Latest / Technology Now / Are no-code apps a ticket to productivity or a shadow IT nightmare?
Transcript
- Michael Bird (00:10): Hello and welcome back to Technology Now, a weekly show from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise where we take what's happening in the world and explore how it's changing the way organizations are using technology. We are hosts Michael Bird. Alysha Kempson-Taylor (00:23): I'm me, Alysha Kempson-Taylor standing for the wonderful Aubrey Lovell. Michael Bird (00:27): Alysha, thank you so much for co-hosting this show with me as a one-off since Aubrey's out, particularly because you've been working on this show pretty much since the beginning. Alysha Kempson-Taylor (00:37): Yes, I have been and it is very strange to be on the other side of the microphone, but I'm very happy to be here. Michael Bird (00:42): Alysha, what do we have in store for this week's episode? Alysha Kempson-Taylor (00:47): In this episode we are looking at the rise of no-code or no-code apps. It's a fascinating idea. Someone with little to no experience of coding can make their own business tools at the click of a button or drag of a mouse. That leaves the professionals to take care of biggest issues and longer term projects, and that could mean better productivity for all of us. Michael Bird (01:09): Yes, exactly. But it does come with challenges. How do organizations police everyone being able to make their own tools? Is it safe to allow inexperienced users access to technology which could easily go wrong? And do we want hundreds of users each with their own tools? Isn't that just inviting inefficiency? Now, there's a lot to talk about in this episode, so if you're the kind of person who needs to know why, what's going on in the world matters to your organization, then this podcast is for you. If you haven't yet done so, do make sure you subscribe on your podcast app of choice so you don't miss out. Right. Let's get into it. Alysha Kempson-Taylor (01:52): Low and no-code development is a massive and growing market. The premise is simple. Rather than coding an app or tool yourself, you simply drag and drop pre-existing components, data sources and outputs into a chain and map. Then set the actions to whatever you need. They allow workers to build and streamline customized workflows and data flows. That means that you can get process and action far faster and more flexibly than you could with locked down traditional tools. Michael Bird (02:19): Now, that opportunity is reflected in the segment's market growth. According to data from PNS market research, which we've linked to in the show notes, the low-code market is booming. In 2023, it was valued at a staggering $24.8 billion, but it's not without its challenges. Giving everyone access to make their own tools creates a form of shadow IT where everyone uses different workflows and platforms making it extremely difficult to police what people do with their technology. (02:56): Then there's being tied to a single tool or vendor because if somebody creates a productivity tool that's unique to them, their work is going to be impacted if that tool or the service they built it on is taken away, and of course you are giving a lot of people the opportunity to interact potentially destructively with your data. How do we overcome these challenges and is the opportunity cost worth it? Well, joining us today to discuss is Richard Kerridge. He is a strategist in HPE's customer education services team. Richard, welcome to the show. Now, Richard, first question, when you think about low-code or no-code, you tend to think of educational tools in schools to help kids develop their IT skills. Clearly we are a step up from that I guess. But what does low-code mean when we talk about enterprise-level organizations? Richard Kerridge (03:59): Yeah. That's a great question, and actually the analogy to graphical tools like this is actually pretty apt. We're talking about ways of allowing non-professional IT staff to produce automation applications and AI-related work without having to have any professional development experience, so I know how to program or code. They are using predominantly graphical-based tools. There's some distinctions there around low-code and no-code, but we tend to bunch them together. If you think about your business analyst or your domain expert in the business who's using spreadsheets or databases or personal productivity tools in the past, they now have access to a range of facilities and applications of which there are many in which they can use these graphical drag and drop interfaces and little macros and little formulas from spreadsheets that they can drop in to really take that to the next level. Of course, that's running in the cloud and not on their desktop, and that unleashes a whole raft of new opportunities for both those users at a personal productivity level but increasingly in producing enterprise applications. Alysha Kempson-Taylor (05:07): Are these apps that people typically make within the shell of another suite or tools? Are they stand-alone pieces of software? Richard Kerridge (05:16): It depends. There is an ability to run some of these things locally, but the use cases that I'm most familiar with and that I've seen most used are really around SAS-based cloud applications. These things are normally hosted within some environments provided by the low-code or the no-code tool environment to run the snippets of code or these graphical logic diagrams that you're essentially building automations with. They're normally running in some framework. It's normally some SAS platform and it's normally something that's already part of an enterprise company's architecture, but it could be stand-alone. (05:52): We are seeing the ability, especially with things like robotic process automation where there is a lot of low-code engineering