what is the best way develop my online business
1.Top 5 Ways To Make Money Online (Build a $1 Million Online Business)
These are the best 5 ways to make money online and build a profitable online business in 2022, which has the potential to be scaled to 7-figures. So after thousands of making online money strategies that we talked about on my previous blogs and the How to Earn Money Online article.
I am finally going to address the 5 best online businesses you should start in 2022. These are the businesses that I'm either running right now or have run in the past. So I know they work, and I know they have a massive potential to make you money online. And it's vital to choose the right online business from the start because it doesn't matter how hard you work on a business or how much time you spend on it. If the business doesn't have the potential so it's important to choose some of the five that we will talk about in this article.
So before we jump into my computer, make sure to drop a like down below and subscribe for our latest updates. and let's begin…
Faceless Youtube Automation
The first online business on our list will be faceless youtube automation. It's basically making money on youtube without making videos and showing your face. You know how big YouTubers, for example, graham Stefan, he's a massive finance YouTuber, and he's making millions of dollars every single year from his youtube channel.
But the thing with that is that there's only one Graham Stefan. There's a limit to how many videos he can film in a day. He can't really scale that business that much; obviously, he is making a lot of money, but he can't really scale it to a point where he doesn't need to film videos all day long and can make the same amount of money that he is making. But if there is someone else creating the content for him. He can scale a theme of people that creates videos, and he can just run that and operate his youtube channel as a business and not as a creator, and that's how faceless youtube automation actually works. I'm currently running like that's probably my primary online business.
I have different youtube channels where I'm not showing my face; I'm just getting other people to create the content for me. Then I'm just making some money from other revenue brand deals, affiliate marketing, CPA marketing, and all of that great stuff. I actually have like lots of different tutorials in both this and the main channel where I talk about how youtube automation works and how you can start that business from scratch. So I guess you've seen some of those. If not, you can go over to the channel and watch them. They're usually titled like how you can make money on youtube without making videos, and I tried to explain it in detail. Obviously, it can't cover every single step of the process in a 10-minute long video.
But you can just get an idea of how the business works because it's a really lucrative business. And I feel like it's one of the best online businesses in 2022, and it's actually pretty pretty simple, like there's not much to think about it. Yeah, I also do want to mention that you don't actually have to start paying from the start. You can actually start a business for free because you can get free online resources and create the content from stock footage, videos, photos, and stuff like that. And you can also see that inside of those tutorials, and I'll show you exactly how to do it step by step. Also, we're absolutely free, and later on, you can actually scale the business by hiring someone else to do that for you. But from the start, you can do it yourself; it doesn't take that much time and effort, but it's going to be absolutely free.
Affiliate Marketing
The second online business on our list is going to be affiliate marketing; this means that instead of you creating the product and instead of you creating like the sales page delivering the product doing the support and all that stuff, you can actually take someone else's effect, someone else's sales page and just promote it as an affiliate and earn affiliate commissions when someone buys that product or service through your affiliate link. For example, you can even promote amazon products even though I do not recommend that because they only pay like a couple of percents like maybe three to four percent per product sale, which is pretty low, which is a significant difference.
For example, you promote like a lamp on amazon that costs like ten dollars, so you don't have the lamp. You don't have the inventory; you're not going to ship the lamp, you're not going to do customer support, you're not gonna talk to the customer. all you're going to do is grab the link of that lamp and share it like with a friend or a family member or someone else on the internet they click on your link. If they purchase the lamp for ten dollars, you will get two dollars. Just for referring that person or three dollars for referring a person, and there's a lot of different ways that you can promote those products.
A lot of people will tell you like if you google like affiliate marketing, the number one advice would be just to run paid ads to affiliate marketing offers which is something that I highly do not recommend because the cost of advertising on like Facebook or google or youtube is just rising year by year. It's not worth spending that much money to promote affiliate offers. There are many different ways you can do it, and also like combining youtube automation with the previous online business and affiliate marketing is a lot better. Because not only do you get free traffic, so you avoid paying for like Facebook ads and google ads, but you also are being paid to promote those products by youtube because you earn ad revenue from those views.
