The Future Of Business Innovation Is Not Based On Coding Alone

Success in today’s challenging and unpredictable conditions demands that we move faster while doing more with less.GETTY

Many C-suite leaders believe innovation starts with their corporate IT staff. That is true to a point. But if you’re only thinking about the developers you employ, rather than the ones you can access, you may be neglecting some of today’s most powerful business strategies. 

Similarly, though developers are still essential for specific types of workloads, they’re not your only source of technological innovation. We now have tools that enable nontechnical employees to optimize business processes, build innovative apps, and improve corporate productivity.

Success in today’s challenging and unpredictable conditions demands that we move faster while doing more with less. And to get there, enterprise leaders need to challenge traditional workforce divisions, such as technical versus nontechnical. Everyone must rethink where innovation comes from. 

Understanding the importance of the interface

Many layers of technological complexity underpin this process, but conceptually, much of it boils down to a simple idea: the interface. 

Interfaces have largely driven the proliferation of computing. Three decades ago, if someone had a computer in their home, doing anything with it probably involved inputting DOS commands. By the ’90s, graphical interfaces made interacting with computers much less technologically daunting. Today, touch and voice interfaces let people do increasingly powerful things via increasingly simple operations. 

The mechanisms and tools that let enterprises build applications and create new digital workflows have evolved similarly. Programmers don’t have to write as much code as they used to in order to build an app, and some developers don’t have to code at all. There’s a lot of complexity beneath the interfaces where app building occurs, but with the development of new tools, that complexity doesn’t have to be part of the app-building experience. 

Read more: forbes