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Codeless web development in an agile world

Codeless web development in an agile world

Feb 26, 2022 | Codeless, Digital Ecosystem, Digital Transformation

How codeless web development is changing the world of application software development

With codeless enterprise software development platforms like Encanvas, it only takes ONE business analyst to take an app from concept to deployment. When a scrum of one becomes pointless, how do firms adapt their methods for modern software development?

The move to codeless agile software development

At one time, companies would buy an IBM AS/400 computer and a bundle of software.  They would expect to find everything in the box to run their enterprise.  Not today. Enterprise computing has become fragmented, complex, and more virtualized. Even with all the latest tech tools, it’s not enough to serve up the software applications they need.

This has led to enormous growth in demand for functional and task-specific Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.  So-called ‘SaaS sprawl’ accounts for a growing proportion of technology spend, with the average company now relying on over 200 unique SaaS apps.

The average number of SaaS apps used by businesses has been steadily rising. In 2020, it was around 80, and by 2022, it jumped to an average of 130.

The biggest losers in the adoption of SaaS are data-driven businesses. Adoption of SaaS tools creates tens, if not hundreds, of discrete data repositories with each operating a data model designed by a vendor. Harnessing this data becomes a nightmare for departmental and business leaders who find themselves running blind on business-critical decisions.

business analyst making business application

Innovation factories powered by codeless deveopment

Faced with the need to originate high-quality real-time enterprise data insights, companies have resorted to creating in-house development teams; their ambition to become innovation factories in their own right.  Software Development Life-Cycles (SDLC) have changed.

Today, the state of the art in web development software is codeless agile.  In concept, codeless agile differs from traditional waterfall software development projects by encouraging cooperation between developers through daily dev team stand-ups and scrums. In this ‘must do it well and fast’ world of app development, digital leaders have encouraged the use of fewer, more capable tools—with many adopting cloud platforms with built-in tooling to assist rapid application development, deployment, scaling, containerization, security, and such like.

But that innovation in methods and tools still doesn’t cut the mustard.

For most application developments, additional layers of data aggregation and business intelligence tooling to make sense of the data squirting out of the myriad of apps used across the enterprise. And the trusty spreadsheet is hanging on for dear life to retain its stature as the accountant’s friend, and the first and last port of call when professional SaaS apps aren’t still numerous enough to solve the many and varied data processing problems of users and teams.

From Rapid to Low-Code, to No-Code and codeless web development

Cloud delivered software development tooling is more holistic and comprehensive in its design than the desktop tools that preceded it. Industry watchers have seen the enterprise software development industry transition from Rapid Applications Development (RAD), to Low-Code, to No-Code in less than a decade.

Today, cloud-delivered codeless web development platforms like Encanvas are fast becoming the state of the art. They remove the visibility of software code and script from the app design interface which means businesspeople can be directly involved in the applications development process, to steer priorities, and quickly identify shortfalls in User Experience (essential in a world that priorities customer experience above practically any other competitive strength).  

colleagues working on the app development process

From scrums to fusion teams

The use of No-Code development tools has presented organizations with the means to re-think their designs to foster dedicated change teams.   

Gartner calls these new development organizational structures as ‘Fusion Teams.’ These new ad-hoc structures in organization design appear as and when a new application development is needed; bringing together business stakeholders, change professionals, security experts, and business analysts together to create a solution for the new requirement. Once the solution is delivered, ‘the team’ dissolves.

In the context of a Fusion Team, the entire software development team (as was ‘the scrum’ in the previous team design model) is represented by a single Business Analyst, who, with the support of an IT architect, is empowered to take an app concept to delivery using No-Code tools and plug-in technologies.

Such a fundamental change in operational behaviors dictates that project management processes keep up. Fusion Teams today are experimenting with new approaches to project management, like Agile Codeless that have been purposely engineered to keep up with the development cadence of Fusion Teams and No-Code app development, that today are creating apps in days and weeks that would’ve taken months and years only a few years ago.

Application Fabrics are a natural evolution in enterprise computing technology

What makes this transition possible is Enterprise Applications Fabric technology. An Applications Fabric (AppFabric) is a cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) equipped to design, deploy and run countless software bots and applications. It facilities the replication, scaling and operational performance management of published applications, while managing their life-cycle from birth to death. Using an AppFabric, it is left to the IT team to frame the fundamental user experience design rules, together with end-point security, core data tables, etc. This means Business Analysts operate within a suitably constrained and monitored ‘creative bubble’ determined by the IT experts of the enterprise.

This new approach to enterprise applications developments offers organizations the means to engineer their own built-to-fit digital ecosystem, without having to rely on spreadsheets and third-party SaaS tools, or the need to glue data together afterward. Fundamentally, all apps created in an Application Fabric bring data together in a single place, allowing organizations to fully leverage and re-use their accessible data.