As I said, I would never recommend promoting amazon products and physical products. Because there's also like a limit to how much you can sell. If it's like a physical product because there's an inventory, but if it's a digital product, there is no limit because there's no inventory and the commissions are usually a lot higher for digital products they go for like 40 to 50 or sometimes even 75 percent, so that was the second online business.
Drop servicing
Let's talk about the third one the next online business on our list will be drop servicing. Just like dropshipping, In Dropshipping, You drop ship physical goods, and in Dropservicing, you drop-ship services. In my opinion, this is probably the best online business that you can start in 2022.
Drop servicing means that instead of dropshipping physical products, you can drop services like Fiverr and other freelancing platforms so if you've ever been through Fiverr or upwork. You've seen that people are selling services like logo design services and video editing services, and they're selling them for like $20, $30, $40, or $50. but what you can do is find clients who will pay more like you can create an agency and charge more for those same services.
But instead of you completing the service yourself, you can outsource it to some freelancer and Fiverr. So let's say you sell a $5 you sell a logo for like $50, and then you go to Fiverr and find a really good logo designer and a graphic designer to create a logo for you for like $25 keep $25 profit. Just as a middleman, so basically like drop servicing services from freelancers and freelancing platforms like Fiverr. This is actually an online business model that I've been doing in 2018-2019 and somewhat of 2022, and it was good. I also have some old blogs and videos that you can read and watch on my blog and YouTube channel.
Personal Branding
The next on our list is going to be something that I'm doing right now, and that's having a personal brand, so as much as I like running like anonymous online businesses like faceless online businesses including faceless youtube automation, affiliate marketing, and drop servicing and all that great stuff having a personal brand is extremely important especially in 2022. because it opens so many doors and can actually make you money in so many different ways, and it's also amusing like as you can see.
I'm out here having fun worldwide, like every single week or every single month. We are traveling to a different place. We are meeting new people, we are having fun, and I'm also building an actual business while doing all of that, so I feel like having a personal brand is one of the best ways you can start one of the best online businesses you can start it's not the easiest one soon this list. Affiliate marketing is the easiest online business that you can start with no previous experience, but having a personal brand is also extremely important. You can monetize it in so many different ways.
It doesn’t matter if you build it on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Pinterest or any other platform as long as you have.
Selling Digital Products
It's good I know the last online business is actually tied to the previous one, and it's selling digital products with your personal brand. So I personally sold a course last year and actually made over 70 lakhs by selling a digital product by selling. A digital course and selling digital products is also really good because there's no inventory once again. So you don't have to have a physical product. It obviously takes a lot of time and effort to craft that digital product. But I feel like it's way more worth it because you can sell it unlimited times. There's no limit to how much digital products how many digital products you can sell, and that's how I was actually able to build that one line of product to scale that one line of product to over a million dollars in over a year and a half or something like that so selling digital products can be extremely profitable in funding.
As long as you have somewhat of a personal brand, it doesn't need to be a massive personal brand, like even if you have just 1 000 followers or 1000 subscribers or 1000 friends on Facebook who are really interested in a specific thing. For example, I built a tribe of people interested in making money online and traveling the world like I'm doing. So by doing that, I was able to attract those types of people and sell a product related to that thing they are all interested in. Once again, you don't need a massive following, and you don't need a huge social media presence. Even with just a couple of hundred or a thousand followers, you can still build a profitable online business.
Learn 👉 How to Start a Dropshipping Business on Shopify (2022)
So those are the best five online businesses you can start in 2022. we have faceless youtube automation, drop servicing, affiliate marketing, personal brand, and selling digital products.
I really hope you learned something new in this article, and if you did, make sure to drop a like down below if you want to see how you can do this step by step or complete step-by-step tutorials. Make sure to subscribe to my email list for the latest updates.
Read More: Best & Easiest Ways to Make Money Online for Beginners
- 11 online money-making ways that could make you a millionaire in your 20s
Seriously, I'm not joking.
You might be thinking, how is this possible? But the answer is yes, It is possible.
The internet allows you to make your dream come true, tremendous opportunities out there, all you have a laptop and a good internet connection, and you’re good to go.
I’m not saying offline business is a waste of money and time. There is tremendous potential offline also, but online could be an easy one.
Although there are lots of things to consider when you’re going to start an online or offline business.
