At any technology event you attend, one topic of conversation that comes up often is the skill gap that exists in the hiring pool. One method of tackling the issue is a new term called “low code.”

John R. Rymer, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, Inc., who coined the term (along with his colleague Clay Richardson), sat down with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during ServiceNow Knowledge16 to talk about developers and the new concepts of low code platforms and developers.

Forming the concept

“We were trying to come up with a term to describe a set of customer behaviors and a set of products that we were researching in the field,” said Rymer. “We found customers that were choosing application development platforms that allowed them to work very, very quickly, so that meant not only declarative tooling as opposed to coding, but also meant self-service, very low cost if any to get started, build something small and keep going.”

He continued to explain that there were a number of products that basically satisfied that need, but there was a randomness as well as a commonality to them. The analysts tossed around “no code” as an option, but that was rejected because, as Rymer put it, “Nobody will believe it.” He suggested that there is always code and the object is to deliver business outcomes and save mission-critical projects for the developers. Rymer noted that early adopters are having success with this model.

Filling a glut in the market

By employing the “low code” development model, Rymer feels that the opportunity for the enterprise is to fill the shortage of developers. He said that companies like ServiceNow, Inc. are helping its clients expand beyond coders and empowering the people who understand a business process, analytics or customer behavior to develop or positively influence the development of software.

Rymer also spoke about topics such as educating people in computer science, the necessity for governance and how data is the new developer kit.

Hear more about the research by watching the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge16.

Photo by SiliconANGLE