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One of our basic ideas here is that low code built software tools could be used to help domain experts make decisions.

That’s an idea which not many people seem to have thought of yet.

Most “Low Code” software companies are in the realm of online forms, data collection, lightweight business process management (re previous blog).

Helping domain experts make decisions involves a different set of tools.

We can think of:

DATA GATHERING AND PRESENTING

– Gathering data (from multiple sources, including searching the corporate archive)
– Interpreting available data (spotting anomalies, automatically classifying and indexing unclassified data, spotting patterns, statistical analysis)
– Visualising available data in various ways (like Spotfire can do)
– Higher level analysis – calculating key performance indicators or other indicators
– Data from last time something like this happened

REASONING

– Case based reasoning – what did we do last time something like this happened? Is there a story available?
– Diagnosis / analysis tools, particularly in engineering, possibly in economics – what is going on this time?

GOAL ANALYSIS

– What am I trying to achieve here? How do I manage conflicting goals?

MESS ANALYSIS

– Overall, how far away am I from where I would ideally like to be? Am I close to a danger zone?

Forrester has an interesting report on Low Code software (available for free download on the Scribe Software website)

The general thrust of it is that low code is usually used by large corporations developing online tools for interacting with customers (online forms, including complex application forms such as for credit card applications) or interacting internally (a form of business process management).

Some of the most complex applications where Low Code is used, according to the report, are ‘case management’ applications, with the example given of a US Federal Agency making a low code tool for tracking appeal cases, with functionality to load documents, send notifications to various parties.

Low Code tools are used for making interactive web pages or entire websites (often based on opensource content management software Drupal).

Many low code platforms have tools for managing ‘workflow’, but they don’t have the ‘deep process design, execution and management features typical of Business Process Management products”, Forrester says.

An (unnamed) systems manager from a UK building society is quoted as saying they first worked with a fully automated Business Process Management system and found it took a lot of time and IT work, and then tried a low code platform after that.

Forrester doesn’t say directly, but it sounds like it is saying that Business Process Management products are usually more sophisticated and complex than ‘low code’ and also take more skills – but you might find ‘low code’ adequate if you need business process management.

EXTRA BENEFITS

EMPATHETIC SOFTWARE – by ’empathetic’ we mean ‘software which works the way you do’ (the term ‘user-friendly’ is over-used to the point where it is meaningless). There are two ways to make empathetic software – one is to spend billions of pounds on research, testing and refinement (as Amazon, Google and Microsoft do) – the other is to have very personal service, providing updates, developments and training as the user needs them. So far business user rarely have empathetic software, because most business software is provided by companies which are too large to provide personal service, but not large enough to develop empathy through intense research.

WORK FOR YOURSELF – many software programmers – and people in general – would be happier working for their own small company rather than working for someone else’s big company – and this provides a route to achieving it.

UTILISE UNDEREMPLOYED DOMAIN EXPERTS – we come across many people with enormous domain expertise who find themselves under employed. They have financial security enough not to take employment in an unpleasant, high stressful position, but find that society is unable to use their expertise in other ways. This project enables them to use this expertise.

ADVERTISING REVENUES – if you have software / online tools with high spending business experts as users, in some situations you may be able to sell their attention (by selling advertising), instead of, or complementing, subscription fee revenue

MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE – imagine what would be possible with domain experts with better information and tools to help them make better decisions. Everything would be better run – city government, village government, schools, police departments, services. Governments could achieve their targets – everything from collecting tax to reducing disease. Companies could perform so much better.

Everybody would be much happier.

Small companies + low code = better domain expert software + great business opportunity.

This is our idea, we invite you to explore it with us.

“LOW CODE” is a new term for software development platforms which don’t require developers to write much code (because all the coding is already done), often hosted on the cloud. By building in low code, you can make software tools much faster and cheaper than if you have to do the coding yourself. This means you don’t need a big team of software programmers in your company, you don’t even need to define yourselves as a ‘software company’. You can also adapt software to user needs after you have built it. Low code software can be web hosted, of course, so no client installation hassles.

DOMAIN EXPERT SOFTWARE is software tools for business experts and managers who could be in any field – from agriculture to zoology. It can include tools to search for and gather the data they need, analyse it, visualise it ready for decision making – and then help them to collaborate, and implement their decisions, and monitor the progress. Not many domain experts have software to maximise their productivity – they are using either mass produced software like Microsoft Office, which can’t do everything they want, or poorly adapted business tools, which are often designed and built by people a long way away from the end users.

GREAT BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY FOR SMALL COMPANIES – because small companies can use low code to make domain expert software, which is much better, less expensive and comes with much better service and support than the software most domain experts currently use!  Domain experts might be willing to spend Eur 1000 a month for software + service + support + ongoing customisation which helps them massively improve productivity, so a company can be viable with just a small number of clients. We imagine that the small company could have both software people and domain experts as partners. That way the sales can be done by domain expert speaking to domain expert (for example, a former telecoms CFO speaking to a current telecoms CFO), rather than employing sales people.

There are actually some tasks in life which are still better delivered by personal service. It isn’t true that everything is delivered better by machine, or a big corporate.

As many business gurus will tell you, a company should only get big if there is a business reason for it to get big – ie it is more efficient that way.

There are costs of being big (more management layers and meetings). In terms of employees, people will usually be more attracted to working for a big company (I don’t know why) and big companies will be better at getting value out of their staff. But employees will often – or usually – be more motivated working for smaller companies or even working for themselves.

And so we come to the software industry.

It isn’t hard to find a software user who doesn’t like their software.