I’ll not discuss here the online, and offline business's pros, and cons
I'm gonna go over some of the top ways to make money online, so stick with me till the end.
Here are some of the top ways to make money online —
- Start a blog
Do you want to make millions?
A blog can be a good option for you.
My top pick is to start your own blog, one of the great ways to make money online. Millions of people are making thousands, millions of dollars per month from blogging.
Do you know? There are more than 1.8+ billion websites out there, in which over the 300M + websites are active? Which means they are making money.
And one of the best things about blogging is it’s a low investment business. yes, you need to consider blogging as a business. All you need is a domain and hosting with a good theme and plugins.
Although I'm not saying you can start without learning or skill, of course, you have to learn the skills first and then apply them yourself.
Nowadays, there is pretty hard to get success in blogging due to high competition. (the 2010s was golden days) Almost more than 99% of people who start their blogging business fail.
But if you start with new tactics new strategies, you will definitely get success. The main reason why most people fail in blogging is that they have no strategy, no plan, no idea, no patience. That's why they fail in blogging.
Consistency is the key. - Start a youtube channel
Do you Know MrBeast? Probably you.
Mrbeast, who has 90M+ subscribers, wants to know how much money he is making per month?
3–4 million per month. (Hell)
Is it possible? Definitely. of course, he worked hard, did lots of effort to archive this milestone, and you can too.
Youtube is the 2nd largest search engine globally, which is owned by the №1 search engine in World, who is?
Google. Yes, google owned youtube.
In 2006 google bought youtube for 1.6 billion dollars. in 2021, google made over 28 billion dollars from youtube. Amazing?
But why I'm telling this to you? There is no rocket science, let me tell you.
Youtube earning is directly proportional to the creator's earnings. If bigger the youtube earning is, the bigger money creators will make.
I think youtube is a great way to make money, not as a hobby but as a business. - Become a freelancer
Do you have any skills?
If yes, then you can make money online as a skilled person.
Did you ever notice those youtube subtitles? Who writes them?
A transcriber.
A transcriber is one who converts video voice to text and gets paid for their writing skill. How cool is that?
Freelancing is the system in which you have to work for other platforms like fiver, up works, in which clients give you some sorts of work to done, and once you have done that job, you get paid for your work, called freelancing.
There are countless jobs in freelancing, all you need particular skills.
It can be anything like video editing, graphic designing, content writing, copywriting, translating, transcribing, funnel making, and so on.
The good part is there is no need for investment (Zero Investment) in this business, you can start with zero money all you have is a skill in any field, and you’re good to go. - Start Dropshipping Bussiness
Remember Shopify?
Dropshipping is a business in which you have to create a store/website for someone else's products, and once anyone can buy from your side, you get paid for that. Seems complicated?
Let me explain
Dropshipping involves three people -
1st — manufacture/product owner
2nd — seller/middle man(you)
3rd — consumer/customer
In order to make money on dropshipping, you will have to contact the product owner or manufacturer to deal, and once the deal will confirm, you have to create a website/store for listing the products, and you will list the product at a higher price rather than normal price so that you get your profit.
And after you will send traffic to your website, and if anyone buys from your website/store, you will send a further process to the product owner to inform of delivering the products.
Because you do not need to deliver the products yourself, all you have to do is just inform the product owner or manufacturer to deliver the product to the customer, it's their job to deliver the product. - buying and selling NFT’s
Ah, what is NFT?
NFTs stands for Non — Fungible Tokens. What I mean by that is an NFT is not a replaceable item which is nobody copies it every item that is created in a form of NFT has a unique identity.
NFTs could be anything like JPEG, music, video, twits, or anything.
Do you know the weird whales?
A boy who is just 13 years old made over $400k just sold his NFTs.
Freakin insane? - Invest in Stocks and Crypto
What is the current price of Bitcoin? maybe around $35k to $40k
What was in 2019–$3900, only? Yes….
Same as the stock market, but the stock market is less volatile as compared to crypto, crypto is more volatile, as you can lose your life-saving overnight.
Seriously? Yes.
But don't mess up with crypto, what I mean by that is, think about long-term returns, don't invest for 1 month or 6 months or even 1 year, invest for 5 to 10 years at least to get good returns.
