and manipulated as drag-and-drop icons.?Business requirements don’t need to be gathered, documented and approved – they’re displayed and altered in real time using graphical design tools.?

?Business experts are intimately involved in design discussions.?IT developers subsequently implement the behind the scenes plumbing required to move data and codify business logic in accordance with prescribed workflows.?Voila, a new application is born in a matter of days or a few weeks and it can be easily modified or expanded to suit the needs of a business user.?

?Low code/no code applications don’t need to be customized because they are - by definition - customized from the start. They are built to address the unique needs and whims of their ultimate users.

?Low code/no code platforms don’t necessarily replace SaaS applications.?In many instances they allow companies to extract greater value from existing SaaS tools by selectively exercising the functionality of individual SaaS services within the context of the operational practices that are unique to every company.??

?Low code/no code capabilities can provide fast solutions that are distinctively tailored to the idiosyncratic ways in which a company wants conduct business.?Outsystems and Mendix are leading vendors in this space.?A cursory perusal of their websites and customer conferences reveals that bespoke applications are being developed for a wide variety of business processes including credit origination, loan processing, supply chain operations, operational reporting, project management, sales pipeline forecasting and a host of other activities.

?Why in the world would companies take the time and trouble to develop proprietary applications in any of these areas when there are literally dozens of SaaS applications that have been specifically developed to address such business needs??

?Because, as any seasoned IT professional will tell you, subject matter experts in individual functional departments are never fully satisfied by generic third party software solutions, no matter how innovative they may be.?They always, ideally, would like software that displays data and automates actions in a certain way: their way!

?A compelling opportunity for IT to add value by returning to its roots

?Low code/no code platforms present IT groups with a unique opportunity to improve the operational efficiency and effectiveness of their companies by getting back into the application development business.?Some CIOs may view these new capabilities as a fad with limited applicability to their companies.?Saavy CIOs will be quick to realize that a new revolution is on their doorstep – one in which they can come out from behind the shadows of SaaS integration, security enforcement and data management and re-assert their role as masters of business process innovation through the development of proprietary applications once again.??

Originally posted on Forbes.com CIO Network