going into where some of those things can be run locally on desktops and moved around, like scripts. But increasingly to get that benefit, to go from just something that I'm doing with a local spreadsheet on my desktop which has been around forever to something where I can produce something for my team or for my business, that ability to run it in the cloud is a real game changer. One of the real benefits of low-code/no-code is that there's no infrastructure for the end user to support here. Michael Bird (06:26): Richard, you've already mentioned a couple, but what kind of opportunities did these low or no-code systems bring about? Richard Kerridge (06:33): Yeah. There's a few. I think the biggest one for me is that it's really helping meet that untapped demand for automation apps and other productivity uses which are currently outstripping IT capacity. Certainly in my world I'm finding that we use these things to be able to move a lot more quickly, so we're able to get that agility and speed that we won't often get if we're having to engage with a large IT department. Often I think that's not a criticism it and a lot of the time we don't really know what we need. It allows us to do some experimentation and prototyping. That agility and speed is really important to us. It also unleashes those domain expertise. (07:13): If we talk about the very widely talked about IT skills gap and the need for driving automation within IT and digital transformation. If you think about who's going to do all that work, there simply aren't enough IT people out there to do everything that needs to be done here. By unleashing your domain experts, you're taking non-technical people who know your processes, know what can be automated, know the way that data is created and flows around your organization and you're allowing them to create applications and automations that really free up IT to work on that more complex stuff. I think there's an element of really bringing some extra resources to the IT party that weren't there before to really help with digital transformation. (07:52): I think as it matures you can end up in some nice situations that... Certainly this is my experience. We're just starting to get into doing fusion development. We've been doing low-code for many years here with these SAS-based platforms for at least five years. We're now getting into a situation where we have a very healthy relationship with our IT department where we can blend that low-code tech with our IT team, or we can take earlier prototypes that we've built in low-code and we can then have IT build a bigger, better version where we better understand our requirements. There's a number of benefits around there, but I think really unleashing those domain experts to move at speed is the big one. Alysha Kempson-Taylor (08:28): On the flip side of that, you're giving non-coders the opportunity to create tools that access your data without really understanding good practice or any data governance. That creates risks and challenges. The one that really jumps out is shadow IT, a whole load of tools that aren't sanctioned or even known about by the organization. Richard Kerridge (08:48): That is a real risk. Shadow IT has been something that's plagued IT for many, many years, and it is something that's just a fact of life. You aren't going to shut it down. I've worked half of my career in IT and half in the business. I've been both policing shadow IT and creating it in my career, and it is impossible to stop it from happening. The challenge here is about how we can deal with shadow IT and some of the things that you talk about. There are definite risks here around just letting a low-code environment or indeed any shadow IT exist in your business. You mentioned security and data governance. That's increasingly important with real teeth in privacy regulations and a real concern that the businesses will have data leaks or that will inadvertently breach people's privacy or these things. (09:36): Where you've got people who aren't trained in these things producing applications that these days can be quite far-reaching. You've also got a risk around sprawl and technical debt. If left unchecked and ungoverned, you can of course, like with any shadow IT, you have lots of duplication. You can be creating lots of technical debt within your organization without you knowing it. Before you know it, you can end up with a situation where you've got lots of different types of technology and shadow IT running around the place. Yes, a completely ungoverned environment does contain some quite serious risks. The good news there I think is just that there are really decent ways to approach all of these challenges which allow you to look at shadow IT as rather than something that's a threat to your business but rather as something that you can flip into an advantage for your business. Michael Bird (10:24): Richard, do IT departments understand the nature of this problem? Richard Kerridge (10:29): I think IT departments are very aware of data governance and security issues within the organization, and they're very aware of shadow IT. But historically, there's been an awareness that's really around how do they find it so that they can stop it? How do they control it rather than harness it? But what we've found is that this simply creates more creative ways for people to get around them. That really does seem to be a losing strategy, but it is something that IT have been aware of for years. I think when it comes to low-code, they are very aware of these things. It's quite difficult for citizen developers, as we would call people who work with low-code, to just stand up their own low-code environment. We're talking about people normally who are using tools that are provided by IT. (11:13): I think the best informal description I've heard of citizen developers are people who