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PROPHECY: THE NO-CODE REVOLUTION IS COMING FOR DATA GOVERNANCE

By Malcolm Chisholm

I occasionally like to indulge in predictions, such as “The Dawn of Big Data – Are We on The Cusp of a New Paradigm?” from October of 2009.  Well, Big Data has come and gone, and it had a good run for a while before mutating into a variety of offspring.  Now change is in the air again for the data profession – this time from the No-Code revolution.

What Is No-Code?

No-code is a new software philosophy that is now available in a wide range of commercial products.  The most fundamental idea is that businesspeople can create their own applications without needing to involve IT, without having to rely on external consultants, and without having to buy off-the-shelf tools.  Business users can create their own databases and put automated workflows on top of them, together with simple logic.  And it can all be done incredibly quickly and cheaply.

Another principle of the No-Code revolution is that you do not use a single product.  Instead you use a constellation of products.  Many of the No-Code products have integration.  For the ones that are not integrated there is a family of No-Code tools that will perform the integration for you (e.g. Zapier, Integromat).  There is no concept of single monolithic product from a single vendor.

As may be expected, the No-Code tools are Cloud based with subscription models.  You can take out the subscription level that best suits you.  And you can be flighty with them.  If something better shows up, you just unload your existing data to csv files, do some no-coding in the new product, upload your data into the new product and move on. 

No IT, no consultants, no time-consuming software acquisition cycles, no expensive licenses, no silos, no administrative overhead for care and feeding of the software, no being told to make your processes look like the software, and little commitment.  That’s just some of the promise of the No-Code revolution.

AND SO WHAT FOR DATA GOVERNANCE?

In the past decade we have seen the rapid growth of tools for Data Governance.   These tools have justified themselves, play an important role, and will continue to do so.  But at the same time there are a myriad of Data Governance use cases that are conceptually simple yet not aligned to these tools.  Many Data Governance use cases are simple lists of things that need to be managed in a particular way, with a particular network of stakeholders who play various roles in the use case.  My experience has been that there is a great deal of variety in terms of Data Governance use cases from one enterprise to the next.  No one tool will ever be able to address all these small to medium-sized needs, and the majority of them are quite simple.  

There is also often a need to further process information produced by the major Data Governance platforms.  For instance, you can get analytics our of these platforms about how people are interacting with them.  That can be normalized and analyzed using No-Code solutions to provide operational reporting and insights, and is a perfect No-Code use case.

Get Ready

In my career I’ve had quite a few data professionals tell me that they got into data because they couldn’t code, or didn’t want to.  Well, now they have the opportunity to become nocoders.  It may be that if they do not adapt to becoming nocoders they are not going to have much of a future.  Gartner is predicting that by 2025 70% of all development will be done by Citizen Developers using No-Code solutions https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/10/gartner_it_symposium/).  Many No-Code companies are already wildly successful, like Airtable, to mention just one, with a current valuation north of $7.0B and over 250,000 customers.  

Is There Opportunity?

The revolution is already here, and we can expect it to only gather force.  However, it brings with it an aspect that may not yet be addressed, which is the need for governance.  What data is in these No-Code applications, where is it stored, what does it mean, who knows about it, and so on.  In other words we are going to have to extend our Data Governance framework to cover No-Code too.  This may be a challenge, given that Data Governance has never adequately addressed End User Computing (EUC).  But that is a topic for another day.  For now, let’s roll with the revolution. 

There’s a revolution going on that is likely to have profound implications for Data Governance over the next few years.  It’s the No-Code revolution, and there’s no avoiding it. In this article I explore the fundamental principles of the revolution and why we are all going to be affected by it.   Are you planning to adopt No-Code in your Data Governance program?  Do you thing Data Governance professionals need to become nocoders?  Are you planning to become a nocoder?  Share your thoughts – I’d really like to hear from you. 

Read more at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/prophecy-no-code-revolution-coming-data-governance-malcolm-chisholm #businessglossary #datagovernance #datacatalog #datacatalogs #metadata #metadatamanagement #data #bigdata #nocode #lowcode #datamanagement #MDM