Agenda

  • Roll Call (East to West) Name and Institution
  • Call for a Scribe
  • Main Topic - Low/Code, No/Code, A Journey Discovery featuring J.J. Du Chateau at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • Working Group Updates
  • Close

Notes

  • The goal of this session is to share the UWM low-code/no-code journey = what worked, what we learned, what our needs were, and our drivers, and some discussion!
  • Today, we will steer away from discussions about specific vendors and products, instead focusing on the motivations and the outcomes.
  • Some definitions, principally UWM-sourced but inspired by various other sources:
    • Low Code vs No Code:
      • Some scripting/coding vs no scripting/coding required
    • LCAP - Low-Code App Platform (LCAP):
      • Visual software development where one can string together individual components to create and deploy applications with little or no coding.
      • Differs from line-of-business platforms that can be customized of extended without coding.
    • CDAP Citizen Automation and Development Platform (CDAP):
      • This is partly the latest Gartner positioning on the spectrum between low-code and no-code.
  • Gartner considers "no-code" a marketing term, Forrester has another approach to navigating this distinction, and in the market there is a lot of fuzzy overlap between the low-code-vs-no-code, so it's not something to focus overly upon!  For those with access to Gartner, these two resources provide a useful entry point:
    • Vincent, P., Iijima, K., West, M., Matvitskyy, O., Davis, K., & Jain, A. (2023) _Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms_, Gartner Research, Article ID G00786718, available at https://www.gartner.com/document/4853531 — LCAPs accelerate application development by abstracting common reusable software components and allocating developer effort to tasks closer to business outcomes. Software engineering leaders should use this research to assess their use cases against vendor offerings.
    • Matvitskyy, O., Iijima, K., West, M., Davis, K., Jain, A., & Vincent, P. (2023) _Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms_, Gartner Research, Article ID G00785824, available at https://www.gartner.com/document/4843031 — LCAPs accelerate application development by abstracting the coding for the common reusable software components and allocating developer effort to tasks closer to business outcomes. Use this research to compare and contrast vendors in the global LCAP market.
  • "¿but isn't low-code and no-code everywhere already?"  When we look at the tools and templates in Microsoft Teams and in Google Workspace there is a lot of sprawl around these things already appearing in our environments and other platforms.
  • Beware of inconsistent definitions and hype!  There are also a lot of "alphabet soup" and overlapping capabilities in this space, including:
    • MXDP = MultieXperience Development Platforms
    • RPA = Robotic Process Automation
    • DAP = Digital Adoption Platforms
    • CWM = Collaborative Work Management
    • iBPMS = Intelligence Business Process Management Suite
  • Some of the UWM drivers for doing this work including a range of local applications built in unsupportable technologies by individuals who might not still be working at the university... and note particularly the drivers here related to the UWM migrations from PeopleSoft to Workday, where features and functions that were perhaps customized in PeopleSoft and do not exist in the new Workday solutions that the business decided it needed to retain, so that became a pressing driver here too.
  • The implications of these drivers have a dangerous and unsustainable application sprawl including a lot of duplication (including duplication of enterprise data) of basic forms-and-workflow and local variations to purchase-and-payment and adjacent finance processes and activities across the university:
    • When local applications are built in unsupported tools:
      • Sustainability risks related to technology and skills and so forth.
      • Data and security risks
      • Compliance risks
      • Duplicative applications where people don't know what already exists
    • Campus needs:
      • An option for locally-developed applications in various at-risk situations
      • An easy-to-use platform to build local applications and workflow automations
      • Ability to interact with other systems (e.g., centrally-managed email service)

  • There might be a gap in the tooling needs between office-productivity solutions and full-blown programming stacks — note that the focus of the UWM work here is really on the local-departmental applications rather than on enterprise applications:

    ...and the analogy here is like the ease and utility of a bicycle (vs) the industrial-strength carrier vehicle:

    ...so, what do we do about all the vehicle-type needs in the middle?
  • Goals here:


  • Quite a spread of use-cases, including (and also including a per-diem calculator that was customized in PeopleSoft previously) these:
  • The approach was as follows, to explore and understand what is available in this space and what options would best suit for UWM:
    • a research-and-recommendation project was run over six months
    • sixty different low-code-and-no-code product offerings were assessed
    • there were a great many meetings and discussions held with campus stakeholders and with IT functional areas — these meetings were focused on:
      • gathering use-cases
      • vetting use-cases
      • understanding the tool-capability requirements
      • reviewing vendor feedback
    • meetings and discussions were also held with:
      • vendors (with project-team and campus stakeholders)
      • Gartner and other industry analysts
    • The evaluation included UWM developers using the final six shortlisted tools to create a building-access-request form
  • Primary selection and filtering criteria included:
  • As of January 2024, UWM is focused currently on the governance of the use-cases and which should be encouraged and which not.  The status of this initiative is now:
    • Acquired a LCAP solution (done)
    • IT service team hired (done)
    • Advisory Board created (done)
    • Training (initial cohort done, second round starting)
    • Administration & Governance structures (ongoing)
    • Integrations with IT infrastructure (ongoing)
    • First applications in development
  • Some learnings and reflections:
    • the whole low-code/no-code space is still maturing
    • the whole low-code/no-code space is still evolving rapidly
    • there is a large variety of vendor solutions with a correspondingly wide range of focus and capabilities
    • no-code capabilities will continue to be added into other products (that we all use already)
    • niche no-code products (dedicated to serving quite-specific focus-and-capability mixes) will continue to appear in the market
    • every platform requires some measure of training and appropriate application-development knowledge (commensurate with the use-case)
  • Challenges in the future are expected to include:
  • There is no unicorn solution!  What would that unicorn solution look like?  It would be something enabling any person to build anything safely with little training or support.  UWM did find several platforms that were able to fill the gap (between desktop-productivity tools and full-blown technology-stack solutions).
  • Beyond the platform:

