How no-code development tools can benefit IT

No-code application development tools can quickly deliver information to customers, while freeing IT resources to concentrate on core business needs.

Remember when application development was done only by IT? Those days are gone forever. Today, line-of-business (LOB) departments that expect near-instant results have a new weapon: cloud-based, no-code development tools.

Some LOB managers are turning to no-code application development tools as a way to circumvent a recalcitrant CIO or IT department lacking the time and budget for cloud application projects that aren't considered high priority. Yet, IT can benefit by divesting itself of simple development projects that do not place intellectual assets in jeopardy. The CIO who condones such departmental application development can even be perceived as a forward-thinking facilitator.

Leveraging pre-built templates that cover a range of usage scenarios, no-code application development tools are designed to appeal to users with no expertise in Javascript, Python or other programming languages. Built on a foundation of configurable components for importing and handling data, and a drag-and-drop interface for building mobile app front ends, a key aim is to offload simple projects from developers -- whose coding skills are likely more valuable elsewhere.

For the Sarasota Memorial Health Care System in Florida, IT welcomed the opportunity to jettison development of a mobile app designed to help visitors use their iPhones and iPads to navigate the facility's corridors without getting lost. "We built an application that displays cloud-resident maps on a user's phone or tablet and uses BLE [Bluetooth Low Energy] with iBeacon to pinpoint and mark the current location," said Charles Westcott, a senior digital developer not in IT, but in the hospital's marketing department. A counterpart for Android devices is slated to go live in the fall of 2015.

No-code dev responds to GPS problem

Westcott and Sarasota Memorial's IT department mutually agreed on theMobileSmith Inc. no-code development platform, combined with beaconing technology from Gimbal Inc. MobileSmith was selected largely on the strength of the Raleigh, N.C., company's track record with other medical institutions. Sarasota Memorial chose the BLE and iBeacon combination after an experiment using GPS technology was unable to pinpoint altitude with sufficient accuracy to determine on which of a building's floors a visitor was located. Using the representational state transfer (REST) API simplified tying the mobile application into the hospital's map database and will form the basis for the next data-integration phase: extracting and displaying doctors' information and office locations.

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"These tools are not evil," said Theresa Lanowitz, founder of advisory services at research firmvoke Inc., based in Minden, Nev. "Good no-code tools can make IT appear more innovative and makes a CIO more aware of what's going on throughout the company. What this does do is get rid of the command-and-control type of IT, but IT does need to be aware of which tools are being used and act as a mentor, not an adversary."

Andrew Leigh, vice president of products and alliances at no-code tool maker Jitterbit, based in Alameda, Calif., is even blunter in his assessment about a no-code approach. "I don't know if it's good or bad for IT, but it certainly is inevitable," he said. "In this age, every employee of every company should be thought of as an employee of IT, and that means IT needs to shift its vision to be companywide -- not just departmental."

That inevitability is nothing new, according to Leigh and Lanowitz.

"Twenty-five years ago, everything was coded," Leigh said. A custom accounting system that took Leigh and his colleagues four years to build inC++ was replaced just a few years later with a package from Oracle. Packages of that ilk are now giving way to cloud-based software as a service, he said.

Departments have long tinkered with their own app development, including PC-based DOS utilities that proliferated across the LAN, said Lanowitz. "IT had to learn to contend with this."

Though hard coding was indeed the norm, code generators for mainframe development that ran on PCs under MS-DOS existed as far back as the mid-1980s. One particularly well-known platform was ACCOLADE (A CICS COBOL Online Application Development Environment), perhaps best remembered today only for its cleverly crafted acronym.

Debatable security risks for no-code

As with all application development, the security of apps built with no-code tools is, rightfully, a key concern. "IT could possibly make an app more secure by coding it from the ground up, but IT often does not have the time, money or security expertise" said Grant Glas, founder of no-code tool makerApp Press LLC, based in Indianapolis. "IT is going to flex its muscle and ask how you are storing data. But, at end of the day, that app will save hundreds of development hours."