Whether it's crypto or stock both have their own potential of returns. The stock market is also good. Less volatile, less risk, as a result, fewer returns will come from stock.
What you have to consider in order to make money with this strategy, you need capital to invest, without capital there is no role for you.
Keep that in mind the only money you should invest in crypto/stock which you can afford to lose. Don't invest your life savings blinding in crypto, and stock, it may make you a millionaire to a beggar overnight.
Note — nothing is financial advice, only for entertainment purposes. - Create Online Course
Do you have an audience? Yes?
Then what are you holding back to making courses for your audience. Courses are a great way to convert your audience into a dollar. Most marketers do it, why? Because they know the power of courses.
Don't think much, if you haven't built your audience yet, build your audience, and create a course for them, points to consider your course should be valuable and No brainer. - Become an online Tutor
Do you know Multiple languages?
Yes, I'm talking about English, Spanish, Hindi or any language, if you know, then start teaching other people.
There are lots of platforms out there that allow you to create your profile, and start teaching others, for instance, you probably heard about cambly, yes you’re thinking right an English online learning app.
Although it’s not necessary that you need only language skills, it can be anything, if you’re good in math, good in science, good in programming, whatever you can think, you can teach online. - Become an Affiliate marketer
Want to make quick money? (No quick rich scheme)
Don't get me wrong.
I'm not talking about old-fashionable affiliate marketing, which says start promoting affiliate links through the Facebook group, post on Instagram, or some scammy type of tactics, nope. I don't know whether these methods work or not, because I never tried them.
So what affiliate marketing am I talking about?
I'm talking about paid ads, in a professional way. But you may say google, and Facebook will fuck me yes, they fuck because they don't like affiliate marketers. That's why I don't prefer to go with Facebook or Google.
So where will you start?
There are two platforms which I prefer
Native ad(my favorite)
Bing ads
Native ads are a great way to start your paid advertising journey as an affiliate marketer because native ads are not fuck you like Google and Facebook does.
In native ads, there is no account banning, no hard restrictions, although you need a big budget to start as compared to Google and Facebook.
But once you master it, no one can stop you from becoming the next millionaire in your circle.
Bing ads, personally I never tried bing, but bing is also a great way to start if you have a lower budget, bing also not ban your account as they are not bad as google and Facebook is(for affiliate marketers) - Start your Own Store
Do you have any physical products?
If yes, then creating a website for your product is a piece of cake for you
It can boost your business in the sky, you can generate more sells in online than offline, because offline we were have limited customers to buy the product but in the case of online we can drive traffic to our website, we can do SEO, paid ads, or social media marketing.
In the generation of online, if your business is not touched with online then you're probably missing tons of opportunities out there. - Create online Softwares
Saas industry is huge right now, almost every work, task we does we can get tools for that, whether it’s email marketing software or lead generation software, whether it's meeting software or any website designing software.
Did you get my point? Aah,
To create this kind of software, you can grab the market. There are lots of people who have been making money in this industry for decades. I know you need some sort of skill to do this.
But don't be afraid to start, don't be afraid if you don't know coding, and programming, you can outsource them. (need budget)
Also, first you can learn these skills, and do some market research, and then start, it will be better for you.
Conclusion
Now it's time to decide whether you start an online business or continue your 9 -5 boring job. Well, it's up to you, my job is to teach you, guide you the right and better way to live life, but I can't force you to do the same as I said, never, it's your choice, and it's your life, do whatever you feel like.
If you find this article helpful, don't forget to share it with your friends and family, maybe they will find it helpful, and who knows if this post will change someone's life.
Thank you.
3.Citizen developers can work with business leaders to develop real software solutions on low-code platforms
Will low-code/no-code tools and automation lead to fewer developer jobs? My guest today doesn’t think so, and he’ll tell us why on this episode of Dynamic Developer. The following is a transcript of this interview, edited for readability.
Bill Detwiler: I’m your host Bill Detwiler, and I’m joined by Malcolm Ross, VP of product strategy and deputy CTO for Appian. Malcom, thanks for joining us.
Malcolm Ross: Thanks for the time, Bill.
Listen to the podcast version of this Dynamic Developer episode on SoundCloud
Malcolm Ross: Thanks for the time, Bill.