Ian Tomlin

Ian Tomlin

Author

Ian Tomlin is a marketer, entrepreneur, business leader and management consultant. His passion is to help make great ideas happen. Relentlessly optimistic about the potential of technology for good, Ian’s 30+ year career has focused around the intersect of strategy, technology and marketing. He writes on subjects including enterprise computing and organizational design. He also works as a consultant and advisor to the executive teams of PrinSIX Technologies, Answer Pay and INTNT.AI, helping to rethink their marketing in order to tell their brand story.

Ian has founded a series of successful businesses including NDMC Ltd (2003), Encanvas (2006), and Newton Day Ltd (2019). He has written books, articles and guides on brand, digital transformation, enterprise applications, data science, workforce management, and organizational design. He can be reached via LinkedIn or Twitter.

Now read:

Codeless web development in an agile world

Enterprise app software platforms allow companies to create their own agile codeless digital ecosystem, bringing data together in one place.
Read More

What is Codeless Software?

Codeless software is a type of enterprise computing platform used to design, deploy and operate software apps without the use of, or visual presence of code

Read More

Codeless enterprise software

Ian Tomlin, CEO of Encanvas predicts the rapid adoption of Codeless enterprise software in the coming years and gives his reasons why.

Read More

What is Agile Codeless?

Agile Codeless is a software development life-Cycle (SDLC) approach that embraces codeless authoring tools and methods to produce enterprise apps

Read More

get in touch

What is Codeless Software?

What is Codeless Software?

Feb 12, 2022 | Agile Codeless, Codeless, SDLC

A Quick Guide to Codeless Software

Codeless web development software removes the need for manual coding of software apps and, in doing so, cuts the time and cost of software development by as much as 60%.

Codeless Software – A Definition

Codeless software is a short-form term to describe a software development approach that removes the visibility of software code from screens when programming software applications. An abstraction layer is used to create applications logic, data structures and forms using software wizards and building blocks.  While No-Code platforms allow software developers to quickly build applications by a simple drag-and-drop tool, codeless software goes a step further by eradicating visibility of software code in the software development and publishing journey.

This new form of rapid application development software is today frequently used in web development and enterprise computing.  Normally, Low Code and No-Code app development platforms used for codeless authoring are deployed on a cloud computing environment.  They help organizations to bring new software applications to market faster, and at a lower cost.

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Examples of codeless web deveopment screens (copyright Encanvas 2022).  Note the absence of any visible code.

encanvas data linking feature illustration
Encanvas Canvases Illustration

The need for adaptive IT to support digital transformation

Markets have always been competitive, but with the progressive rise of digital business and the globalization of markets, the very structure of markets is changing too.  It means that organizations must find faster and smarter ways to adapt their enterprise computing platforms to maximize customer value and minimize spend.  It’s not just people and processes, but technology too is having to adapt faster and more often to change. 

This means traditional IT platforms are being displaced by Low Code or Codeless enterprise software application platforms that are designed to adapt to change constantly, and offer productivity enabling tooling to serve the needs of change managers orchestrating change.

How organizational change has changed 

At one time, an organizational change was a rare thing.  Business models rarely altered and the structure of organizations – i.e. how organizational structures were designed and resourced – had no need to change.  Once people were assigned roles in the organization, they rarely moved beyond their role or department. Not today.  The business models organizations operate are changing frequently and rapidly.

This is because, in a digital age, the structure of markets and the nature of competition.  Many new forms of competition emerge from beyond the traditional players in any given market.  We are seeing retailers selling holidays, telecoms contracts and financial services products, utilities and automotive manufacturers selling data and online retailers selling everything!  In such a tumultuous market for products and services, suppliers have to respond to change faster.  This means organizations are facing near constant organizational restructuring.

The need for adaptive IT to support digital transformation

Markets have always been competitive, but with the progressive rise of digital business and the globalization of markets, the very structure of markets is changing too.  It means that organizations must find faster and smarter ways to adapt their enterprise computing platforms to maximize customer value and minimize spend.  It’s not just people and processes, but technology too is having to adapt faster and more often to change. 

This means traditional IT platforms are being displaced by Low Code or Codeless enterprise software application platforms that are designed to adapt to change constantly, and offer productivity enabling tooling to serve the needs of change managers orchestrating change.

Breaking down the barrier between IT and the business

Codeless software development is a major breakthrough in the evolution of enterprise computing because, until its arrival, enterprise-grade applications were largely created by expert software development teams in back-offices, working ‘offline’ as opposed to developments carried out in near-real-time in workshops.

Evidence shows that users and stakeholders of applications are very much put off by the visual presence of code and script on computer screens as it’s a language they simply don’t understand.  In consequence, they feel isolated and unqualified to present their case for enhancements to applications designs during review meetings; some claiming they feel awkward presenting ideas for improvements because of concerns over the amount of extra work they might be placing on IT colleagues. 

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A professional development tool-set for citizen developers 

Codeless web development software is sponsoring a new talent market, as non IT professionals can enter into a career of developing professional applications.