Further Information

ZOOM Chat

  • 08:21:43 From Mary Stevens to Everyone: Obligatory question about how AI is going to drive the tool set or the adoption of the tool set?  You might cover it later in the presentation, but putting it out there to answer when appropriate.
  • 08:32:41 From jeff kennedy to Everyone: #lol we have about one-hundred-and-seventeen different building-access-request forms here, built in about ninety-eight different technologies, so that example is close to home!
  • 08:36:09 From Dave Berry to Everyone: Did you consider accessibility among your criteria, e.g. WCAG 2.0?
  • 08:42:21 From jeff kennedy to Everyone: ¿How do you see/navigate the difference between LCAP (low-code for builders who probably work for Central IT) and CDAP (no-code for business partners with zero awareness of SDLC)? ...do your "citizens" require something like a driver licence to get into the tooling?
  • 08:43:02 From Todd Schaefer to Everyone: Who made the decision for the Division of Information Technology to get engaged in Low Code/No Code space?
  • 08:43:17 From jeff kennedy to Everyone: @J.J. Du Chateau (Wisconsin) = superb and provocative and useful presentation today, thank you!
  • 08:43:22 From Piet Niederhausen to Everyone: Thank you JJ, very thoughtful and well presented!
  • 08:44:24 From Ashish Pandit to Everyone: Thanks JJ. Are you able to share which tools made it to your short list?
  • 08:44:27 From J.J. Du Chateau (Wisconsin) to Everyone: Replying to "Did you consider acc..." Yes, we have our accessibility folks review each of our finalists.  They do vary in how well then comply to WCAG 2.0.
  • 08:45:00 From jeff kennedy to Everyone: ¿Did you have a sense of preconditions before getting into this?  Particularly for the data-and-functionality side of things, my expectation is that we have good/beautiful APIs that can field maybe 80% of the data and functionality that the most-common local-and-departmental use-cases require.  Without that, i fear a world of the same old badness and shiny faux-endorsed scale!
  • 08:45:29 From Louis King to Everyone: @J.J. Du Chateau (Wisconsin)  You looked at a ton of environments. Thanks for sharing the journey.
  • 08:45:32 From J.J. Du Chateau (Wisconsin) to Everyone: Replying to "¿How do you see/navi..." For us, we are having local IT folks do local IT dev, and they have to agree to the service's TOS and abide by SDLC best practices to develop in it.
  • 08:46:02 From Dana Miller I UTA to Everyone: Great presentation J.J.! In what areas were some of the people you didn’t expect to be interested?
  • 08:46:21 From J.J. Du Chateau (Wisconsin) to Everyone: Replying to "Who made the decisio..." IT - both the EAs in the CTO office and the sponsors of our Workday migration effort.
  • 08:47:40 From jeff kennedy to Everyone: ¿Governance: i've formed a view that we need to enable and encourage local variation where it makes sense (i.e., where specific research disciplines or particular teaching pedagogies demand them) and that we must curate common practices and standards everywhere else (and particularly for the _enabling_ business capabilities like finance and human resources)... all this to avoid "The Tragedy of the Commons".  What are your thoughts on this aspect of governance?
  • 08:48:24 From Piet Niederhausen to Everyone: There’s vendor lock in for an LCAP, but as J.J. started out describing there’s also effectively lock in for any solution people come up with that’s not staffed/supported, no matter what the technology.
  • 08:48:38 From Henry Pruitt to Everyone: one thing that has come to mind when looking at this before is how can solutions that are home grown be shared, if not a direct fit, as a good base for customization... since teams may have the same need and just not know another team already has something built
  • 08:49:13 From John A Mobley to Everyone: Thank you for the great topic today
  • 08:49:23 From Henry Pruitt to Everyone: and the last time we looked at it the license costs of some of the solutions was scary!
  • 08:51:14 From Mary Stevens to Everyone: Do you have clear metrics to know if it is a success in the long run, justify a continuing investment in the tool?
  • 08:53:32 From Louis King to Everyone: We will have access to operational data in our application inventory that accrues incidents and problems as well as usage, users, performance, etc. We can slice by platform.
  • 08:56:06 From J.J. Du Chateau (Wisconsin) to Everyone: Jonathan.DuChateau@wisc..edu if anyone wants to discuss further, including vendor specifics.
  • 08:57:05 From Irene A Ogolla to Everyone: Thank you! That was wonderful.
  • 08:57:11 From Rupert Berk to Everyone: Excellent information. Thanks, JJ

Attendees-26 on the call

ZOOM Chat


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