| Wasn’t this the way widgets were supposed to work?
Has anyone played with the modern low-code/no-code tools?
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Dr. Kenneth Laskey
MITRE Corporation, M/S H330 phone: 703-983-7934
7515 Colshire Drive fax: 703-983-7996
McLean VA 22102-7508
Food for thought vis-a-vis DevOps.
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Fall Conference Season Kicks off with VMWorld![]()
It's been a rare few months since Charlie and I have been on the road, but the respite has come to an end.
I'm on my way to VMWorld in Las Vegas, while Charlie is speaking at a conference in Colombia this week.
We'll be at a number of other conferences over the next few months, speaking at some of them.
It's also webinar season -- see the bottom of this email for dates and times.
And as always, if you run into me at VMWorld, be sure to ask for a copy of your Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster!
-- Jason Bloomberg |
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| New content from Intellyx |
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Two apparently distinct movements are in the process of disrupting the world of enterprise application development: DevOps and Low-Code.
DevOps is a cultural and organizational shift that empowers enterprise software teams to deliver better software quicker – in particular, hand-codedsoftware.
Low-Code platforms, in contrast, provide a technology platform and visual tooling that empower enterprise software teams to deliver better software quicker -- with little or no hand-coding required.
Two disruptive approaches with remarkably similar value propositions. Except that one emphasizes hand-coding while the other replaces it.
The obvious question: are we in for some kind of appdev battle to the death, as the two disparate approaches fight for supremacy?
Or are we somehow setting ourselves up for a delightful Kumbaya moment, where DevOps and Low-Code live together, happily ever after?
If we take a closer look at these questions, however, a number of subtleties emerge. Low-Code can help DevOps adoption – and vice versa.
And while Kumbaya won’t make it to our playlists any time soon (thank goodness), fleshing out the vision of appdev in the fully digital enterprise highlights important aspects of both movements we might have overlooked.
Splitting Up the Build vs. Buy DecisionOne of the toughest decisions any IT exec faces during their career is whether to buy a commercial off the shelf (COTS) software package or alternatively, get their team to build one from scratch.
The advent of the cloud split up the ‘buy’ part of this equation, adding various subscription options to the standard licensing models that have been around for decades.
Today, Low-Code is having the same effect on the ‘build’ part. It’s no longer build vs. buy. Instead, the ‘build’ option has now split into two: build with Low-Code vs. hand-code.
According to many of the Low-Code vendors, the hand-code option will soon be a relic of days past, as their platforms will cover the full spectrum of bespoke software solutions.
While this sweeping statement may very well become true at some point in the future, today’s Low-Code platforms don’t replace the need for enterprises to hand-code software entirely.
What is true today, however, is that the Low-Code platforms are maturing rapidly. As a result, the types of applications suitable for Low-Code are growing in number, while the number of applications an enterprise has no viable alternative but to hand-code is shrinking.
If an organization believes its DevOps efforts focus entirely on the hand-coding part of this equation, therefore, then the inescapable conclusion is that the need for DevOps in the enterprise is actually shrinking – with its demise only a few years hence, if that.
However, the assumption we based that conclusion on is deeply flawed. In fact, if IT leaders have focused their DevOps efforts solely on hand-coded applications, then they don’t understand the point to DevOps.
Two Sides to DevOpsDepending on whom you ask, you are likely to get two quite different perspectives on what DevOps is and why an organization would want to adopt it.
First is the appdev-centric view: DevOps is a cultural and organizational shift for creating and deploying better software faster – with a particular emphasis on hand-coded software. Yet, while it’s difficult to argue with this perspective on its face, it’s not the whole story.
That brings us to the other view of DevOps: an approach to breaking down organizational silos by instituting a culture of cross-functional, collaborative self-organization in order to better align software efforts with customer needs and demands.
Software plays a central role in both perspectives, of course – but the first view centers on hand-coded software as DevOps’ central motivation. This perspective would lead to an eventual demise of DevOps as Low-Code matures.
The second view, however, centers on software as an enabler of an end-to-end focus on the customer: end-to-end in the sense of the customer at one end, systems of record on the other end, and the entire enterprise in between. In other words, this view of DevOps centers on what it means to become a digital enterprise.
