Prepare For The Wave — No/Low Code Software Platforms And The Future of Work

A new wave of low and no code software platforms is coming and it will transform the way you think about your work, data and the software that you use every day.

Two young fish are swimming one day and a larger, older fish swims by and asks, “How’s the water?” to which the younger fish replied, “What water?”

There are many areas of life we could apply that image to in an age of unprecedented change. It wasn’t long ago that there was no such thing as social media. Cell phones were not in every pocket. Rand McNally map books occupied the backseat of most cars. And, yet, we have all become so accustom to this myriad of new technology, working methods and eco-systems that it’s easy to forget how we got here and where, in fact, we are right now.

The software we use is not exempt from this, either. If we went back 15 years ago, anyone with a software product could summon an audience. Simply having a product was an achievement in itself. Fast forward to today, everyone and their brother has an app, software or platform. The marketplace is as crowded as a bustling bazaar with touts and hawkers shouting to get the customers’ attention. Inside this ecosystem, companies evolved to maximize their own growth, namely, by focusing their product around a specific set of uses that spoke to an increasingly more narrow segment of the market in hopes of piercing through the cacophony of competing voices.

What that has yielded is a workplace and computing life with an endless assortment of tools designed for a narrow set of uses with their own parameters. Go into any workplace and you will witness a broad array of tools embraced by different departments for different uses with differing levels of aptitude and adoption. And for the most part, there is little perceived problem with this condition. It simply is what it is — the norm.

However, this norm is posing incredible challenges in an age where companies are discovering the need to unify its data as well as its workforce under some semblance of a common source of truth. The current ecosystem of single purpose software is at odds with this burgeoning need to become more data driven and prepare for AI and machine learning. If we zoom out, what we can see is various groups of unconnected people using an array of single purpose platforms where data sets and critical information is isolated in pockets, unable to be aggregated and applied in any useful fashion beyond the platform’s design. This is the equivalent of living in a country rich in minerals and raw materials but having no access to the machinery and processing methods to turn the materials into anything useful.

Enter A New Paradigm

To address this massive challenge, a whole new paradigm of software creation is emerging that will have revolutionary implications for the companies who embrace it. The low/no code software movement allows companies to quickly create bespoke software quickly and iteratively to unify and access data across silos, capture critical information in ways never imagined before and significantly reduce inefficiencies at all levels of the organization. Being able to manage institutional knowledge, best practices and data will no longer be the sole domain of overstretched IT departments. In a low/no code world, a savvy intern can quickly build an interface to crunch data from multiple sources and discover key insights that would have taken months and enormous budgets for a Big 4 consulting company to do. Managers will be able to capture best practices in interactive workflows to quickly train and develop departments in new practices and technology. Data sets from different departments will be linked together into interfaces to enable employees to create strategies that think beyond their narrow silo. On-boarding of employees will be able to be done far more quickly and effectively thanks to HR’s ability to create courses, surveys and wikis of resources that can quickly be created and retrofitted to ever changing needs.

In this ecosystem, there will still be need for single purpose tech platforms, however, it will be unacceptable to have the data and insights restricted by that platform and isolated in pockets of platforms, teams and projects. Think of low code, customized software as the glue or connective tissue that bridges the gaps between platforms and, in many cases, giving companies the ability to build exactly what they need rather than hoping someone has built a platform that will address their needs only to adopt a platform, get everyone trained in only to find it doesn’t quite do the job.

If all of this sounds too good to be true, one only need to imagine someone trying to describe what you would be doing in 2021 on your smartphone back in 2005. In 2005 we were still 2 years away from the first generation iPhone and it would have been impossible to imagine the wave of innovation it would unleash. What new advances in technology show us is that the tools and software we use limits our imagination and ability to innovate. We are always operating inside the limitations of the tool itself. Creating an ecosystem of apps or downloading music and podcasts wasn’t even an idea inside the limitations of dial up phones or even flip phones the same way that linking critical data and best practices isn’t available inside our hodgepodge world of single purpose applications.

Companies who are embracing this new approach are discovering efficiencies and value that they never thought possible (and wasn’t possible inside the constraints of their previous tool set). Full disclosure: I work for one of these forward-thinking low/no code software platforms. Beyond my job scope, this topic is a passion project, as well, because of the transformational impact it promises for those that can see the real possibilities that this new approach unleashes. Take, for instance, a client — a fortune 1000 company with 10,000+ SKUs of complex and technical products that individually have a wide arrange of specs and, to complicate matters even more, are linked together with other products to achieve the right needs for the customer. Now, imagine what scaling a sales force in that environment must be like.

