BJSS Guest Blog – No Code in a Code World
Our first No Code Lab guest blog features BJSS, you may remember them from our event, the ‘National Data Strategy Forum’. You can read the write up of the event here. Daniel Amini, the Head of Microsoft Technologies shares with us the vast insight he has gained over his 25 year span with BJSS.
BJSS, designs and delivers enterprise software solutions. We’re a full-service technology consultancy that employs over a thousand people in software delivery roles. Many of the solutions we deliver require large multi-disciplined teams building complex systems providing critical solutions for our clients. Even still, we need to embrace the no code evolution as much as anyone.
25 years ago, we used Visual BASIC, which allowed applications to be developed quickly and allowed us, on occasion, to build applications with very little code. Development comprised largely of dragging and dropping labels, buttons and lists. We delivered simple solutions like this, that would have taken much longer using developers trained in C or C++ languages – and it would have been a huge misuse of our teams’ skills and time. Instead, we were able to use relatively unskilled staff to complete development, leaving the highly valued talent to work on complex, bespoke solutions.
Since then, a lot has changed, but being able to quickly turn requirements in to a solution that solves a problem has never been more important to us.
Covid-19 has shown us all that providing value quickly and being able to iterate and adapt is key to success. There will always be a need to build high performance, low level solutions that push the envelope, but there will also always be a need for rapid application development.
Bridging the Gap
Organisations were already facing a talent shortage before the pandemic. “The Great Developer Shortage” is real and we see this first-hand with recruitment at BJSS. There is a growing gap between demand for app development skills and availability. 65% of organisations report an app development backlog, according to research by Forrester, while Gartner state that 86% of organisations even struggle to find technical talent to build applications.
At BJSS we believe that Fusion Teams are the solution to solving the talent gap, bringing together citizen developers, IT professionals and software engineers, and is the key to unlocking the future of software development, enabling multi-disciplined teams to deliver faster results at scale. Low code provides an opportunity to change the way we develop solutions, and work as a team.
Citizen developers are a direct result of the rise of Low Code Platforms, it was not an accident and is proof that if you provide accessible tools, to empower inquisitive end users, they will build their own solutions, 500 million low-code apps will be developed in the next five years. This is more than all the apps built in the last 40 years. Not all of these will be built by professional IT developers.
In many ways, the world needs no code and low code solutions. They fill a need that coders just cannot. Low Code should not be seen as something different or a threat to existing delivery. It’s an evolution of everything that has gone before. Low Code sits well with existing skills, and any overlap is actually a real enabler. Even for firms like us, that are code through and through, we appreciate the need for no code and low code solutions. Our goal is the employ a hybrid of both code and no code to be best placed to solve our client’s problems.
Get in touch with No Code Lab if you feel you have a unique and interesting perspective on no code or low code, or if you want to collaborate in future.