Skip to main content

To code or not to code

There's an ongoing debate on the LocalGov Digital Slack Team about the merits of a low code approach to building digital services.

A low code platform is one that enables you to quickly create and deploy digital services usually by dragging and dropping a selection of predefined plug and play elements. These could be anything from a text input box, to a database or API call, to a bit of logic based on answers to previous questions.

Where I work we've been using a low code platform for 3-4 years and some of the stuff you can see being used in our dashboard was built without writing a line of code.

There are great benefits to having this approach available to you. Just one example of this is we're currently user testing an end-to-end register for the Self-build and Custom Housebuilding Regulations which we built in a couple of weeks. We'll make this available for anyone using the same platform as us, for free.

Because we're starting to use the Local Government Digital Service Standard and therefore the Government Digital Service design patterns, when we needed to include something that checked whether someone was over 18, we built something that looks like this. The great thing about a low code platform is now that we don't need to build that again. We can drag and drop it into any new digital service and it'll work straight away.

So low code is the way forward, right?

Well yes and no. If you're astute you'll have probably guessed that when we built our over 18 checker, we did that by writing code. The design pattern suggests that individual inputs for Day, Month and Year are best for usability for memorable dates, and we didn't have anything that merged these together into one date, then worked out if that date was more than 18 years in the past.

When you start to think about it, actually every digital service runs on code and markup, even if you don't write it or see it yourself. So actually low code is really low code once you've written the code.

Through having access to this method of building services over the past few years it's become apparent that as digital services evolve, and when you start to tackle some of the bigger transformation work, there's an increasing need to write connectors, end points and other more bespoke functionality. This isn't a one off process because the services your organisation consume will change, or you'll want to change how you use them to respond to user needs,

Without a developer you'll be at the mercy of a supplier, and you'll be in the same position some have found themselves in the past, with a supplier wanting to charge £100s for a minor change to the HTML of a web portal. This isn't prudent use of public money, nor will it enable you to get something quickly most of the time.

So my advice? Low code is a great idea and will help you accelerate the creation of your digital services. Do seriously look at it, but don't outsource your ability to create and adapt your re-usable low code elements yourself, or you'll find yourself a less agile and adaptable organisation.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Digital best practice checklist

This week I finished the draft of a digital best practice check-list. It's not digital strategy, in fact I'm increasingly thinking organisations don't need a digital strategy, they need a delivery strategy. My draft has check-list of seven questions and recommendations, with one overall recommendation regarding best practice for delivering digital. Ideally it would be incorporated into a wider service and information delivery strategy. Below I've omitted the bulk of the content, the reasoning behind arriving at the recommendation from the question because it's still in draft, but here are the seven questions and eight recommendations: 1. Is the council properly promoting its digital services and content, to reduce avoidable contact? Recommendation: Establish a “digital first” ethos to the promotion of services and better targeting what, when and where they're promoted. 2. Are the digital services the council offers, especially where the design and

Carl's Conundrum of Internal Influence

I'm writing this partly as a reply to an excellent piece that Carl Haggerty published about the disconnect between internal and external influence and partly due to various conversations over the past month about how to make using tools like collaboration platform  Pipeline common practice. This isn't really about Carl though, or Devon County Council, or any other council specifically, it's more a comment on the influence of digital teams in local governments, or lack of, and how to resolve this. So here's the question that prompted this piece. How can someone who's been recognised nationally for their work, first by winning the Guardian's Leadership Excellent Award and who has more recently been placed in the top 100 of the Local Government Chronicle's most influential people in local government , "sometimes feel rather isolated and disconnected to the power and influence internally". First, let's consider whether is this a problem to

Pipeline Alpha

In September 2014, officers from 25 councils met in Guildford to discuss a platform to enable collaboration across Local Government. A "Kickstarter for local government" is the missing part to Makers Project Teams , a concept to enable collaborative working across different organisations put forward by LGMakers the design and development strand of LocalGov Digital . Based on the user needs captured at the event, LGMakers created collaboration platform Pipeline and by October people from over 50 councils had signed up . Pipeline is an Alpha, a prototype set up to evaluate how a Kickstarter for councils might work. It is a working site though, and is being used as the platform it is eventually intended to be, at present without some of finer features a live offer might have. So what have I've learnt in the eight months since we launched Pipeline? There's a strong desire to collaborate  LocalGov Digital isn't a funded programme. I wrote about how much it

Superfast highways

You may have seen this slide I put together to help explain digital transformation This week we launched a new beta service to report speeding traffic. It looks fairly simple but to give you an idea of what's happening in the background I thought it might be useful to show you the before and after. So here's the before and as you can see it's completely a manual process. Stuff might be recorded electronically but it takes someone to do something seven time to make the process work and send it to the parish or the district. Here's the after What this doesn't tell you is that it's basing whether the request is for the parish or district on three questions. It's also doing a spatial look up to find the parish and returning the parish clerk details using the Modern.Gov API. Because these are already part of our platform this is data that we currently maintain, so there's no additional work to keep this up to date and we've reduced the h

Defining transformation to a wider audience

For the past month I've been putting together a paper on the next steps of digital transformation, for the organisation I work for. I'm proposing we look at two capabilities and two business areas, and if approved I'll be writing more about it. It's been a great exercise in gathering my thoughts and helping me to define digital transformation to a wider audience and how it fits into the bigger picture of service improvement. Here's some of the stuff I've learnt or had affirmed: Transformation, digital or not, starts with understanding the needs of the user through research. This should be obvious, but in local government too often I've seen "build it and they will come" approach applied. It's unlikely a commercial operation would launch a new product without first researching the market, so why would a digital service be any difference? A couple of years ago I wrote how the phrase "digital transformation" was hindering digit