And we get raging debates about whose fault this was. Is the user ‘resistant to change’? Was the user not involved in the discussion about how the software should be built (or did they only realise what they needed after it was built?) Is the user too lazy to work out a new user interface? Is the software company unwilling to provide better support (and who is going to pay for it)?

There is a better solution – have a small company in between the big software company and the big company user – and the small company is paid a monthly fee to provide a personal service, be available to solve problems, and reconfigure the software on the fly (which is possible, since it is made from low-code) if the user realises that their requirements were different to what they thought.

The small company uses empathy and imagination to work out what the user needs (even if the user can’t describe it).

This is another angle to our ‘Software for Domain Experts’ business model.

Here’s an idea. Could better software make large parts of the world much nicer to live in – and can it be built with ‘low code’ tools?

The world has a big and growing problem with some parts of the world being much more attractive to live in than others – and too many people trying to move from the unpleasant places to the pleasant places.

The social administration of a place is a major factor in how pleasant it is to live in. Is it dangerous? Can you find a job? Can you buy a house? Are there good schools? Can you go for a walk with your children without being mown down by a car? Can you access healthcare if you need it? Is it expensive? Is it intellectually stimulating? Can you get some peace?

And all of these factors (except the last three) come, to a large extent, down to the people who administrate society – who deliver effective policing and schools at a price taxpayers are able to pay, who can make the right adjustments to the business environment to keep it healthy, who can find the right balance between the need for transport and the need to stop cars damaging local life, and much more.

And all of these factors come down to sophisticated decision making and implementation of those decisions – which requires sophisticated information gathering, collaboration and analysis tools.

And nearly all fields have more information now than people can work with, so the tools are the bottleneck. And every specialist needs data in a different way – so they can’t be happy with standard software.

Government professionals don’t usually have large sums to spend on software – and they have also been very frustrated by the services provided by ‘big government’ software suppliers in the past. There is money available.

These all sound like business opportunities for ‘Software for Domain Experts’.

Imagine a Greek software start-up developing tools for improving social administration and selling it to a German town administration. Wouldn’t that be a great story?

Here’s a business idea,
UK company Senceive Ltd specialises in wireless infrastructure asset condition monitoring, and says it has thousands of units deployed, particularly in rail (including tunnels, track bed, earthworks, bridges and structures), and construction projects.

The sensors have 15 years of battery life and can report at 15 minute intervals, and it is possible to connect cameras to them.

They are also continuously innovating, and in addition to the new platform which boasts an unprecedented 15 years of battery life powering a high precision sensor and reporting at 15 minute intervals, have recently launched and deployed cameras integrated alongside wireless sensors.

The company can ensure real time, stable and accurate data.

How could you make a ‘Software for Domain Experts’ project around that?

Start by thinking about which domain experts could use condition monitoring. So that’s everyone who needs to monitor the condition of assets which might vibrate or rotate. Anyone whose job involves monitoring any transport infrastructure (vehicles, ships, road, rail) or any other machinery – or anyone who has to monitor building condition which could be detected by sensors (I’m not sure what that is – internal temperature, vibration of tall buildings)?

These domain experts must be willing to pay a fee to have the data delivered to them by web browser in the condition which is most useful to them (eg alerts for something suddenly changing).

Perhaps a city police department or fire department would like an alert about any building or bridge in their region showing an uncomfortable degree of vibration?

Then you can build a tool to do this, using ‘low code’ systems?

Government professionals have to work with enormous amounts of data and have complex workflows. Is there anything low code tools can do to help them?

In the UK there have been well publicised IT disaster stories – particularly with the National Health Service – attempts to build monstrosity IT systems which turned out to be too complex to work.

Perhaps low code tools do have an answer here – particularly because if they are cheap to build then the costs of building the wrong thing are not too high.

Perhaps the only way to do it is bespoke for each individual. Everybody has specific data sources they go to and people they collaborate with, probably mainly with structured routines. This can be included in business process management tools.

Perhaps a small company can help by taking on some of the development risk. Instead of a government person having to get approval for a multimillion pound new software project, going through the approved licensing steps and inevitably only available to very large suppliers, a small company can build something on spec and provide it for a monthly fee.

I am not sure it has ever been done, though!

A common frustration among domain experts in many fields is that their software is rubbish. Or more to the point, it doesn’t do what they want.

Anyone who can offer them software ‘which works the way you do’ should have an advantage.

The mass market software, such as Microsoft Office, has had a lot of time, money, talented people and iterations to get this sorted out. How do you get software ‘working the way you do’ without such budget?

A glib answer could be empathy – which is defined as having the imagination to see someone else’s point of view – and, harder, understand their working world.

Even if you are very empathetic, understanding someone else’s working view takes a great deal of effort.

But beyond that – there’s only a limited number of things software can do – take in data, move data, show data, share data, gather data, analyse data –

How do we make it easier for you to build tools for domain experts which they really like?

.. and how can we make this easier?

Probably the first step is to identify a business opportunity – and to do this you’ll probably need to either already be a domain expert in a certain field (for example, someone who knows the shipping industry very well), or work together with one.

The needs for professionals in different fields is similar (in that it comes down to gathering and managing data) – but you’ll need to know the specific requirements.

Then you’ll need to come up with a useful software tool – perhaps using a free trial with one of the ‘low-code’ companies.

Then you’ll need to get access to professionals in the domain to show them what you’ve done. This will be easier if you are working together with people who are already domain experts themselves – so you have (for example) a current police chief talking to a former police chief.

Then you need to get them interested in what you are doing,

Probably iterate a few times,

And finally perhaps get some business.

Of course it isn’t easy. But is there any way we can make it easier?