Low-Code/No-Code Governance: The Essential Framework for Balancing Agility and Risk

[00:00:00.000] Hi, welcome back. It’s the end of the week. I’m your host, Mathieu Galipeau, and I’m with Alex today. And we’re going to be talking about how businesses need to establish some governance framework to properly implement low-code/no-code tools.

[00:00:17.280] Awesome. Yeah.

[00:00:18.290] So one thing that we’re seeing as low-code/no-code tools are beginning more and more available. And for anyone that doesn’t know what a low-code/no-code tool is anything that technically does not need a developer to customize. So if you think of some of the low-code/no-code tools that we use in our day-to-day are the Microsoft Power Apps. And what that is, is just a visual representation of different process flows or automations that you could do within your business application. The whole idea is to say, Well, you don’t need IT to build those apps anymore, and you’re providing your end users a solution that enables them to create these smaller apps and solve for business challenges. One thing that we’re seeing is similar to how people used to do with Excel, where they used to build little apps in itself. Excel used to be self-contained. It would be on someone’s desktop, or it would be didn’t have a lot of reach in the overall organization versus low code/no code tools. What they do is that they have a much greater reach on the organization. And what that can cause is that your IT is disconnected from the business needs as every department is building their own little app and you don’t have overall structure or guidance on where you want to go.

[00:01:41.090] So I don’t know if that’s something that you’ve seen or that-Yeah, the way I see it now is that just the pure accessibility to be able to build anything allows any employee and empowers them to essentially create whatever they want in terms of view.

[00:01:55.220] So obviously, now we’re talking a lot about AI, we’re talking a lot about data. Companies know that they need to be gathering a lot of data. And with this data, it allows anybody to build whatever view. So you talked about low-code/no-code, you talked about Microsoft. So the whole concept of the Power automate, Power apps is that you can use flows to automate some of the pieces of your business. If you are the only person that is aware of what you just built, right away, you’re creating a challenge for your whole business. Because if we’re multiple people building similar things without a general vision, very quickly, new people that you onboard can get lost. People leave and there’s views or automations that we’re using. We need some vision and some structure to follow. The word governance is a good one to actually allow for good IT framework for a business.

[00:02:45.640] The reason why this is now becoming a challenge, and it wasn’t a challenge before, is whenever there was a business need that couldn’t be solved through Excel, you needed to go to IT. You needed to put in a ticket. It needed to look at that ticket and say, Oh, is this something that the business actually wants to invest effort in doing? If so, well, how do we make sure that we deploy something that responds to the majority of the business? So there was already governance because there was no way around it. What low-code/no-code tools are allowing us to remove that visibility from IT and just ultimately bypass it and let people do what they want. So how can businesses adapt and make sure whatever the different departments are building, because I think it’s important to let the different departments or the different functions build out their tools as proof of concept and provide agility in their way of working, because one of the biggest complaints is, well, what’s the point of bringing it to IT? It’s going to take a year and a half for anything to happen, right? So you want to provide that flexibility, but you also want to make sure there’s governance to control it.

[00:03:53.490] So what are your thoughts around that?

[00:03:55.110] Yeah, I think, going back to the whole concept of governance as a business, you just need to not necessarily impose, but bring in… I want to go back to the vision that I use. I think just a long term vision as to this is what we want to build, this is what we want to do. You can take on new requests from employees, but you need some framework to follow. So as long as you have that as a business, I think already you’re setting yourself up to at least structure what you’re going to do. Like you said, if you take the mindset of using some of these tools as more of a prototyping, more of investigating a view, it’s already great because then you’re just trying to solve your own problems in your silo. But the second you’re trying to solve for bigger problems, you need to just make sure you align with the vision. Do you agree with that?

[00:04:39.870] Yeah, I agree with it. And I think one of the things that we’re seeing with a lot of our clients is that people don’t understand the importance or potential impact of these implementations, and they implement it with little intent. So someone from a department is going to say, Hey, can you give me access to Power Apps? I just want to build a quick flow to extract data from some system. And someone’s like, You know what? It doesn’t really have a large impact on any solution. So they just give access and provide licenses to users left and right without having overall governance. So that is the risk that we’re seeing is that it’s so easy to get access to these tools that a lot of time, IT doesn’t think twice about it and just says, Okay, build the power app that you need, do whatever you want, and that’s fine. And I think that the first step is understanding that if you’re going to deploy these tools, you shouldn’t think that it’s easier to deploy that tool to enable your end users to create what they need than to actually build something out for them. I think it’s really going to be a question of making sure that as these tools are deployed, people are trained properly, they understand the impact, and there’s this feedback loop that’s actually implemented.

[00:05:59.360] And when I think of a feedback loop, every company is going to do it differently. But there needs to be a mechanism where every, maybe month, every quarter, twice a year, IT speaks to the different departments and understands what have you built in the last two, three months, and then looks at that and says, Okay, well, actually, this is a one-off thing, and you need it temporarily because it’s a special project, or actually, no, this is a bigger business requirement that we should be solving. So I believe going forward, IT is going to be much more intentional or will have to be much more intentional about getting the information from the end user, versus in the past, IT was the gatekeeper and they had to go through them. So the mindset of whoever is going to be your director of IT, your VP of IT, who’s going to be leading IT needs to change as you’re thinking about using those different tools because there’s no need to go through IT anymore. So you want to engage You want to reach people, and you want to make sure that they feel that there’s benefit to them to go speak to you.