Bill Detwiler: Before we get started talking about automation, and low-code, and no-code citizen developers and the effect that that’s having on the software development industry as a whole, for those who don’t know Appian, give them a little rundown on what Appian is, what it does, and what you do there.
Malcolm Ross: Sure. Appian is a low-code development platform, and we specialize, of course, in automation, workflow, RPA, those other areas. So, if you think about what that means is, it’s a new paradigm for building applications using more visual, declarative drag and drop tools to rapidly deliver solutions that customers are expecting and of course, in a cloud native modern architecture as well.
SEE: Business leaders as developer: The rise of no–code and low–code software (free PDF) (TechRepublic)
I’ve been with Appian for over 16 and a half years now. So, several roles, but my current role is I lead product strategy, which is the long-term roadmap direction of the company, but in several roles as far as leading product management, product marketing, other aspects of the company as well. And been in the automation space myself before Appian for about 22 years now. So, a lot of experiences in enterprise software and building workflow BPM processes for a variety of companies over several decades now.
Bill Detwiler: I think that’s a great segue into my first question. Because you have so much experience in automation, and one of the fears that software developers, engineers, full-stack developers have when it comes to low-code and no-code tools is that it could be, I guess, limiting their career prospects, right? It could be by making it easier for more folks to develop enterprise software without the fundamental traditional software engineer and training background. Does it make them less needed, right? Are there going to be less developer jobs because now you don’t need a developer to build software?
So, pulling on your experience in automation from the past and now translating that into not automation per se, but actually just reducing the barrier to entry to creating enterprise software, what do you say to those concerns? How do you address them?
Malcolm Ross: Really, there’s so many ways to unpack that, and I’m one of those myself: I got my degree in computer science and information science a few decades ago and consider myself a developer. But with that regard, it’s a look at the global backlog of digital needs, it’s humongous. The reality is, there’s not enough people to satisfy the demand, to digitize all these businesses out there. And things like the global pandemic have just accelerated that need as we need to work more at a distance, as retail stores need to do online shopping and digital pickup more, the demand is just simply not stopping–it’s growing and growing. So, there’s no fear as far as software developers losing jobs, because speaking from a software company, we can’t hire enough people with professional software development experience.
Low-code tools, though, are a direct response to this trend of what we’ve seen over the past 10 years of the need for agile development, agile growth. So, as we saw in the mid 2000s, there was a big shift from, say, Waterfall development to agile development and doing rapid one-week, two-week sprint cycles and showing results quickly and having more agile development methodologies that adapt to business change while the methodologies of how you build software change, the tools themselves did not and didn’t really allow people to build quickly and with agility because of the high-code experience, because of the numerous tools required. You think about a Java developer, right? If I’m building in Java, fine, I have spent time learning that high-code experience, learned how to build all these interfaces, but Java’s just oftentimes is a service layer.
If I want to, say, build unit tests on it, I need to use J units. If I want to start to merge that into a CI/CD architecture, I need to learn GitHub and scripts, I need to learn Jenkins or Bamboo. If I need to build integration or user experience testing, I need to learn Selenium. Oftentimes, I want to build that UI layer, I need to learn Angular or React or other languages. So, it’s immensely complex to be a full-stack developer and to build all these elements; you have to learn a lot of tools, not just to build what you want but also to get it through an agile CI/CD pipeline. And that’s complex, and it’s difficult to train people and it’s also difficult to do it right.
Low-code tools really aren’t about displacing developers. It’s about facilitating that process more elegantly. When you think about low-code, you often just think about that composition layer. So, the composition, like, how do I declare what I want from coding to drag-and-drop? Well, anyone who’s familiar with the SDLC knows that that’s probably just 20%, 30% of the entire software development process. There’s testing developments, there’s pushing things through, there’s branching, there’s diffing, there’s merging, there’s deployment cycles, there’s testing. All these things need to come together to produce high-quality software.
Low-code tools, or at least the ones like Appian, address the full lifecycle. So, it’s not just about declarative tooling, making it easier for non-coders to build stuff but it’s also about facilitating the entire agile lifecycle to build things quickly and deploy them quickly and iterate quickly and change quickly as well.