are developing using technology that was essentially unintentionally provided to them. An IT organization has probably installed some large ERP or some other large SaaS platform to do a number of other tasks, whether it be CRM, whether it be productivity for knowledge workers that may come with these low-code capabilities within it that now end users are using. I think IT are very aware of that, but they may not have been aware that when they deployed it that it was going to be used in this way. I think there's an element of IT being aware that it's out there but not very aware about how to deal with it and how to approach the challenges rather than just trying to switch it off, which doesn't normally work. Alysha Kempson-Taylor (11:58): How do we fix it? Richard Kerridge (12:00): I certainly think the training and awareness is a key part. In education services we spend a lot of time thinking about how we can give our customers, HP's customers, the right knowledge and skills that they need to do things in the workplace, and that includes low-code and IT around the governance. There's a couple of things I think I'd point out here that are really important so that you can get that training in place and you can get that governance in place. With governance, governance needs to be a partnership with IT. That's the key here is low-code/no-code is still information technology. It is not IT versus low-code or low-code. This is on a spectrum. It's on a continuum. At one end you might have people working completely in no-code environments and then all the way up to fusion it where you've got people working on projects with pro-coders working hand in hand with low-coders to get all the benefits of both of those worlds. (12:50): In a healthy governed environment, you will see that whole continuum at play in partnership with IT where they're ensuring that security and oversight, they're building the connectors into the data to make sure it's accessed and created and shared in the way that complies with the corporation standards and also make sure that they're compliant with things like data privacy. They're able to turn on and off features within these environments that they don't want to use. For example, they may not want to have their business units being able to share data into social media feeds for example. Those are the kinds of things that they can put in place with data governance protocols. The second part of this I would say is around establishing a centre of excellence. You are talking about business users who aren't IT. (13:33): IT is a very structured environment. If you try to deploy something like ITIL or ITSM to a business user, it's not particularly going to work very well. You can't do those configuration management exercises or those deep mature processes around IT ops and dev ops with business users. You need to establish a COE where you can build a coalition of the willing, your early adopters who can work with IT. They can do things like onboard new users, welcome them, answer support tickets, guide them in the right area, and also, critically, point them at the training and support that exists. As you say, in education services today we obviously have a lot of training that we can provide on low-code and low-code as part of our digital learner subscriptions. (14:17): But unless you signpost that to the user, unless you know it's there, and embed that training in the flow of work, you're not really going to get them to come and take that. I think having a COE, a centre of excellence, that can really guide users and critically that COE I think is run by users for users, which is a more unusual approach with IT, but it's heavily supported and backed by it. IT doesn't really drag on IT. It lets these business users be creative with the low-code technology, but also run the governance themselves. I'm part of HPE's COE and part of that governance environment, so I've sit in that role and worked with a number of other people who actually put a lot more time into it than I do. There's a lot of energy and enthusiasm around low-code within those domain experts, and you can tap into that and use it in your COE without it becoming a big drag on IT. Alysha Kempson-Taylor (15:06): Thanks, Richard. This really is a very cool topic, and we can't wait to hear more in just a minute. Now it's time for Today I Learned, the part of the show where we take a look at something happening in the world that we think you should know about. Michael Bird (15:22): Yes, Alysha. This one for this week is from me. From red flags to the red planet, China has announced an ambitious project to perform a sample return mission to Mars. Now, the project, known as Tianwen 3, hopefully I've pronounced that correctly, is set to launch in either 2028 or 2030 and will feature two rockets, one carrying a lander and ascent vehicle to get to Mars, collect the sample and return it to Mars in orbit, and a second rocket that will contain an orbiter and return module to collect the ascender and get it back to Earth. (16:02): Wow. There's a whole load of technical hurdles with the mission. It'll be the first time that a sample has been returned from Mars. Up until now they've always been processed on the surface by robotic labs within the rover. Getting samples back is really, really difficult. A mind-boggling feat of engineering and mathematics where hundreds of pieces have to align with millimeter precision over interplanetary distances. Then there's the issues around protecting the Martian ecosystem through what's known as planetary protection guidelines. Nevertheless, China claims that work on the project is progressing quickly, and its on track for one of the two launch windows. Wow. That is pretty awesome. Alysha Kempson-Taylor (16:47): Yes. Thanks for that, Michael. That is very, very cool. Right. Now it's time to return to our guest, Richard