Implementation of no code platform is a risky adventure. It was said a lot about glories of getting rid from an IT team. Nobody mentioned that exactly this irritating and in all ways accused IT team plays crucial role in control of the organization over its digital assets. And in contemporary enterprise digital assets often comprise lion’s share of the whole business.
Going to no-code platform means de-facto outsourcing of crucial IT infrastructure to an external company, which developed no-code platform. Organization is barred then from essential access to the code itself. Ironically, more universal and powerful platform is, more power it takes away from control of its client organizations or, respectively, more control gives up a company by implementing that system. Are you ready to give up your business?
What will happen to all clients, if one day developer of this great no-code super-powerful software gets out of business? It will effectively block all business operations of all its clients and, recursively, destroy all their business. Not accidentally, no-code platforms encounter so fierce opposition from top management. They are fast and charming to start with. But, as with many charming temptations, cost health, wealth and mere existence of the company on a longer term.
It partially explains why, open source solutions recently win increasing popularity among no-code systems. At least it gives a relative guarantee of system transparency in case of accidents and protection from unpleasant surprises. However, even open source does not protect from a spaghetti code, which is impossible to cope with and maintain in critical situations. Incidentally, no-code paradigm is actually an opposite pole of open source solutions. It means not absent code but deeply hidden code.
Dream of no-code platform often expresses merely inability of companies to manage effectively their IT teams and essential business knowledge. Well managed IT team is nearly equivalent to no-code platform in terms of its ability to deliver quality business solutions and isolate business from low level technical code. Even the cost can be comparable, if we consider wide offshore outsourcing options.
Not no-code platform or open source solutions are keys to IT transparency in business but systematic throughout business modeling of processes in all IT infrastructure and consistent aggregation of corporate metadata, in other words, BPM. But in no way BPM is equal or associated with no-code platform. BPM brings control over business, while no-code steals control together with code far too often.
My main point here that IT value and easy management is in analysis of processes and structures by means of BPM, rather than in elimination of code. If processes and structures are well written, they will be still valid and relevant to improve / rework even 25 years after creation, no matter how many code generations changed since then. In my view, optimal are not low-code platforms but high-code platforms with rich and high level code management. It allows to emit full executable code of the system in the language client chooses and link / modify it with industry standard compiler. It ensures optimal transparency, structuring and independence in support of such system in future. Alas, in regular coding business rules are too often directly embedded into code, which makes them specific to implementation and impossible to extract or migrate. BPM should serve to eliminate such situations.
We can watch a progressive sequence of code levels and abstractions. Important difference of lower levels with BPM is standardization. While you can write a code in C# of C++ and be (relatively) sure that any developer in the world will be able to compile and run it, there is little hope that BPM scenario composed in one BPM system will run on others. I m sure we will eventually arrive to commonly accepted BPM world standard. But, alas, we are too far from it yet.
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