Heavy Strategy | August 16, 2022
HS030 Can Low Code Fit Your IT Strategy
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Greg
Ferro
Johna Till
Johnson
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Both sides of the low code/no code debate. We outline two sides of the debate, discuss four topics in favour of low code and then cover four negatives. Avoidance of toil coding, avoid skill shortage and viable testing are good things. Lockin, shadow IT and ownership are problematic. Its a solid debate on the topic.
Sponsor
Thanks to Kolide for sponsoring. Kolide offers a user-centred approach to end point security by scanning and monitoring their devices. If something is outside policy Kolide will engage the user in Slack to find out more and suggest rectification. We don’t often see security tooling the engages the user and encourages them to participate in compliance. Its worth checking out Honest Security – https://honest.security/ which describes the philosophy behind this.
If you want more information then use the code HEAVYSTRATEGY when visiting Kolide – Endpoint Security for Teams That Slack – https://www.kolide.com/heavystrategy to receive a goody bag.
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listening to the podcast I had 2 thought.
Users are a problem, mainly in US where the lack of skills in workers goes all the way to HR, where HR sets requirements but cannot verify them.
The solution would be to use recruiting companies but then they have also been know to oversell people.
The biggest problem is that workers are resistant to the idea of continuing education and companies do not enforce or encourage it.
For example, the local college here had an amazing course on computer for seniors. I paid out of pocket because I wanted to see how it was. The course took a users from no computer experience to using email and web and etiquette pretty quickly.
I made that my recommendation for the course, i talked to management and we agreed to pay for the course ($60), but no one took it. No one enrolled because that are already working and thought that the company should pay them to take the course.
But in the opposite side, with another company we did an office course series, brought the teacher onsite and had 3 levels for word, Excel and outlook. There was an initial questionnaire to check the proficiency level and almost all users needed beginner minimum. Management got in the way and did not allow people to take courses, or only allow the higher levels …. because the user is in Excel every day and know how to use Excel. It was so bad that the trainer asked me if he should cancel the training. Advanced level was really advanced, and explaining difficult formulas to people that don’t know how to save, what a source is, and how to make formulas in general is fruitless.
In the end it did help about 10% of the people, but it made either the other 90% think that they were better than they were actually, or hurt their confidence.
Management later asked to see if we could do yearly and i refused because it took a lot of work to setup, it was expensive and management shorted the experience, so I had a request that the trainer was going to assign the courses, the users would not sign in, and the directors refused, saying that they wanted to assign people to courses to make sure there were no holes for productivity……Each class was offered twice this way half of accounting could attend one, and half the other, but also this was during low season and for the previous engagement we almost stopped operations. The problem was management trying to control the image of the department.
So, low code doesn’t work when the user level and continuing education is low and unfortunately iny 20+ years of IT experience this is every where.
People here are thought that there is an artificial limit to learning, this is why people specialize too much (I know how to move boxes and that is all I can do, as long as the box is not red), with that comes the lack of understanding of other areas. The red line project video is an exaggerated example of something very common.
I have a little experience with an University and there the low code works, but because they are all engineers of some sort, and it is research and they are used to having to “tweak” things to work properly. In the general marketplace it doesn’t work.
Just my 2 cents.
Love the podcast