Agile Codeless is transforming how businesses create the applications they need to service their business models. Find out why it’s so different to what’s come before.
About
Agile Codeless is a software development life-Cycle *(SDLC) approach that embraces codeless authoring methods and tools to produce enterprise apps. Developed by NDMC Consulting over a decade of enterprise software projects, it removes the barriers that exist between IT and the Business when authoring enterprise applications software..
The challenges of developing software applications
A level of trial and error can be expected for any creative activity but the excessive risks of software authoring are born out in studies both in terms of slow time to market and burgeoning costs. The article ‘Why Your IT Project May Be Riskier Than You Think’ by HBR (November 2011) followed a survey of 1,471 IT projects with an average spend of $167m and found:
- The average overrun was 27%
- One in six projects studied experienced a cost overrun of over 200%.
- Almost 70% of black swan projects also overrun their schedules.
Though the pitfalls of software applications development are by now well documented the IT industry has been singularly unable to overcome them. But as globalization increases apace, business models change ever more rapidly and organizations seek to leverage ‘Big Data’, the need to reliably produce better applications right-first-time has never been more critical. This booklet examines the CAAD methodology for creating applications and the reasons behind its timely arrival.
An unprecedented pace of change in business models is creating a need for more agile IT
For a hundred years management thinking has valued mechanization over creativity…
..but after decades of automation, the core business processes of organizations are pretty slick – that is until markets change and business models need to realign. Then concepts of operational excellence evangelized by management consultants sound hollow.
As the very structure of markets changes, smaller, more nimble companies benefitting from closer ties to their customers, and a clearer understanding of their value, are able to steal a march on vendors 100 times their size.
Even global brands aren’t safe – new aggressors can emerge from a different industry altogether to take a big bite out of a market they see as fair game in an open, global marketplace (such as retailers venturing into the car insurance market for example).
“Institutionally, the ability to be agile enough is the gut issue in leading an organization today.” James McNearney – CEO, Boeing
Organizations that could once survive without reviewing business models more than once a decade are now forced to re-assess annually. The new mantra of business excellence is agility – to create an enterprise that can adapt to always win in its most addressable markets.
Powering enterprise agility
Key to the drive for agility is the need to empower middle managers; people with the energy, skills and curiosity to question why processes work as they do and find new ways to distill customer value. Leaders are coming to realize that leadership at all levels of the enterprise is vital. This critical tier of ‘corporals’ demand systems and tools to understand and adapt their assets and resources to fit internal processes to the ever-changing business landscape.
This is driving demand for a new tier of applications that harvest data from existing sources to create new applications that respond to new situations (‘situational applications’) as they arise and align IT systems to better fit constantly evolving processes.
Releasing Innovation
Disparate silos of data across the enterprise – a known problem that has faced organizations for decades, but how do you fix it?
Services-Oriented Architecture is a term that describes the design and use of information services to support business needs; a coherent enterprise-wide method of organizing how computer systems present information to other systems so the data they manage can be accessed more easily without compromising systems performance or security. For business people, the major benefit of organizing information through SOA is the prospect that data held in disparate silos across the enterprise can be re-used to create new applications that produce smarter processes.
To consume Web Services requires applications able to bring data together while fashioning new data structures, web portals and forms-based applications to view, edit and update data.
Demand for these new applications increasingly comes from communities of workers that, while small in number, are essential to process innovation and creativity – things that create competitive advantage in the 21st century business world.
The conceived wisdom of building large lumbering enterprise applications for the majority at the expense of the few no longer fits the reality of what these critical communities of information workers either need or expect. The high quality of software people now use in their homes and on their mobile phones has raised the bar of what business users expect. The digital native generation dismisses applications that require a manual or that ask them to live with inhospitable reporting tools.
To meet the demands of this new ‘consumerized’ user community, the only viable solution is to produce applications at a faster pace and at lower risk; getting new applications to market faster, at a lower cost. This demand has led to the innovations found in the Agile Codeless methodology.
“Middle managers spend more than a quarter of their time searching for information necessary to their jobs, and when they do find it, it is often wrong.”
Source: AIMS survey on information management, 2007
Delivering as Services Oriented Architecture
Services-Oriented Architecture is a term that describes the design and use of information services to support business needs; a coherent enterprise-wide method of organizing how computer systems present information to other systems so the data they manage can be accessed more easily without compromising systems performance or security.
For business people, the major benefit of organizing information through SOA is the prospect that data held in disparate silos across the enterprise can be re-used to create new applications that produce smarter processes.
To consume Web Services requires applications able to bring data together while fashioning new data structures, web portals and forms-based applications to view, edit and update data.
Demand for these new applications increasingly comes from communities of workers that, while small in number, are essential to process innovation and creativity – things that create competitive advantage in the 21st-century business world.
The conceived wisdom of building large lumbering enterprise applications for the majority at the expense of the few, no longer fits the reality of what these critical communities of information workers either need or expect. The high quality of software people now use in their homes and on their mobile phones has raised the bar of what business users expect.
The digital native generation dismisses applications that require a manual or that ask them to live with inhospitable reporting tools. To meet the demands of this new consumerized user community, the only viable solution is to produce applications at a faster pace and at lower risk; getting new applications to market faster, at a lower cost.
How Agile Codeless Works
Agile Codeless is a rapid method of designing and deploying situational applications for workgroups and teams. It’s codeless because applications are authored using a platform that supplies pre-formed building blocks of technology, negating the need to see or use programming code. The absence of code and script in design workshops is important because it removes the barriers between IT experts and business professionals responsible for scoping applications; probably because they are stakeholders and users of the app to be authored.
The ability to develop applications in near real-time (largely during workshops with users and stakeholders) not only makes applications ‘better-fit’ to the community of users and beneficiaries they’re intended for, but reduces the time, cost and risk of applications developments – all but removing testing, tuning and re-working costs.
Agile Codeless methods and tools dramatically reduce the skills needed for authoring applications which means that one individual can reasonably discharge the entire lifecycle. The fact that applications are authored ‘faster’ does not remove the need for quality gates or pre-qualification of the use-case, user needs and benefactor outcome expectations. Developments are by necessity heavily pre-scoped using formalized analysis methods that include:
- Outcome Driven Innovation (ODI) based job worth analysis
- Scorecarding
- SRPRS applications scoping
The Author
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 teams of tech companies in Europe, America and Canada. He can be contacted via his LinkedIn profile or follow him on Twitter.