Furthermore, when we say software in this context, we’re not referring to hand-coded software per se. Instead, we’re talking about the full breadth of software-based value in the enterprise, from the software-defined network to the infrastructure to the applications, all within the broad context of hybrid IT.
Digital enterprises, after all, don’t focus on how they build software. They focus on how they meet the needs of customers – and that focus drives behavior across the organization, rather than in particular silos.
In this context, Low-Code becomes an essential enabler of DevOps, because it both accelerates the time to customer value as well as facilitating the cross-functional collaboration among stakeholders and application creators so essential, not only for DevOps, but for Agile approaches in general.
Overcoming Pushback Against Low-Code with DevOpsLow-Code can thus be an enabler of DevOps by streamlining the application creation process while facilitating better collaboration. The combination of Low-Code and DevOps can also help to resolve the pushback against Low-Code so prevalent in IT shops today.
As I explained in a recent Cortex, many organizations are facing pushback against Low-Code/No-Code initiatives from the ranks of professional developers, who feel threatened by the simplicity of building apps with such platforms.
If such an organization is also transforming to a DevOps culture, however, then the reasons for the pushback against Low-Code stop making sense.
The essence of the DevOps culture is cooperation, and the key to cooperation is empathy. In other words, DevOps organizations favor and encourage the breaking down of organizational silos by fostering better human interactions among people who had previously fallen into different organizational units.
The root of the pushback against Low-Code, in contrast, is a fundamental ‘us vs. them’ mentality that pits the appdev team – or in some cases, the entire IT organization – against the ‘business.’
I put ‘business’ in quotes here because the belief that the part of the organization outside IT is the business part is itself a fiction that derives from this misplaced us-vs-them mentality. In reality, of course, the entire organization is the ‘business.’
The bottom line: for organizations to succeed in the digital era – that is, to become digital enterprises – they must dispense with such adversarial patterns across the board. The best way to accomplish this task? Move to a DevOps culture.
The Intellyx TakeIt’s possible to sum up the discussion in this Cortex into two concise pieces of advice:
If you’re moving to a DevOps culture, then implement Low-Code in order to further the collaboration and rapid development goals of DevOps.
If you’re implementing Low-Code, then move to a DevOps culture in order to facilitate the collaboration and customer-centricity necessary to break down resistance to Low-Code.
To these two core tenets, we could add a third:
If your organization has yet to implement Low-Code and has also not begun its DevOps journey, then moving forward with both efforts at once will lower risk, accelerate your time to value, and bring you closer to the goals of digital transformation faster than implementing either in isolation.
What are you waiting for?
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Deb Nystrom.
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Digital transformation is on the tip of every executive’s tongue, but according to a recent study, most organizations are failing to realize value from their efforts – putting CIOs in peril.There are two ways to look at the current fate of the CIO role: Either the CIO is in the perfect place and time as the worlds of business and IT converge, or they are standing squarely in the “kill zone” waiting for those same converging forces to fell them. I have been covering digital transformation for over three years and have watched with fascination as it has evolved from a new idea to its present state of frenzied hype. My hope was that as its mind share reached critical mass with business and IT executives, there would be a renaissance in strategy and action within executive suites. Unfortunately, it appears that organizations have realized only the first half of that hope. According to a recent CIO study conducted by Harvey Nash and KPMG titled, “Navigating Uncertainty,” there has been a 52% increase in organizations that now have an enterprise-wide digital strategy. More encouraging, a full 90% of organizations have either adopted an enterprise-wide strategy or have at least done so on a business unit level.
