Digital democracy or IT anarchy? Gartner flags the low-code revolution Gartner has raised the specter of departments outside of tech running their own IT functions under the guise of low-code and digital democratization. A study by the consultant-cum-market-researcher has shown that 46 percent of EMEA CIOs are moving to a world where techies are no longer the sole proprietor of a company's …
The thought of massed Excel 2.0 warriors makes me shudder, but I've seen enough this past few months to see where data is going and how to get money out of it and it needs skills from all over a business. IT will still provide the backbone but data is now "in yer face" commercial and needs completely different mentalities to fashion it. Even the name "data scientist" seems old in an environment where data value is subjective, fashionable and ever changing and you need experts from various fields to access it and fast.
Governance is the key and there are loads of tools out there now to control all that. This is going to be fun.
IT Departments are often seen as slow, expensive and obstructive by other departments.
Some of that is due to good governance frameworks, but often its IT Dept not understanding the wider business and simple protectionism.
In most companies IT should be a service to the rest if the business, and good enough that shadow IT is less attractive.
> often its IT Dept not understanding the wider business and simple protectionism.
No, often it's senior management information hiding, getting you to do a half-ass job and then passing it onto an outside consultant (after giving you the day off). Then pretending he did it.
No, often it's senior management information hiding
We used to allow remote offices a good deal of autonomy in IT terms - right up until we had a rash of office managers basically disconnecting themselves from the phone system and network..
(a phone/broadband vendor had done a presentation to the office managers forum and sold a bunch of VOIP phone switches and routers to the offices. Trouble is, they completely replaced the extant office routers which dropped the offices concerned off our MPLS network - which meant no access at all to internal systems *and* Internet. We arrived at one office after they phoned the service desk, expecting to have to commission the spare on-site router only to discover that the live router and the backup were no-where to be seen. They then had the temerity to tell us that we should work with the telecomms company to allow their routers to be added to our MPLS setup. We said no. Our ISP said no. Eventually our board said no. The offices then had to pay the telecoms company *and* our ISP to have the old routers reinstated and the PABX routed out via our MPLS rather than via the telecoms network. Oh what fun we had. And the days of the offices doing what they wanted with no reference to us got crapped on from a very great height.)
Another aspect is that IT may try to process data using tools that would do it properly, for example writing custom code where there is a single point of truth for the source of the data and a defined process for changing anything, which is more stable and likely to perform better in the long run. However, building something yourself is a lot faster because you don't have to find someone with the programming skills to make that, nor go through the process of explaining clearly to the programmer what you need and answering all those questions. Developing a system that's high quality often takes time that the group concerned doesn't want to spend, and hacks like Excel end up bridging the gap.
As a person who sometimes ends up writing the code for this part*, I have sympathy with the groups here. When I write code that takes data from a form they already have and performs some simple transformations on it before giving it back in another straightforward form, it often seems like there should be a way to do this that's somewhere between an Excel spreadsheet with zero error checking and a custom-built program with a lot of manually-written error checking with an environment in which to run it. I haven't yet seen a low code system that I'm confident does this well, but I definitely understand the desire for it.
* My job mostly involves writing more complex programs, but if they need some plumbing, it can get assigned to me as with anyone else. I also do volunteer work and this is by far the largest subset of programming tasks that charities make of me.
> In most companies IT should be a service to the rest if the business
In most companies it is.
The problem is, a good service also has the responsibility to say "No." from time to time. When IT does that, usually they have a good reason to do so. When the reaction to that is to create shadow IT systems, instead of asking "Why not?" and actually listening to the answer, then the problem is not coming from IT.
It's not new - back in the day, minicomputers (and then microcomputers...) were often a departmental response to a perceived or actual failure of provision by central organisations.
If you have a poorly-run company, riven by turf-wars (probably the majority of them...), any new technology whose acquisition isn't forbidden by existing policies is going to be a candidate for bolstering someone's power base. Cross-functional management is fairly rare, which is a shame as there's usually a genuine business requirement that's currently unmet and usually a better way of achieving it than business units going their own way.
Tech is a broad church. IT depts. are good at core services, but maybe not so much use with specialist analysis.
IT would never complain or demand control if Sales employed a consultant and that consultant used a data analyst.
Now Sales may feel that the data analyst can work directly for them.
Not a good idea to run with the turf war school of corporate politics. Ends up toxic.
Time instead to ensure a better understanding of security prevails whenever tech is used, throughout the entity. Maybe should have been like that from the start.
Usually Gartner is an instant win of bullshit bingo, but this is quite on spot.
"even more shadow IT than the one that companies have" yep indeed. The usual "what does this server do? Nobody knows?" next level.
"This suggests to us that not all CIOs necessarily understand what AI is in the current context" - sad but true.
I had a junior staffer who once let a "software" type loose with the root password.
All I had to say was this: "You are responsible for everything that this dude breaks."
The root password was changed 2 minutes later.
If "low-code" solution fails, then the author, not IT, must be held accountable. If things go wrong....
Schools are teaching kids to code. It's up to IT departments to make use of those skills. Low-code and no-code solutions exist and are going to be used. It's up to the IT department to ensure that it's done safely. That involves setting guidelines and procedures for handling corporate data. It's a pity that it's too late to apply those controls to spreadsheets. It's up to corporate management to give IT departments the resources to do that. Billing a department for the cost of hiring a contractor to fix 'Shadow IT' will concentrate the mind wonderfully. Make sure that corporate management knows in advance that's going to happen if end-users don't follow your rules.
"Democratization... accompanied by robust governance" is a nice soundbite but one man's robust governance is another man's redtape. It was redtape that caused "non-democratization" of digital delivery in the first place. Not sure how it can accompany democratization of digital delivery.
As a user of Microsoft "Power" things in a locked down org with enterprise apps, I don't see room for a lot of "citizen developer" things (as in all the webinars and ads) happening.
It's still a techie activity even if you're plugging Lego blocks together. If you don't understand data types and control structures or text munging, it's going to be tough. And if you can't do local installs or manage user access, IT holds the keys.
I evaluated RPA tools and for instance, Automation Anywhere? Local Admin rights is needed - the run agent on your machine wants to update on a daily basis. For the case of automating cloud apps, there are more possibilities for the citizen dev, but I don't see that for desktop apps.
What is this word, "governance" that the author keeps using? In all seriousness, as a business-side techie, I represent all of the possible bad outcomes of so-called democratization. I have access dbs and power apps and VBA kluges a-plenty. But I have never sincerely been approached with an introduction or "sales pitch" for working within the governance of my organization or "teaming up" with IT to solve my many niggling techie challenges. At best, I get lengthy QnA calls and no follow up.
What governance models exist that do a good job of educating the consumer and making it practical for the consumer to arrive at a truly collaborative outcome with their IT department?
Lots of models are out there under "RPA adoption" or "Citizen Developer" programs" and "Centers of Excellence" (CoE) but it requires management changes that include IT and Business to get together and start proofs of concept (PoC) and Pilot projects.
One example to search for: "Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit"
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