Examples of mobile and web desktop applications developed using codeless programming

encanvas surface screenshot example_ mobile2
Feature page (light)

The rise of the citizen developer

The last decade has seen the gradual erosion of centralized IT power in technology selection and decision making.  This is partly because departmental leaders have grown more confident in their appreciation of technology and its potential to automate their processes. It is also because read-to-deploy Business Intelligence, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications and robotic process automation (RPA) tools have made it possible for departmental managers to request software tooling that instantly works to address task fulfilment challenges.

During the period, the term ‘citizen developer’ has arrived in enterprise software development vernacular.  A Citizen Developer is someone who wants to author an application but lacks IT expertise (particularly coding or scripting) and tools. A wave of Low-Code and Codeless software applications have evolve to aid citizen developers in their quest to use software applications to solve their individual or team productivity challenges.

Codeless software applications development and the citizen developer

Codeless web development software platforms equip citizen developers with the tools they need to design applications without coding or scripting, to then deploy apps using one-click deployment methods. 

This latest genre of technology raises the bar on what can be achieved by citizen developers.  Toolkits enable non-programmers to build complete end-to-end business applications, deploy them, and manage them.  This means enterprise-grade apps can be designed and deployed by non-IT people without compromizing IT governance and security. 

For some individuals, citizen development codeless software offers the potential of a new career by offering services to businesses through task portals live Fiverr and TopTemp to build apps without coding.

The risks and rewards of investing in codeless software development tools

Codeless software has endured a challenging evolution to gain credibility for being useful and professional.  In this section, we look at the pro’s and con’s of adopting codeless app development methods.

pros and cons image

PROs

The benefits of codeless applications development

Sited benefits of using Codeless applications development platforms include:

  1. Faster time to market of new apps
  2. Lower development costs and risks
  3. Higher quality apps – because designers are better equipped to understand and apply the needs of users, stakeholders and the business
  4. Improved data management and governance controls
  5. Better data security because use of shadow data is removed from the enterprise
  6. Capacity is released from IT teams who no longer need to directly support software developments, so they can concentrate on more expert activities demanding their skills

CONs

The risks

Adoption of Low-Code and Codeless applications development software used to be seen as a high-risk venture.  IT teams were concerned about a loss of influence, control and governance over deployed systems.  Fortunately, modern enterprise applications software platforms carefully balance the needs of citizen developers with the expectations of IT teams, so everyone gains.  Deployed applications bring MORE INFLUENCE, CONTROL AND GOVERNANCE to IT teams, not less.  This is because:

• They are able to respond to the long-tail of demand from departments for new situational applications; removing calls for two-speed IT solutions and dedicated ‘rapid development’ DevOps teams.
• Use of ‘enterprise-grade’ applications development tools removes the existence of self-authored applications such as spreadsheets (so-called ‘shadow systems’ because their existence is unknown to IT teams).
• Furthermore, it means any created data becomes visible to IT and data security governance professionals rather than being held by users on local hard-drives (so-called ‘shadow data’). 

ian tomlin profile picture

About Ian Tomlin

Ian Tomlin is a management consultant and strategist specializing in helping organizational leadership teams to grow by telling their story, designing and orchestrating their business models, and making conversation with customers and communities. He serves on the management team of Encanvas and works as a virtual CMO and board adviser for tech companies in Europe, America and Canada. He can be contacted via his LinkedIn profile or follow him on Twitter.

Now read:

Codeless web development in an agile world

by | February 26, 2022 | Codeless, Digital Ecosystem, Digital Transformation | 0 Comments

Enterprise app software platforms allow companies to create their own agile codeless digital ecosystem, bringing data together in one place.

Read More

What is Codeless Software?

by | February 12, 2022 | Agile Codeless, Codeless, SDLC | 0 Comments

Codeless software is a type of enterprise computing platform used to design, deploy and operate software apps without the use of, or visual presence of code

Read More

Codeless enterprise software

by | February 4, 2022 | Codeless | 0 Comments

Ian Tomlin, CEO of Encanvas predicts the rapid adoption of Codeless enterprise software in the coming years and gives his reasons why.

Read More

What is Agile Codeless?

by | March 12, 2020 | Agile Codeless, Codeless, Wireframing | 0 Comments

Agile Codeless is a software development life-Cycle (SDLC) approach that embraces codeless authoring tools and methods to produce enterprise apps

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Codeless enterprise software

Codeless enterprise software

Feb 4, 2022 | Codeless

Codeless enterprise software is about creating, deploying and operating applications without needing to see or use software code. In this article, I predict the rapid adoption of codeless enterprise software platforms in 2022 and give my reasons why.

Big leaps in enterprise computer software aren’t always ‘so big’

The rise of no-code application platforms

I write a fair few business books on or around the subject of enterprise IT, but rarely do I make predictions. Being English, I’m naturally cautious. But I think this year we will start to see the first shoots of a codeless enterprise software future, where robots and wizards take over from humans on the majority of enterprise software developments.

It’s strange to think how things have changed in the enterprise computing industry over time and to reflect on those moments when hype curves finally kicked-off, or disappeared without a fizz and bang, like flat party balloons. That said, I’m pretty confident about the impact of this one, and the fact it will happen very soon.

Remember the Millennium bug?

