Technological advances continue to create huge opportunities for finance businesses. But technology isn’t enough. Creating successful products and services won’t happen if banks and financial companies don’t have enough people with the right skills. If your organisation is struggling to recruit those with software engineering and coding skills, Paul Stallard looks at how you can continue to innovate.
For some decades now, the biggest problem financial services companies had was updating old technology, outdated processes and systems. Today, those organisations – and every new player in the sector – agree their biggest problem is finding enough people with the right talent and experience to do what needs doing.
In some organisations, it’s not unusual to take as much as a year to launch a new product. By that time, competitors are likely have got there first. Don’t forget, we’re all chasing more or less the same pool of customers.
‘Lean agile’, ‘DevOps’ and any number of other methodologies have helped build new products more quickly. But what more can be done to speed up the process?
Low-code and no-code are open source software solutions which effectively democratise technology making it accessible to everyone, regardless of their technical knowledge and capability.
Low-code development platforms
John Rymer of business and technology consultants, Forrester, pointed out a while ago that low-code development platforms can make software development up to ten times faster than traditional methods.
Low-code technology gives users who don’t know how to create fully coded solutions, simple, easy-to-use development tools.
Low-code development platforms allow users to build entire products, mobile apps and software solutions without detailed knowledge of programming languages. Users can drag and drop the necessary components into pre-built templates. This allows them to quickly put together everything, from website pages to entire mobile applications.
Anyone in the product management team can be trained to use a low-code development platform. That reduces dependence on coding engineers who can then work on other, potentially more important, projects.
Some see this as the ultimate position for product management methodologies, where no – or at least fewer – coding engineers are needed.
‘No code’ versus ‘low code’
Anyone researching this subject may have noticed the apparent interchangeability of the phrases ‘low-code’ and ‘no-code’ and wondered if they are the same thing. Well, they’re not.
Low-code development tools are similar to no-code platforms. Both make data management, on-boarding, compliance procedures and chat bots easier via a user interface rather than needing complete raw programming code.
So, while low-code users need some understanding of programming, those using no-code solutions don’t.
Citizen developers
Low code and no code technology give organisations the opportunity to appoint a non-technical person to drive new product development like never before. This has prompted the creation of a new role in increasing numbers of businesses – that of the ‘citizen developer’.
The citizen developer is simply a non-IT employee whose job it is to use technology to make their work, and that of their colleagues, a lot easier.
They’re not mavericks running around the business doing whatever they want. Instead, they collaborate with the whole organisation, working with tools that are favoured by IT or other business units.
More often than not citizen developers will not report to IT but to another business unit or function.
Organisations may have more than one citizen developer, depending on the opportunities and challenges they face.
For obvious reasons, a citizen developer is someone with a very deep understanding of an organisation’s business processing and operational needs. They must also have advanced digital skills which would include low-code and no-code development platforms, workflow analytics and much more.
So many new technologies come and go because technology and the business do not always work together as they should. Used wisely low-code technology will force a more successful level of collaboration between the two with much improved, longer-term benefits.
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