Civic Innovations

A recent panel discussion facilitated by ACT-IAC, which included former and current government employees, provided deeper insight into the challenges agencies are facing when working to deliver new services. 

The shorthand takeaway: There is a need for more speed.

This ACT-IAC panel discussion focused on the growing use of low-code and no-code tools to speed up the delivery of agency digital solutions. The overriding sentiment was that using these tools was a way to enable faster delivery of solutions than more traditional software development approaches.

While it’s true these tools can speed up the creation and deployment of digital solutions, there are tradeoffs that agencies need to consider in order to use these tools most effectively.

“No code” doesn’t mean there’s no code

While low-code and no-code tools can reduce the need to write custom software code, one of the great misconceptions of these tools is that they involve no code at all — that no-code applications can be “code free.” 

A similar misconception exists with people new to cloud computing. Putting solutions “in the cloud” or adopting a “serverless” approach doesn’t mean that there are no servers involved, it’s just that those servers are not readily visible. The details of managing the servers and other infrastructure hosting an application are abstracted away from the cloud user, but they still must be maintained and supported.

Similarly, low-code and no-code solutions don’t necessarily mean less code is used. The underlying code behind these solutions is simply abstracted away from the person creating them. In fact, low-code solutions may generate more code than an application developed in a traditional way — it’s hard to know, because we usually can’t see the underlying code. 

Technical debt and security issues

For a government agency that is under pressure to deliver a new solution quickly, abstracted-away code might seem like a small concern. But there are real implications to solutions built on large, complex code bases. All things being equal, larger code bases are harder to manage, improve, and secure. 

In late 2021, a newly identified zero-day exploit in the popular and widely used Apache Log4j logging utility caused agencies to scramble to determine if their applications and platforms were vulnerable to the new exploit. Agencies that took comfort in not knowing the technical details of the code base behind their low-code and no-code applications suddenly cared very much about what those underlying code bases looked like.

Your UX is not a commodity

The recent ACT-IAC panel also talked a lot about where low-code and no-code tools can be used most effectively, such as automating labor-intensive back-office processes. While there is an argument to be made for that use case, it can be tempting for some agencies to use them to design external-facing interfaces.

The civic tech community has collectively spent nearly a decade emphasizing the importance of user-centered design and building experiences for users that rival those of consumer technology. This isn’t just nice for users. It’s vital for agencies who want to deliver services effectively, realize their mission, and comply with directives to improve customer experiences.

Building a high-quality user experience is not merely about making a pretty website. It is a deeply strategic aspect of how an organization keeps and retains users. It’s how an organization successfully transforms itself for the digital era. It requires planning and coordination, and can not be met solely by acquiring a tool that enables non-coders to drag and drop elements of a user interface onto a canvas and then click a button to push it out to users. 

Alternative approaches to low code

One alternative to these tools is to adopt a platform approach. Internal developer platforms are an important component of any agency’s digital modernization strategy and provide important benefits to support the development and delivery of software. These platforms help reduce the amount of custom code needed to support new applications.

Promoting reuse of services: Platforms include common functionality, like observability, logging, and authentication, that every mature application needs. These features can be built once and reused widely to accelerate application teams, letting them build on top of a foundation of already-solved problems.

Separation of responsibility: Platforms help define clear boundaries between the team responsible for the common functionality included in a platform, and the application teams using it — helping narrow each team’s scope and the need to repeatedly rebuild components that are already included in the platform.

Private sector companies are increasingly turning to these internal developer platforms, often referred to as Golden Paths and Paved Roads, to enable rapid development and minimize the amount of new custom code that goes into each application. Agencies like the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services are also realizing significant benefits from adopting a platform approach, enabling them to more quickly, efficiently, and securely deliver new digital services.

Low-code and no-code tools present an attractive option for agencies under pressure to deliver new digital solutions quickly. But they also come with tradeoffs. Understanding these tradeoffs is important for agencies to position themselves to effectively deliver new and improved digital services.