The Era of Social No-Coding
Remember the days of going to a library, searching a catalogue for that book on planets just to work out how many planets there are in the solar system? The days of library books have all but disappeared, replaced by the Internet, giving us access to such information at the tip of our fingers. And then came the social media era, when each individual got given the power to spread knowledge through Memes, Posts or Podcasts. People decide amongst ourselves now who's opinions matter the most with likes, shares and ratings.
Is there a similar trend happening within IT? I think so. Let's compare.
Remember the days when we had to wait months to receive those massive servers occupying the whole room with just 2GB of storage and only then being able to develop that web page you wanted to display to the world? Fast forward a few decades and we have the cloud, which allows developers to spin up websites within hours accessible world wide. And now more recently, (through advances such as the Microsoft Power Platform) we are entering the era of no code and citizen developers, giving non-IT business users the ability to make and share applications very quickly and with no coding knowledge needed!
See any similarities there?
Just as social media took over the sharing of knowledge, I believe the no code citizen developers model will very soon take over the IT landscape.
So how do we make this no code citizen developer era a success? I believe the key is to adopt the lessons learnt from the social media era.
This means having the structure in place to allow the following:
- Give citizen developers access to apps and data without compromising on enterprise security and data loss. Governance plays a key role here and it may not be a centrally run governance. Much like trying to prevent fake news is in the hands of all social media providers, Business units now must take some responsibility for governance of citizen developers.
- A mindset change of IT giving away some power to the business in developing and governing these applications. This may feel difficult for some, but it is an inevitable reality that we have already begun to experience with businesses enrolling to SaaS applications when IT has been too slow to respond.
- And most importantly, having a mechanism to share, like and rate citizen developed applications so we all know which apps are the most useful for us. We must limit fake news!
So is this the start of a new era - of Social No-Coding? Please do let me know what you think.
I agree that nocode platforms will cross over to citizen developers in a more significant way. But I am not sure to what extend and when it would be common place. The reason is because it is not as simple as reading text, as in your library example. There are still some level of science involved in developing nocode apps. E.g using arrays. So my reference is Excel. Some people are very advanced in its use. Most are not, even with numerate functions, like Finance. PowerFX is in fact a variant of the type of formulas used in Excel so it may be a good comparison. I think AI may be one way that it would go..e.g. it may be able to read and talk to a person, and the system will create the solution..also, GitHub sort of thing will also be another way, where open source solutions can be picked off automatically that very closely matches anyone's requirement (due to the volume of solutions that will eventually be available).