Pulpstream founder Pankaj 'Romy' Malviya was invited to join Robb Wilson of OneReach, David McCormick of Alpha Software, Prabhjot Singh of Pyze, and Grant Smith of K-Rise Systems on a recent episode of Inside Analysis podcast, a forum known for its ability to bring its listeners the “latest buzz from the information economy, straight from industry experts.”
This episode, “Developers Optional: The Low-Code/No-Code Movement,” focused on a topic at the core of Pulpstream’s purpose: the rise and evolution of an organization’s ability to easily customize its own information systems to cut out unnecessary activities and streamline processes without coding or limited forms of it.
Read on to discover the key takeaways from the episode.
Driven to Make Changes
One of the main topics of the podcast was what motivated each of the guests to be part of the low-code or no-code movement.
“As an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley for the past 22 years, my experience (and interest in no-code) is that when dealing with the buzzword ‘low code’ and motivating IT to use low-code platforms, you see that lots of small chunks of code were being written throughout the processes, and it started to look much more complicated than an assembly of Java code,” Malviya explained.
Like other guests, Malviya acknowledged that the real benefit to organizations isn’t low-code software—where users still had to be familiar with, manipulate, and use code to realize the benefits of a solution—but rather a true no-code software. This, according to Malviya, ensures that processes can be easily designed and maintained exclusively by the users who perform them without needing coding skills or help from developers.
And this is exactly what Pulpstream is all about: providing a platform to streamline business processes and operations without writing a line of code. Those business users who interact with and are driven to make changes and streamline processes are those who can use Pulpstream themselves.
The Myth of Citizen Developers
The podcast also touched on the topic of empowering citizen developers, users who create business applications to be used by fellow business users. While citizen development has been in fashion since 2007, Malviya said from his experience that the practice does have its limits.
In particular, he shared that he believes it’s a myth when it comes to streamlining critical business processes that make a department run. In fact, business users are focused on their core competency and making sure that their departments run smoothly, and not on the practice of configuring a business process system itself.
Malviya elaborated: “Business managers are focused on running their business. Period. Department heads understand the processes, but do they have time to write that logic? In my 13 years of experience, I have never come across a single citizen developer enthusiastic about doing development beyond creating a simple form.”
While their skills can be used to configure forms or document a process flow, these business users can’t be expected to turn their ideas into complex processes and rules configuration that will digitize and streamline an entire process using even limited forms of coding.
Where Off-the-Shelf Software Falls Short
Finally, the podcast turned toward the relationship between commercial off-the-shelf software and its limits in enabling businesses.
Here, Malviya and the other guests agreed that if your business needs finance software, customer relationship management (CRM), or industry-specific solutions, then organizations should choose one of the many trusted, dedicated platforms.
However, for those internal, proprietary processes that make one’s business unique, represent an organization’s core competency, or reflect how your team serves your customers differently than everyone else, then that’s a different story. As Malviya noted, that’s when you want to deploy your own processes using a tool that allows you to do it exactly like you want to.
Take Your Key Processes into Your Own Hands
While the podcast covered a lot of ground, it’s clear that IT and operations industry leaders such as Malviya and the other guests are passionate about enabling organizations to drive innovation and evolution at the speed of business without the delays of complex software development.
“We focus on ZERO code. We focus on empowering business users,” Malviya stated.
In other words, for those business users looking to document, streamline, and manage those processes that make their organizations unique using a true no-code software, Pulpstream is made for you.
Schedule a demo to see how Pulpstream can digitally transform your painfully inefficient processes!