Kerridge, to talk about low and no-code apps. Richard, let's talk generative AI. Graphical tools are great, but what can these low-code systems do that generative AI can't, or do they complement each other somehow? Richard Kerridge (17:11): These are complementary technologies. Just as you're seeing with pro-coders, they're able to use tools that can help them generate code and get them in a collaborative way to the right answer. We're also seeing the same thing for low-code. What we find with low-code and pro-code is exactly the same thing. Generative AI, amazing as it is, can get you a lot closer, but it's best when it's in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing. In the same way that generative AI isn't replacing pro-code engineers anytime soon, but helping those pro engineers accelerate and be more productive and more complete and produce higher quality code, it's also helping domain experts produce better low-code. I've worked with a number of platforms where I'm able to go in and actually use gen AI now to do the kind of things that you talk about. I can go into a platform and give it a prompt to say, "Create me a workflow that takes this and moves all the rows inside it into a database list that loads all the rows from a spreadsheet into a table," for example, "in the database." (18:11): That thing gets me so far, so it'll get me like 80% of the way through, but the specifics of what I'm trying to do in the workflow generally have to be added by the low-code engineer in the same way that the specifics have to be added by the pro-code engineer. I see that gen AI is having the same effect on low-code as it's having on pro-code, but it feels that at the moment we're still a little bit away from the gen AI having the domain expertise to be able to ask the right question. I think the skill is still there in terms of what are you asking gen AI, it's still at the moment a very passive technology. You can prompt it, and the skill to which you prompt it generally defines the quality of the output you get. I think that's true in coding, in low-code and in using gen AI in general. Michael Bird (18:57): As always, Richard, for our final question, why should our audience be paying attention to the concept of low-code and low-code apps? Richard Kerridge (19:07): I think in terms of the IT decision makers, there's a huge opportunity here for you to meet some of the biggest digital transformation challenges you have coming up. If you're an IT decision maker, you will know how difficult it is to produce the right amount of IT capacity and the demands on your time on the resources in your organization. By embracing low-code, you can really help unleash those domain experts within your organization in a controlled, governed, and managed way to remove some of that burden on IT. Essentially, it means you can do more with the skilled IT resources that you have that we know are a scarce resource at the same time of meeting that pent-up demand for digital transformation that's in most businesses these days. Michael Bird (19:51): Richard, thank you so much. It's been fascinating. You can find more on the topics discussed in today's episode in the show notes. Right. Well, we are getting towards the end of the show, which means it is time for This Week in History, a look at monumental events in the world of business and technology which has changed our lives. Alysha, what was the clue from last week? Alysha Kempson-Taylor (20:16): The clue last week was from 1986, stealing has been against our code of conduct. Any idea, Michael? Michael Bird (20:24): No, not a clue at all. Please do give me the answer? Alysha Kempson-Taylor (20:29): Well, it was rather niche, so you can have a pass on this one. Michael Bird (20:32): Thank you. Alysha Kempson-Taylor (20:32): Well done if you got it at home. It was the announcement that computer code is subject to copyrights. Following a landmark legal case between two computer giants, this week in 1986, the US District Court for the Northern District of California announced that computer code was subject to copyright, but that it wasn't illegal to reverse engineer it. The finding came about as part of a larger case around whether two companies could produce an identical processor chip range. There were a whole load of follow-up cases that ironed out the law around computing code further. But in essence, code is now treated as literary work, which means that the way the author expresses their ideas is protected, not the idea itself. That is to say as long as the code is different, it can do the same thing. It is obviously a lot, lot more complicated than that, but there we go. Michael Bird (21:26): Awesome. Thank you so much, Alysha. Now, the clue for next week is it's 1960 and this ship boldly went into the atomic age. I think I might know. I don't want to give away. Alysha, any ideas? Alysha Kempson-Taylor (21:43): Oh, I no clue. No clue. Michael Bird (21:44): No? All right. Okay. Well, we'll find out next week. That also brings us to the end of Technology Now for this week. Thank you so much to our guest, Richard Kerridge, strategist in HPE's customer education services team, and of course to you. Thank you so much for joining us. This episode of Technology Now was hosted by Alysha Kempson-Taylor, and myself, Michael Bird. This episode was produced by Sam Datta-Paulin with production support from Harry Morton, Zoe Anderson, Aubrey Lovell, Alison Paisley, Alyssa Mitry and Camilla Patel. Alysha Kempson-Taylor (22:16): Our social editorial team is Rebecca Wissinger, Judy-Anne Goldman, Katie Guarino, and our social media designers are Alejandro Garcia, Carlos Alberto Suarez, and Ambar Maldonado. Michael Bird (22:28): Technology Now is a Lower Street production for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. We'll see you same time at the same place next week. Cheers.