Examine past predictions and it’s apparent that humans aren’t very good at predicting the future of enterprise tech. Many of us still remember the ‘millennium bug’ panic that happened at the turn of the century with many IT pundits expecting hundreds of computers to simply stop working at the gong of Big Ben at midnight.  

But the impact?  It led to lots of IT leaders holding their breath when the moment came, and plenty of overtime in IT departments, nothing more.

Examples of mobile and web desktop apps designed and deployed on codeless enterprise software

encanvas surface screenshot example_ mobile2
Feature page (light)

My 2022 prediction for codeless enterprise software

Agility became the subject of my first book – Agilization – that I started writing in 2002 after a couple of years of management consulting in Europe.  I was consulting for large corporations and their inflexibility in IT, methods, and organizational structures was crippling their growth.  I became ever more convinced agility was something people talked about but didn’t know how to turn into a sustainable attribute of culture and behavior.

In all this, the biggest challenge they faced was the intransigence of departmental and IT leaders prepared to consider a new way of working. Back then, practically everything in the business was hard-coded.

Exec teams saw their organization chart as a true reflection of their organizational design, they were buying ERP systems that were a blueprint design that every other competitor was also adopting. The idea of agile workforces, agile IT, agile business models seemed ‘out there.’

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen agile organizations come to the fore and pounce on the market changes that have happened.  

Interested in trying out codeless enterprise software? Get in touch.

My 2022 prediction – The era of codeless enterprise software becons

The evolution of codeless software

data spaghetti graphic

This decade, I predict we will finally see Codeless enterprise software take center stage in enterprise computing.  It will have a more profound impact on the IT world than most commentators forecast.  The IT industry has been trying to remove coding from the list of necessary skills to create apps since the millennium.

It began with Enterprise Mashups leading the charge. Gartner predicted these tools would fill the void between inflexible ERP systems and business model orchestrations, serving the long-tail of demands for apps that could be used by individuals, teams and departments to get jobs done.

Within a couple of years, Enterprise Mashups got redefined as Situational Applications solutions.

Then, the enterprise IT audience got bored. But now, pretty much the same group of entrepreneurs that started building application platforms to remove coding from application design, deployment and operations have resurfaced as application Platform as a Service (aPaaS), High Productivity applications Platform as a Service (HPaPaaS) and yes, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) brands.

 

Why is NOW the right time for codeless enterprise software?

 I believe this decade, this time around, Codeless enterprise software platforms are going to hit their mark for three very good reasons:

1. Digital transformation pressures

Digital transformation agendas sparked by new digital technologies and the rapid pace of Business model changes is increasing demands for adaptive apps platforms that reduce the time to market, costs and risks of producing and managing apps.

2. Data security

Data security threats mean companies can no longer tolerate spreadsheet apps, self-authored apps that IT can’t govern, and the existence of shadow data means that spreadsheets are no longer a sustainable answer to citizen developer requests.

3. Tooling

With advances in AI emerging every day, the tooling for low-code and no-code development is getting seismically easier to use and with integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) technology innovations. Technologies like Encanvas’s hyperdrive plugin permit the use of third-party DLLs, code, script, data sources, etc., there’s no limit to the type or scale of applications businesses can design for themselves.

4. COVID-19

I think COVID-19 has increased pressures on IT solutions to be more agile, and faster to develop. There is a pent-up demand now to build and adapt enterprise apps on a scale, and at a pace, that we’ve never seen before. 

Final thoughts

The notion that software development teams will sit down in scrums and start coding new apps in agile scrums seems truly outmoded by codeless. New codeless platforms offer MUCH MORE rapid development and integration (with almost no testing overhead). And, thanks to the use of robots and wizards in the software development process, it’s now possible to displace the need of human coders to write the majority of code.

COVID-19, then, might well represent the death-nail in what is now exposing itself as an ageing industry built around human coding of applications.

ian tomlin profile picture

About Ian Tomlin

Ian Tomlin is a management consultant and strategist specializing in helping organizational leadership teams to grow by telling their story, designing and orchestrating their business models, and making conversation with customers and communities. He serves on the management team of Encanvas and works as a virtual CMO and board adviser for tech companies in Europe, America and Canada. He can be contacted via his LinkedIn profile or follow him on Twitter.

Now read:

Codeless web development in an agile world

Enterprise app software platforms allow companies to create their own agile codeless digital ecosystem, bringing data together in one place.

Read More

What is Codeless Software?

Codeless software is a type of enterprise computing platform used to design, deploy and operate software apps without the use of, or visual presence of code

Read More

Codeless enterprise software

Ian Tomlin, CEO of Encanvas predicts the rapid adoption of Codeless enterprise software in the coming years and gives his reasons why.

Read More

What is Agile Codeless?

Agile Codeless is a software development life-Cycle (SDLC) approach that embraces codeless authoring tools and methods to produce enterprise apps

Read More

Best No-Code Platform 2022—What to Expect

Best No-Code Platform 2022—What to Expect

Jan 24, 2022 | No Code Development Platform

No-Code in 2024?

