Low-code challenges: A Computer Weekly Downtime Upload podcast

One of the questions the IT decision-makers in organisations using SAP are asking is how low-code and no-code tooling will change how they manage enterprise software going forward.

It is a question the UK & Ireland SAP User Group (UKISUG) has been pondering. Computer Weekly spoke to chair of the user group, Conor Riordan, during the UKISUG annual Connect 25 conference in Birmingham. Riordan says that as SAP brings out new technology, it is being made available to citizen developers.

Traditionally, IT organisations took requirements from business users and coded those requirements into the enterprise software, which was then made available to end users. In general, SAP recommends organisations configure its software, rather than develop bespoke customisations, which not only requires SAP programming skills, but also means the customisations need to be maintained and kept aligned to changes made to the core SAP enterprise software platform.

Configuration means the core system remains clean and it is this configurability that is lowering the technical barriers needed to develop useful enhancements to the SAP system.

This is being accelerated by the integration of artificial intelligence (AI), and in particular generative AI (GenAI) in enterprise software, which has the potential to alter IT’s relationship with the business, as Riordan explains: “Some of this technology is now being made available to end users to enable them to code themselves without having to learn to code.” In effect, end users can configure the software simply through prompt engineering. 

“This allows end users to do ‘level 1 IT developer work’. It is really, really good for prototyping and from a concept perspective,” he says. 

However, for Riordan, where this becomes challenging, is how this end user coding is put into the corporate production environment. He says IT leaders need to consider how the output from end user coding is managed and supported.

He says: “There's a path between how you empower your business users to be citizen developers and entrepreneurs when it comes to experimenting with technology and how you collaborate with IT to industrialise those ideas and put them into a productive system that can be supported through a robust business process.” 

There is certainly a case to avoid enabling these capabilities in enterprise software given the complexity of such IT systems and the vast sums of money invested by the business to make them work properly. But the ease of programmability now coming to enterprise software is analogous to the era of Excel macros, which resulted in an explosion in use, leaving a headache of unmanaged code for IT departments.

There are lessons that can be learned from Excel macros. But as Riordan notes, the idea of end users programming enterprise systems is becoming more and more mainstream as new graduates are coming out of college, who are all digital savvy.

He says: “They're all IT literate. They're all able to program and when they come into organisations and they're faced with having to write a requirement document and give it over to someone in IT who's going to try and code it but doesn't really understand what you want to achieve, we'll see a lot of friction.”

Riordan believes low-code/no-code technology is empowering new graduates but IT departments are still in the old world where there is a separation between the business and IT. “We are really trying to figure out how we all operate in the new world where we can maximise productivity and ingenuity, while at the same time maintaining the robustness of our production IT systems.”