Let’s start today’s piece with a simple question. Why do people travel when they want to do soul searching? Sure, some like me go to their nearby meditation centre for a week and some backpack through western Europe (hi, Joey *wink wink*). Why has there never been a story of someone finding their purpose in their own house, on their bed? That’s because, as the saying goes, life begins at the end of your comfort zone.

But, we do not see this happening frequently at companies after a point, and probably rightly so too, since, at a company, there is a lot more at stake. But, once in a while, there occurs a black swan event that forces companies to go outside their comfort zones and think, and disrupt. The covid-19 pandemic is one such event. This event has made companies rethink their structures and working styles overnight, but we do not think that this is the end, we think this is the beginning of a paradigm change. A change from ineffective remote collaboration to effective communication, remote or otherwise. A change from a mismatch in demands from business and the delivery capacity of technology teams to technology teams who deliver faster than the businesses can even expect. A change from high attrition rates to retainment of skilled and in-demand resources. A change from technology teams that are resistant to different demands to ones that embrace them.

So what can you do?

The traditional recipe

1. Take a pause
2. Assess, prioritize, plan and implement things the traditional way
3. Limit the scope since the operations can have too many environmental challenges
4. Try to avoid mistakes which you probably won’t be able to due to the fractured communication and that will rake up costs manifold since the cost of digitizing is on the rise
5. Finally, go through the painful process of finding people talented enough to execute this.

Or, take a pause and equip teams with force multipliers on the path of digital acceleration

1. Take a pause
2. And equip your team with force multipliers.

What are these force multipliers we talk about? They are tools and processes that help you make your processes faster, more efficient and tolerant to failure from the human and machine side.

We have already talked about a few of these in our previous articles such as DevOps and agile methodology, but today we talk about the NoCode Revolution.

But why are we calling it a revolution?

Because this part of the technology industry is booming like never before. Faster adoption, bigger and bigger funding rounds with crazy valuations and most importantly happy customers.

And why now?

The no-code industry has been evolving for years now, but we were simply not ready for it. The intent of the computing industry has majorly been towards packing more power with higher efficiency in a smaller space. We have gone from mainframes to bulky desktops to mobiles and laptops that weigh less than a kilogram which can do highly complex tasks with relative ease. Earlier too, we have taken steps in the direction to get ready for no-code, such as moving desktop solutions to the web, however, they were not branded that way as the web was not mature enough to replicate the power of an on-premise database system. It was very difficult to create web email clients in the early 200s that were even 50% as powerful as their desktop counterparts, but in the last decade, we have learnt to live with Javascript, invented react and have started using technologies that were intended for web to make desktop apps too (hi, electron.js). It was a technological gap that stopped this revolution, not user acceptance.

And why exactly should I care about this? Because you want to take this black swan of a pandemic with optimism and start doing things in 2 steps instead of 5. Your focus as an organisation should only be on one word, AUTOMATE!

Automate everything, automate every process that needs a manual action. Do you have a 5 step procedure to reconcile sales? Automate it. You press a button every day to download a report? Automate it! We usually don’t realise how much time we can get back from our schedules till we do this. Organisations with small business IT teams can plan to adapt no code and blend them with specialized API driven products. Those with medium-sized teams can use it to tailor the specialized business process and differentiate from the competition.

Those with a large team should have a specialized DevOps team so that change management is automated. This will help you deploy a no-friction ecosystem. There is an urgent need in the industry to stop friction in execution. And the no-code philosophy can help you do it!

We know that you have a lot of questions in your head, like, how are businesses currently using and benefiting from no code, when should you plan to go from code to no code, why transformations fail, what about your current IT teams and a lot more. Don’t worry, we have an article coming up on each of these topics and you can follow us to stay updated.

Shameless Plug: We, with our technological philosophy and specialised stack, help organisations in digital acceleration  Feel free to reach out to us transform-me@prodt.co for a quick assessment.