... Click here to read the entire article. |
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The Low-Code/No-Code movement will disrupt all application development from the largest enterprise applications to small, throwaway apps, but this disruption is so dramatic that it is experiencing pushback from several camps – that is the conclusion of my recent article, The Low-Code/No-Code Movement: More Disruptive Than You Realize. To add more color to this story, I recently spoke with Martin Dowdall, Vice President and General Manager of ExpertSOLUTIONS at Stericycle. Stericycle is best known as a medical waste destruction firm, while its ExpertSOLUTIONS division offers product recall services to automobile manufacturers and other firms that have to deal with unexpected, potentially catastrophic product recalls. There are many steps to a recall process, but among the most important is the initial outreach to affected consumers. “A lot of what we do is communications,” Dowdall said. “For example, with our automotive customers, the key issue is getting people to bring their car into the dealership to get it fixed.” ... Click here to read the entire article. |
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Digital transformation has reached the tipping point. Everyone now understands that they must transform. But amid all the fervor and hype, it is easy to lose sight of what is at the center of digital transformation: the customer. The customer is the star in the story of digital transformation. As such, the customer experience is critical. An organization’s ability to engage and thrill its customers — along with the employees and partners who must serve them — is a cornerstone of digital transformation. As organizations have come to this realization, a new type of platform has risen to help organizations create and manage the customer experience: the digital experience platform. When organizations leverage this new platform effectively, it is the on-ramp to digital transformation. ... Click here to download the whitepaper (registration required) |
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Dramatically accelerated application creation, check. Iterative collaboration with business stakeholders, check. Lower costs, definite check. Streamlined integration, data modeling, even compliance – check, check, check again. What’s not to love about Low-Code/No-Code platforms? Apparently, in some corners, the answer is ‘quite a lot.’ Have you heard any of these? Low-Code/No-Code disrupts the existing application development organization. It makes managers look bad for having recommended slower, more time-consuming alternatives. People lump today’s Low-Code/No-Code platforms in with previous generation rapid application development (RAD), computer assisted software engineering (CASE) and fourth-generation language (4GL) tools, assuming the flaws of these now-obsolete approaches must apply to modern Low-Code/No-Code. And most significantly, Low-Code/No-Code can actually set lines of business and IT against each other, as they battle for control over the organization’s applications. ... Click here to read the entire article. |
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| Intellyx in the Press & Blogosphere |
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Kintone Connect is a one-day conference that will bring together business leaders from across the country to discuss the challenges of digital transformation and how organizations can navigate this newera of team empowerment. Kintone, provider of a low-code application development platform and toolkit that quickly connects, organizes, and visualizes information and workflows, will host the conference on November 3 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. Besides sharing best practices, speakers will present use cases that will provide attendees with a better understanding of how to leverage cloud-based digital tools to support team collaboration and increase efficiency, transform business processes that affect bottom lines, and empower employees to drive innovation by enhancing the skills of citizen developers. The conference will feature solo presentations and workshops by business leaders, including: - President of Intellyx, Jason Bloomberg is a leading industry analyst and globally recognized expert on agile digital transformation
...Click here to read the entire article. |
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... The future of quantum computers is profoundly exciting, but it also comes with a catch. Cryptologists use the limitations of our current technology to keep our information and transactions secure. Once we are able to manage massive complexity with quantum computing, our present encryption standards will be rendered ineffective. That seems profoundly scary. As Jason Bloomberg wrote in the Forbes article mentioned above, “should the Russian government break all of our encryption before the US develops countermeasures, stolen elections will seem like small potatoes. Welcome to the cyber-battlefield of the 21st century.” ...Click here to read the entire article. |
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... 随着微服务逐渐流行起来，很多厂商开始尝试把他们的Java EE Web服务转成微服务，这样他们就可以继续卖他们的过时产品，API Gateway就是这些厂商中的一个。
Jason Bloomberg是Intellyx的主席，他在一篇文章里指出了传统Web服务和微服务的区别，并对把传统Web ...Click here to read the entire article. |
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As the low-code and no-code approaches to application development explode in the marketplace, confusion surrounds these terms. The analysts don’t really agree on how no-code and low-code differ, with Gartner even downplaying the use of either term. As a result, enterprise buyers are left scratching their heads, as the low-code and no-code terminology remains remarkably persistent. In this brief, Jason Bloomberg of Intellyx (and a regular contributor to Forbes) tackles the confusion, asserting that the difference between the two segments is not “code,” but rather who the user is and how the approach is being used. He describes no-code and low-code in depth, points out the pitfalls and clearly delineates the difference between the two. And, for those who are trying to find out which approach works for the enterprise, he has the answer. ... Click here to read the entire article. |
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... In our latest white paper, Jason Bloomberg strips away any vague definitions of the EA role and redefines the group as the Center of Digital Empowerment – CODE. The change in terminology also signals a vital move toward self-organization. CODE should be a self-organizing group made up of business and IT leaders across the enterprise. EAs aren’t the only people in CODE. Going forward, this group should assist the EA in creating a strong framework that supports business-wide priorities of the digital effort. ... Click here to read the entire article. |
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