What Does the Future Hold for No-Code App Development?

Written by Ian C. Tomlin | 12th January 2024

2023 saw a significant boost in the popularity of No-Code platforms, as many businesses concluded the best way to grow out of an economic downturn (resulting from the pandemic) was to innovate.  Will 2024 be the year that no-code application development takes hold?  If so, what innovations can enterprise buyers expect from state-of-the-art platforms like Encanvas?  Read this article to find out.

Overcoming The Coding Bias

Few people involved in the enterprise applications development market would be unaware of the strong bias towards manual coding. The industry has been run by people who themselves trained as coders.  These individuals have invested in coding.  No question, coding offers unlimited versatility while any form of abstraction layer will inevitably lead to inflexibilities.  These inflexibilities come in the form of functionality shortcomings built into apps, or in the ongoing platform architecture—making it more difficult to protect data, integrate with other systems, scale apps or manage User and Group permissions.

This has led some IT leadership teams to focus their cultures and behaviors around coding.  When this happens it inhibits speed-to-market and business outcomes.  It is assumed, through this professional bias, that any product claiming to be able to produce enterprise apps without coding is intended for ‘citizen developers’—which these days has become industry-speak for ‘amateur.

The great thing about working with teams of awesomely clever and passionate people wanting to solve a problem, is they don’t see things like ‘bias’ as being an insurmountable obstacle; but rather just another bridge to cross.

Low-Code-2021_image 3

When Encanvas deployed its first enterprise platform for a top 5 professional services company back in 2002, it proved that a no-code appdev platform could do something coder couldn’t. And, in 2003, when it produced a system to manage Advanced Roadworks Plans for a community of over a hundred organizations digging up roads across Greater London, it proved that No-Code can handle ultra-complex enterprise IT challenges better than coded solutions.

No-Code Platforms Have Been Around For Years

The challenge has been to convince a profession whose holy grail is the manual creation of code, that there is a better way of producing enterprise apps.  Thankfully, enterprise projects to create apps have grown in volumes exponentially because of the potential of digital technologies to offer significant cost savings and customer service improvements. Speed-to-market of new applications has led to a drive for smarter ways of building apps. Every business has become an innovation factory.  In 2021, more enterprise buyers than ever started to explore the possibilities of no-code.

The Story So Far

Most No-Code solutions start their life by making it simpler to develop basic forms-based applications.  Almost any enterprise app born in the early 2000s required humans to enter data into it. Understandably, the numeracy of department-level forms-based apps has created a demand for rapidly deployed, ‘designed-to-fit’ solutions. This requirement has shaped the feature sets of No-Code tools. Features to expect include:

Displacing Coding Activity For Simple AppDev Tasks

To be awarded ‘Best No-Code Platform 2022’ solutions need to reduce or remove the amount of mundane coding tasks needed to author and deploy forms-based apps. Early solutions weren’t much different to DataEase or Microsoft Access (if you remember these popular self-authoring tools of the 1990s). Typical design elements included text, text area, numeric, date-box fields (etc.) and presentation building blocks like tables and charts.

Simplifying the User Journey for AppDev

Tools had to offer simple user journeys to intuitively guide developers through the stages of app design and deployment, including ‘one-click publishing.’ Few people are prepared to read user manuals anymore, so if Users can’t work out how to work with a tool without referring to a user manual, it won’t be popular with modern tech buyers.

Cloud Enabled

A big ‘digital tech’ shot in there arm for No-Code platform vendors has been the evolution of cloud platforms like Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure. Large tech vendors have invested billions of dollars into their cloud infrastructures and middleware tools over the past two decades. No-Code platforms are able to harness these capabilities to make it easier to integrate, secure and scale applications; both in their audience size and number. Much of the ‘heavy lifting’ for the back-office IT tasks is ultimately being performed by the cloud infrastructure supplied by one of the top 5 cloud vendors.

Low-Code-2021_image 2

The Rise of Fusion Teams

The demand to speed up the time-to-value of apps has led organizations to create Development Operations (DevOps) teams. These IT teams use agile scrum development methods to fast-track app developments. While operational innovations in DevOps teams and agile have revolutionized the pace of app development, they still gravitate towards coding and coders; which means they still don’t quite remove the barriers between IT and the business.  Business bosses remain hungry for FASTER, CHEAPER applications development. This leads to a move towards ‘Fusion Teams’ that fuse IT and Business People together in workshop-oriented app development teams.

According to the latest thinking by Gartner, DevOps teams are about to get displaced in the enterprise by FUSION teams. They say, “Many firms pursuing distributed delivery are transitioning to “fusion teams” to bring together IT and business employees to develop digital solutions. As fusion teams become more prevalent, enterprise architecture and technology innovation leaders must actively support these blended, multidisciplinary teams.”

Bringing Business People and IT Together

Fusion teams equipped with No-Code software—such as Encanvas, Mendix, OutSystems, BettyBlocks, etc.—encourage open discussions between the people who know what an app needs to do, and the Business Analysts (not coders) responsible for authoring the app solution. This results in better-fit apps, built faster.

