TCA SMALL BUSINESS FORUM
ABSTRACT For decades, software development has required cooperatives to invest considerable time, talent, and treasure to build solutions for their specific problems that could not be resolved using Commercial Off The Shelf software alone. The growing field of Low Code / No Code software development offers cooperatives tools to reduce the resources required while building solutions tailored to the unique needs of each cooperative. Software development tools and practices have steadily evolved and Low Code / No Code is a major step in the “democratization” of building software. When managed correctly, Low Code / No Code offers significant savings in the costs and time required to deliver automated business processes. However, user accessibility to Low Code / No Code based business process automation also poses risks for managers of cooperatives. This article describes Low Code / No Code software development, provides an example of automating a business process, addresses the role that Low Code / No Code provides in a cooperative’s information technology operations, describes risks associated with this technology, provides recommendations, and details some of its limitations. Fall 2020 | The Cooperative Accountant
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EDITOR Barbara A. Wech, Ph.D. Department of Management, Information Systems, and Quantitative Methods University of Alabama at Birmingham COLLAT School of Business 710 13th St. South Department of Management, Information Systems, & Quantitative Methods Birmingham, Alabama 35233 bawech@uab.edu GUEST WRITER Samuel C. Thompson, PhD Department of Management, Information Systems and Quantitative Methods University of Alabama at Birmingham COLLAT School of Business 710 13th St. South Office: (205)934-8384 scthompson@uab.edu
LOW CODE / NO CODE PLATFORMS AND TOOLS Low Code / No Code (LCNC) platforms and tools present a compelling opportunity for managers of cooperatives to automate business processes quickly and at less cost than through traditional software development methods (Bloomberg, 2017). However, the LCNC platforms and tools are being adopted so rapidly that they pose a risk to the operations of cooperatives as they can readily be implemented and used with customer/ member data, and without the approval of the 29