[00:07:05.390] And then you’re going to make a real difference in their day to day from it versus without local no-code tools. They didn’t have a choice.

[00:07:13.430] I think the takeaway from what you’re saying is it’s more of a conversation now, and you need to make sure you have that governance, whether it’s a quarterly meeting like you were saying, to have that conversation. Compare what your departments are doing. Is there overlap in what they’re doing? Can we mix and match or potentially merge some of the efforts. The point that I do want to make is that we’re in no way taking away from low-code/no-code. In fact, when you reference before that a director of IT could take sometimes a year and a half to get a turnaround on anything, the actual great thing about Power automate or any low code/no code is that they can actually do it faster as well. So the actual turnaround from the director of IT would also be quicker. So if we have these conversations, we make sure we align to our initial vision and we can actually that results quickly that have an impact on multiple departments. I think you’re finally grasping through the great things about low code/no code, all the while not necessarily segregating your departments with their processes.

[00:08:11.690] Yeah. So the trade-off is really how do you provide that agility, but at the same time, you don’t get it to a point that you have no understanding or that the business has no understanding of how these different tools work together. We do digital transformation assessments for clients when they say everything is run on a spreadsheet. I don’t understand how it works. If Jeff was to leave the business, we wouldn’t be able to order anymore. Right now it’s relatively easy. Well, it’s not relatively easy, but it is self-contained in Excel sheets, typically, or Google Sheets, so you’re able to quickly identify which one it is. If you think about these different tools that we now have at our disposal, they’re going much deeper in the ecosystem as they’re potentially getting information from API, they’re potentially replicating something that someone is doing on a desktop. They’re doing all these different things that if it’s not properly implemented and properly governed, it becomes very difficult to track. I think the other challenges that companies are going to see is that as we had traditional IT and we’re moving to a bit more of an agile type of business solution, a lot of the business analysts or the people that are running the departments that are using these tools don’t necessarily have a proper understanding or framework related to actually doing code management and documentation around it.

[00:09:42.890] Because it’s such a good tool to prototype in and it’s so easy to do, sometimes it’s easier to actually build a page than it would be to create documentation to build a page. What’s happening or what we’re seeing is happening is people are just going out and building these flows, building these external pages, or just building all these different and stuff. But since it doesn’t need to funnel through traditional IT and there’s no gate that says, Hey, do we have the proper documentation? Do we have the proper test scripts? Do we have the proper data migration strategy? Do we have the proper training, deployment? These steps that are traditional in building tools and someone could just go ahead and do it. Well, we’re getting to a place where there’s minimal documentation and minimal structure around deploying these tools. It tends to make them very fragile. One thing that we see with especially Power BI is that people are saying, I don’t trust that dashboard. That’s what you hear. They didn’t build it. Well, either they didn’t build it or you have So you have three different people that are pulling data and manipulating in three different ways.

[00:10:49.070] So for example, something that we run a lot into is perpetual inventory or just cost of good sold. So for example, someone built a cost of good soul in a Power BI dashboard versus having it directly in the ERP for whatever reason that might be. And you have your department that built it a certain way and another department that built it another way. There’s no documentation around how the logic is implemented, the calculations that are used when the data is pulled, all these different elements. So now you’re looking at two different dashboards. They’re supposed to give you the exact same answer, and they’re giving you two different answers. So now which one do you trust? And you lose trust in that. So the thing that we see is that because people that are building these don’t necessarily have the experience in building tools and they just improvise themselves as developers, they get to a point where they build something that’s not stable and that’s not necessarily accurate, and then people lose confidence in it. So if we go back to the original premise of when IT decides to make these tools available, they need to understand that these have a real business consequence.

[00:12:00.430] And as people start building these app, you could quickly lose trust from the business and what is being built from it. I don’t know if you have any thoughts of how people could mitigate some of that risk.

[00:12:14.790] Well, in my opinion, I think we’ve touched on a lot of different things. Maybe we can wrap up with the key takeaways. So I think the first one that we touched on was having a certain vision, whether it’s a business vision, whether it’s even your director of IT, communicating one to all the different teams. I think that’s super strong. At least it gives some idea. Then we were talking about this governance. One point that I did like that you brought up is the idea of having a conversation with your team. So whether it’s quarterly, whether it’s monthly, making sure you have at least visibility on what they’re building, what they need in terms of information, and make sure that it’s aligned with that vision that you initially had. Another point that you brought up was the documentation aspect. I think that one is a huge one, very often put to the side. I think people are just excited to build their Their Power BI dashboard, and then they just throw away the documentation about what am I actually looking at. So I think that is a huge piece as to also that conversation. Make sure that in that vision, in that structure you’re bringing, documentation is a core piece because you want longevity Whether you’re building a flow, you’re building a dashboard, you need longevity with some of these views, or else, I think the word you use was Frankenstein, of different views throughout your business that mean different things but look the same.

[00:13:28.920] Yeah, I think longevity is really the key take because you want agility. You want it to be quick to deploy, but you want it to be able to last in time. That’s right. I think that if you set a proper framework, then you’re going to take full advantage of the agility that these apps provide and let the users be creative in building what they need and prototyping what they need. But then you need to make sure that you’re bringing that back and you’re not letting it grow into something that you have no more control over.

[00:13:54.870] That’s right.

[00:13:55.570] Well, I mean, I hope this was interesting. I appreciate you taking time with me. Thank you. Thanks for having me. We’ll see you later.