 Look for ‘See-No-Code-Use-No-Code’ features in the best no-code platforms

While Low-Code tools reduce the amount of coding that needs to be done when creating apps, No-Code solutions remove code from the screen when apps are being developed. Coding is displaced by an abstraction later of ‘LegoTM’ styled building blocks that are designed to serve the various demands expected of the design element. For example, ‘Buttons’ can perform layer-upon-layer of actions to update data, check values, automate email workflows and escalations, etc.

Agile Codeless Project Methods

Of course, when you only need one person to build an app, there’s no point having a SCRUM for one. This means Agile Development methods and tools are also having to adapt to this new reality. Additionally, you can expect No-Code platforms to offer an Asset Library to manage assets and re-usable components. Tools like Jira and GitHub used by coders to manage code blocks in a traditional manual coding ecosystem are no longer needed. Instead, simpler ideation and project management tools are used to track progress of what are essentially much simpler and shorter projects, involving far fewer people.

hyperdrive plug-in image

2024 Innovations

Here are a few pointers to some of the latest innovations in enterprise No-Code platforms:

Remote Development

It’s no longer necessary for the people designing and deploying apps to be in the same room. The pandemic of 2020 has encouraged the evolution of remote development tooling into No-Code platforms.

Encanvas, for example, supports an encrypted Passport system for its remotes designers and architects to make access to the platform simple for users, whilst improving platform security compared to applications using two-factor authentication (which presents the risk of someone stealing a Users’s smartphone). Using Passports, designers can safely build apps online with business stakeholders on Zoom, in a Google Huddle, or on Microsoft Teams. No data gets saved to the local devices and no enterprise data connections are exposed.

AI Coding (Or Specifying)

We can imagine 2024 as being the year that artificial intelligence starts writing code, perhaps not as much as humans to begin with, but we can imagine it will get there!  Already, Google’s Gemini is getting pretty nifty at supplying ready-to-use CSS scripts that take the load off of developers.  While fully coding applications may be a while off, we can imagine systems adopting AI tools to allow users to specify their requirements in a more transferrable and adoptable form. 

 

More ETL and Integration Ware

One of the main reasons why enterprise projects fail is the quality of data or the inability to harvest and blend data. The latest innovations in No-Code platforms go a step further with integrated No-Code tooling to mash up data from multiple sources and provide rich back-office software robots to orchestrate data uploads securely. These built-in No-Code features mean organizations no longer need to invest in third-party data integration or Extract-Transform-Load middleware.

More Support for Hyper-Automation

The big new phrase in the digital transformation industry is Hyper-Automation; or the ability to apply best-fit Digital Technology solutions to process improvements without incurring high frictional costs. Enterprise No-Code platforms are now able to plug in third-party AI algorithms, Maps, DLLs, code, script, blockchain, data visualizations, social messaging tools, etc. to make it simpler for companies to embed tech innovations into business processes without having to find third-party tools.

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Micro-Portals • Forms • Reports • Training Dashboards • Charts • Maps • Tables Checklists • Onboarding • Risk Registers • Presentations • eBooks

Summary

The last decade has seen tools evolve for coders and non-coders.  With the advent of Fusion Teams, No-Code platform vendors like Encanvas are now producing tooling to serve both audiences; namely, No-Code applications development tools for fusion teams underpinned by a No-Code cloud ecosystem for IT people to use so they can create data integrations, serve up an AppFabric, manage deployments, scaling, data security and User permissions.

Could this be the final step in the evolution of applications engineering; taking it from manual coding to codeless applications design and deployment? Probably not, but it will give business and IT leaders something to think about in 2024.

Curiosity and low-code software apps

Curiosity and low-code software apps

Dec 15, 2021 | Data-Driven Culture, Low Code Development

We live in a data driven business world. How do you tap into yours?

It’s thought Jeff Bezos was the first person to use the term Innovation Value Management (IVM) to describe data as a business asset based on its contributory value. If it wasn’t Jeff, then it was probably one of his team. Amazon is passionate about the value of its data. The company leadership team knows that capturing rich insights on its customers—their buying preferences and behaviors—offers an unrivalled competitive advantage.

Creating a data-driven culture with low-code software apps

 When organizations shape their management approach to use data every day to make decisions, they are often described as operating a data driven culture. Organizations want to maximize the value of their data by using it to make business decisions. It’s never been more possible thanks to cloud computing and big data. And yet, the secret of driving business success through data often has more to do with the attitudes and skills of your people, than the technology they use.

curiosity

A Business with Curious Minds

Businesses that transition decision making to be evidence based, need curious minds to power change. Individuals at all levels of the enterprise must as the question ‘Why’ more often, and have data and analytical tooling at their disposal that equips them to rapidly find answers to those questions. In the digital age, a spreadsheet doesn’t quite cut it. You will need data harvesting and visualisation tools. More over, you will need data to be organized correctly in the first place, and probably cleansed of impurities.  This is where low-code software apps come in.