Like any other sales team, they had an array of powerful tools including Sales Force that fulfilled certain needs. Despite their suite of tools, even experienced sales people would take an average of 2 weeks after speaking with a customer to find the right combination of products and services to fit their needs. This meant endless research, calls and meetings with product engineers, subject matter experts and technical managers. Not only is that the time of the sales person, but all of the other employees that they had meetings and calls with to find the right product fit for the customer. And, after all of that, there was still only a marginal success rate that the product recommendation was accurate. Imagine on-boarding new sales reps into this scenario and imagine how long it would take to get a new hire up to speed. In reality, this was simply the status quo for this company, no different than it was the status quo to use pay phones up until the early 2000’s. Something that seems grossly inefficient now was the norm not so long ago. And so it was the same for this client.

With a low code software approach, they did not have to search for a software company that created some tool that addressed their particular need (in this case, there was no likelihood that such a thing existed). What became possible is they could look at their actual circumstances and needs and build a tool specifically for it. Because low code software uses a toolkit of blocks and already created capabilities, one can artfully arrange these tools in limitless combinations to address a wide spectrum of challenges in needs. In this particular case there were 2 parallel sets of massive challenges.

Challenge 1: How do we bring all of the product specs into one system where we can quickly whittle down our product list to the products our customer is looking for?

Challenge 2: How do we give the sales people the information they need right away and how do we get them to ask the right questions on technical topics they don’t know anything about?

You can imagine that traditional sales trainings, no matter how masterful, could address these kinds of challenges. With a low code platform and the right team, we created a solution that was built and implemented inside of 2 weeks that was able to be augmented and refined as the teams discovered the best approaches along the way. With this approach, they were able to avoid lengthy research, planning sessions and product build specs. There was no long build process with the hopes that they were prescient enough to get it right and end up with a static piece of software that didn’t fully deliver. With a low code approach, you can start simple and small, building in an iterative fashion without the upfront investment.

Building for the exact needs.

In this particular case we were able to build a tool fitting the exact needs of the situation. After assessing the situation, we agreed that the sales enablement interface needed to be able to supply the sales person with the right questions to ask under the right circumstances. As they were doing this, their inputs into the system needed to whittle down all of the products that were not a fit so that they were left with a narrow list of the correct hardware, software and ancillary services that fit the customer needs. With that, we were able to create the right “container” for them to add to and adapt over time.

The overall interface is rather simple — a text box for the sales person to type their notes into. Below that are two columns each with a series of expandable boxes (different categories). When they write a technical term in the text box that matches something in the connected databases, a flag pops up. They click on the flag asking them, “is this the topic you need to ask the customer about?” If the answer is yes, they click it and a series of questions and prompts appear. The sales person (who may have no technical knowledge of the topic) can ask the series of questions. As they click the corresponding answers, the right column is filtering down to the correct products and services in real time.

With this new custom sales enablement software tool, a typical 2 weeks matching process that took an enormous amount of personnel hours across different departments was whittled down to one person spending 5 minutes. A sales person with little domain expertise is able to get an output of the product specs into a PDF and emailed off to the customer straight from the application and the corresponding data that was captured into a spreadsheet/database can be integrated directly into their CRM or other necessary applications.

In this particular case we were able to distill the deep knowledge of product engineers and specialists into a knowledge management system paired with the data linking and inference engine capabilities into one integrated system that has revolutionized how this company sells, on-boards, and trains a massive sales force. As a result of this success, they are now creating applications in HR, R&D, marketing, and manufacturing specific to those unique needs and strategically linking the data between departments in a way never before possible.

The low/no code wave is the future and it requires a new way of thinking about software and data. Luckily we have been here before. As the pace of change accelerates, we all have become more adept at personally witnessing how our entire mental framework can change with the introduction of new technology and methods. Not only is strategizing for the unknown easier to do now than ever, employees in the workforce are more primed than ever to supply frontline innovation and solutions when empowered with these tools, further aiding efficiency and knowledge transfer in increasingly complex and remote workplaces.

The future of work is bright.