Who has actually seen a success story with this sort of thing?
We arrived at "low-code", but by way of actually solving our problem domain through many hellish iterations and figuring out what all of the various points of configuration should be. As far as I am aware, this is not something that Microsoft or any other vendor can determine for your business ahead of time.
I am sure that there are a lot of types of smaller needs that can be addressed with these sorts of tools, but the big tasks of integrating multiple unique/legacy business systems together into a single logical process with its own internal state is not ever feasible with these tools. You can always get close, but its like a siren song in my experience.
"Who has actually seen a success story with this sort of thing?"
Citizen development stuff is usually more successful than an IT department knows. They think it's failing because every time they hear about it, it's because of some mess. The thing is, they don't hear about all the stuff that works fine. There's typically a ton of MS Access, Quickbase, Excel, Google Sheets, Salesforce, etc, "apps" written and run by non-tech folks that the IT department never knows about.
This stuff is a tactical solution that fills a gap in poor business solutions. Give it 5, 10 years and these non-IT solutions will be a nightmare for everyone involved.
This stuff is really prevalent. I'm a programmer and I'll happily build out some low-code solution in Google Sheets or whatever.
Since it takes out of the equation a whole host of potential workloads (deployment, environment maintenance, source code control, etc), these low-code solutions offer rapid deployment of prototypes. Often times, these little prototypes end up being used by 100s of people within a company.
I love it because I bill out like $x0k for a few days of work. Once it's done, I pretty much never have to support it, since Google is managing that for me.
Clients love it because development is done in a few days and they never seem to have to contact anyone for support. The successful ones always lead to more business. Especially with megacorps with lots of brands. Brand X will show off their new dashboard, and Brand Y wants their own version and will happily pay pretty close to the original price for basically a copy-pasta job.
We have a Microsoft "Access app" build by a ex employee. it was used by a lot of people and now in process to be rewritten into a web app. i guess that's a success story(?).
>I am sure that there are a lot of types of smaller needs that can be addressed with these sorts of tools, but the big tasks of integrating multiple unique/legacy business systems together into a single logical process with its own internal state is not ever feasible with these tools. You can always get close, but its like a siren song in my experience.
i'm fine with that. when they hit a problem that no Microsoft "connector" can solve. you charge them 10x to implement a real solution.
Low-code has been a success in my org, because it's driven by programmers with business analyst acumen. Its not for everyone, but for the right person, it just clicks and they can sit down with a client and come up with something great in very little time. It works very, very well as a rapid prototype or MVP tool.
On the flip side, some of those spreadsheets that reach the "would be easier to manage with a proper codebase" status never would have gotten off the ground had they started as a development project.
It really is full-circle with excel. You can start there, then wind up using it again once you realize its still an excellent data interchange mechanism.
We arrived at "low-code", but by way of actually solving our problem domain through many hellish iterations and figuring out what all of the various points of configuration should be. As far as I am aware, this is not something that Microsoft or any other vendor can determine for your business ahead of time.
I am sure that there are a lot of types of smaller needs that can be addressed with these sorts of tools, but the big tasks of integrating multiple unique/legacy business systems together into a single logical process with its own internal state is not ever feasible with these tools. You can always get close, but its like a siren song in my experience.