Many of the new executive roles are analytics based. For example, in the office equipment industry, the transition to data-driven business has led many vendors to appoint Service Managers with an analytical background where previously, these roles were fulfilled by ‘the best field service engineers.’ Such roles today are largely about understanding patterns in data, managing people, and acting on escalations.

The latest research from Gartner suggests that, by 2023, data literacy will become an explicit and necessary driver of business value, demonstrated by its formal inclusion in over 80% of data and analytics strategies and change management programs.

curiosity

The democratization of data analysis made possible by low-code software apps

Data has become the lifeblood of enterprise. Executive management teams are taking more of an active ownership role in BI initiatives than ever before. Once the bastion of large corporations—because they were the only community of business able to afford the extremely high price tag—business intelligence has become democratized over the last decade thanks to affordable ‘pay-as-you-use’ applications and cloud-based technologies that scale accessibility and affordability to dashboarding and data warehousing tools.  What low-code software apps do is fulfil the ambition that many executives to further democratize business intelligence to every stakeholder in the enterprise, and potentially beyond it.

Benefits of building a data-driven culture with low-code software apps

Creating a data driven ‘curious’ culture will help your business to understand customer behavior, react to market changes faster than your rivals and eliminate the unknowns. What organization would not want these abilities?

curiosity

Challenges

Competency Gaps

Armed with a new set of ambitions, organizations are establishing leadership roles to drive the transition of people, process, technology and data to evolve a data driven culture. The Chief Data Officer (CDO) role is growing in popularity as a standard bearer. According to the latest research from Gartner, this role is intended to:

  • To define and advocate the vision, priorities and role scope of a data driven culture
  • Transform the enterprise by prioritizing cultural change and fostering a data-driven orientation
  • Apply asset management disciplines to select information assets and borrow ideas from other industries and competitors to monetize data
  • Apply technology leadership and best practice to aid the data-driven transformation of their enterprise

Culture Change

In a digital era, businesses operate on data. Much of their opportunity is programmed into inbound marketing schemas and their operational performance depends on data analytics to execute hundreds of decisions based on fact—not gut-feel—to fine-tune internal processes and minimize sales costs. To create a data driven culture requires a culture change in many management teams that are accustomed to driving their business based on ‘hunches’ and ‘best guesses’ over what customers value and what they want. A digital economy means that enterprises no longer need to guess.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon is quoted as saying, “If you don’t understand the details of your business you are going to fail.”

Adoption Hurdles

The most commonly reported barriers to a data driven culture are:

  1. A lack of data literacy in management teams resulting in poor leadership buy-in.
  2. Suboptimal data analytics capabilities.
  3. Unclear data ownership and strategy.
  4. Challenges with data integration – Even with ‘lots of data’ stored in their back-office systems, many businesses find there’s an issue with getting access to the data tools and data scientists needed to really make use of the data assets they hold.
  5. Data quality shortcomings.
curiosity

Final Thoughts

The transition from analog to digital business behaviors has been swift; a matter of a few years. Many enterprises find themselves on the wrong side of this wave, operating without good customer, product, business or market insights. They find their operations somewhat sluggish compared to the ‘SaaSy’ new-kids on the block. Executives know, curious minds are needed to fast-track change at every level of the organization.

Attitudes to data vary across businesses. Leaders generally see it as crucial and an opportunity, while many departmental leaders find it a tantalizing prospect that’s probably out of reach. IT leaders, on the other hand, see data as a problem and a risk. And there will be many that see the surfacing of operational data as a risk, given that it might expose their underperformance. Bringing everyone on the same page will not be easy, but it is necessary to remain competitive in a digital economy.

A Change Project Like No Other

Creating a data driven culture is a change project like any other. To be successful, your business needs to be armed with the same state-of-the-art methods and tools that your competitors will be using. Nothing less will do. That means harnessing robotics and artificial intelligence, analytical visualization tools, predictive modeling and automated escalation routines.

Unfortunately, when considered in isolation, none of this technology will actually help your business to harvest its opportunity and grow. Like most changes in business, it will take a blend of ‘people, process, data and technology’ to become a successful data-driven enterprise—and the need to change attitudes and behaviors will as always take center-stage.

ian tomlin profile picture

About Ian Tomlin

Ian Tomlin is a management consultant and strategist specializing in helping organizational leadership teams to grow by telling their story, designing and orchestrating their business models, and making conversation with customers and communities. He serves on the management team of Encanvas and works as a virtual CMO and board adviser for tech companies in Europe, America and Canada. He can be contacted via his LinkedIn profile or follow him on Twitter.

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HyperDrive – Built for an era beyond APIs

HyperDrive – Built for an era beyond APIs

Dec 14, 2021 | iPaaS

HyperDrive: Making HyperAutomation possible

HyperAutomation is revolutionizing businesses, powered by new integration ware that makes it easier to glue AI, RPO, IOT and other tech advancements into incumbent business processes.   HyperDrive is an example of the bleeding edge of this new enterprise tech. But how does it work and why is it so different to APIs and other data connectors?

Why companies need to HyperAutomate

When the back-office doesn’t link to the front-office

Does your business have the ‘Amazonian’ capability to process every customer request directly from its web-shop or eCommerce site?  If the answer is no, you wouldn’t be alone.  A study by McKinsey of a leading high-street bank a decade ago found that almost 60% of processes still used hard-copy forms or required some level of human intervention.  The fact is, the majority of business processes in most companies aren’t automated still today.

Leveraging codeless iPaaS innovation to drive automation

Digital transformation these days isn’t a new phenomenon, it’s business as usual. With so many advances in digital technology over the past decade—Internet of Things, blockchain, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, drones, and software bots to name a few. It’s hardly surprising that businesses are keen to find smarter ways of enveloping this innovation into their core business processes.  A new(ish) technology that can help is a codeless integration Platform-as-a-Service like Encanvas.

The role of a codeless iPaaS is to build a bridge between the data silos that span the enterprise to form up a single-version of the truth when it comes to the critical data landscapes executives need to see.

Garbage in, garbage out

The quality of data that new app designers want to consume into their workflows remains the biggest single reason why projects derail. Try harvesting data from two or more apps and the challenges soon mount up.

For one thing, many systems still lack a codeless iPaaS to expose their data. Another challenge comes from the fact that businesses don’t always use software the way authors intended, and this can lead to data tables with many omissions. Incomplete data makes matching and organizing data hard to get right.

Even when you can (1) access data, and (2) find it to be of a reasonable quality, there remains the constant challenges of managing sessions (to prevent them from timing out), and knowing what to do with the data once you’ve got it uploaded.

The problem HyperDrive solves – taking data preparation beyond regular iPaaS features

For more than a decade, there have been a variety of Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) products available to app developers that will ‘take care’ of data uploads, transformation and republishing tasks.

But any app developer knows, consuming data often requires a lot of pre and post processing, much of which has to happen server-side on a relational database platform like SQL. All these scripts become a critical ingredient of deployed applications, the hidden heroes of new digital transformation projects. After a while, they become invisible to users and administrators, cogs in the data processing machine that few people can see, or know exist.

And that’s a problem.  Because, when you want to adapt or change your app, there’s a good chance you will need to go back a re-bake these logic rules. If the developers that built these scripts move on, that can leave your project in a mess.

How HyperDrive changes everything

One of the biggest shortcomings of low-code and no-code enterprise app platforms has been their inability to think of everything.

Every now and then, requirements come along that demand more than the collection of app building blocks provided by the provider. For business-critical apps, very often, in-house development teams have over the years found themselves having to rebuild low-code deployments with hi-code solutions on enterprise systems like Oracle, Salesforce, or SAP.

Until now that is.

Encanvas, one of the leading providers of no-code enterprise applications platforms, has this year introduced a new technology called HyperDrive.

HyperDrive is an agnostic  data plug-in technology that enables app developers to ingest code, script, third-party data sources, algorithms, and app plug-ins and DLLs into its no-code integrated development environment (IDE)—all done without scripting and coding.  Which is clever, but what makes HyperDrive cleverer still is that the Encanvas team has added data pre-processing and post-processing into its HyperDrive tool.

Screenshot of Encanvas HyperDrive functionality.  The feature is built into the Encanvas Integrated Development Environment

encanvas data plug in toolware

HYPERDRIVE FEATURES

  • Add third-party data, app plug-ins, algorithms and more into apps without coding or scripting
  • Pre- and post-processing built in.
  • Extends functionality of the Encanvas No-Code Integrated Development Environment

HYPERDRIVE BENEFITS

  • Faster time to value of new apps—Ingest the latest digital technologies and best-of-breed apps into your business workflows without coding or scripting
  • Brings transparency to data integrations, reducing maintenance
  • Creates a No-Code Enterprise App Platform that can be extended by user organizations, de-risking No-Code adoption for enterprise businesses
Francesca Manley

Francesca Manley

Author

Francesca is an independent writer and head of communications for technology brands.  Armed with a passion for writing about innovative technologies that can transform business, she serves on the management team of Encanvas and has worked as a public relations adviser to the executive teams of various companies including Newton Day Ltd, TwoMinute Reads.com, NDMC Consulting, PrinSIX Technologies, and Answer Pay helping to rethink their marketing in order to tell their brand story.  She can be reached via LinkedIn.

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About Encanvas

At Encanvas we have a passion for low-code / no-code (we like to say codeless) software development. We’ve been leading innovation in the enterprise rapid applications development (low-code / no-code / data mashups) industry since 2002.

Our enterprise digital transformation platform is used to design, deploy and run custom apps by uniquely blending application (aPaaS), integration (iPaaS), Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and data mashup codeless software tools.

Encanvas brings agility and innovation to businesses.  Used by data-driven organizations around the world, our platform evolves digitalization plans at the speed of light to maximize customer experience and minimize IT costs.  Accelerate time to value of new applications as part of your digital transformation or data engineering program.  Read the Encanvas Blog to learn more about what we do.

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