Citizen developer programs
Bill Detwiler: That’s the sentiment that I’ve heard from lots of people, is there’s so much work out there that we’re not running out of work for full-stack developers anytime soon; this really is about broadening that base. And I know one of the ways companies broaden that base is through citizen developer programs. Talk a little bit about those, how organizations can use these low-code tools for that percentage of the process that you just talked about and bring more people within their organization into that process.
Malcolm Ross: Yeah, that’s the multiple layers, too, because expanding the number of people who can participate in application development is naturally going to be beneficial. And you do that by both hiring more professional developers as well as simplifying the process of development, which is the low-code side, which then gets into citizen developers and who is a developer, who is non-developer.
So, when you think about more citizen developers, we often have these already. We’ve actually had these citizen developers for 20, 30 years now, ever since the Microsoft office suite came out and allowed you to write macros in Excel, right? We’ve had citizen developers, and they build things in the Office suite.
I myself spent time in the ’90s building FoxPro and Microsoft access databases in the business line for mortgage companies. And I was a citizen developer: I wasn’t an official IT but I was building things that were used for daily operations for in that case mortgage rates notifications to lenders. So, we’ve had this realm of citizen developers for a long time, and the spiral of Microsoft access databases in complex Excel spreadsheets has just been growing and growing.
So low-code tools do give you an opportunity to expand both what system developers can create beyond just the realm of the office suite. They can now create mobile applications, robotic process automations, workflows, web applications. They can expand more, but as well, a low-code tool like Appian gives you more centralized control of it rather than sitting on everyone’s client desktop and people doing whatever, you can have a governance lifecycle on top of it, I can still have IT run a center of excellence to manage the citizen developers. I can enforce policies, consistency, so I can have a more managed approach, I can empower people, citizen developers, as well as make sure I’m still maintaining my information security and development best practices as well.
SEE: Hiring Kit: JavaScript Developer (TechRepublic Premium)
So it’s the best of both worlds. One of the other things that low-code tools also focus on is that business-IT collaboration. So, you have pure citizen developers, so you just let go, but then you also need a realm of where I align business and IT more closely. And this often is a journey as we evolve from Waterfall to agile. One of the biggest challenges of that is getting the business to engage.
Business users have been spoiled or used to Waterfall where they just tell you my requirements upfront and then say, “I’ll see you in four to six months when you finish my magical application,” without talking to you on a regular basis, and we of course know that doesn’t work. And the key to agile is really having that regular communication with the business where I demonstrate as a developer what I’ve built, validate with the business constituents that this is what they want, and then plan and change the backlog to meet the next set of criteria.
So, it’s that constant communication. Low-code tools, since we’re providing a mechanism that the business can understand better. So, instead of looking at code of a logic, maybe they have a specific tax calculation rule, instead of looking at the tax calculation in Java code and say, “Hey, is this what you want?” They’re not really understanding what they’re looking at. You can show them a decision table. You can show them a process flow or decision tree, you can show them something visual that the business users understand better.
So a big part of what low-code tools is, is still empowering IT as well to build applications but have a development framework which bridges the communication cap with a business so that they can look at your work and understand it and also validate it and participate better in the Agile development process. So it’s both fronts, low-code is not purely a citizen development tool, it’s actually more commonly adopted by professional IT, and the benefit is actually the business-IT collaboration of having the common language framework.
Adopting an agile culture is an evolutionary process
Bill Detwiler: Yeah, I think that’s interesting. And I like the Microsoft Access FoxPro analogy there. I remember doing those same things back in the ’90s too, and that’s the way I liken the low-code and the no-code tools to the same rise that you saw with business productivity suites during the ’90s and the 2000s, right? It made even things like word processing and Excel spreadsheets didn’t suddenly mean we don’t need CPAs and we don’t need people to use those tools, but it gave more people access to those tools, which allowed businesses to be more productive and to produce whatever they were using to produce, whatever they’re producing in a better way to broaden that base.
And I’d like to key on something you just said there, which is the interaction between the business and between IT, because you were talking about how there needs to be as part of the agile process, this back and forth. How do companies do that successfully that maybe haven’t done that in the past? I’m not sure, most folks that I talk to have moved to agile development process. And as part of that, they’re involving product managers or they’re trying to get the business constituents more involved in the process, but that can be a little tricky, as you said, for companies that maybe have been spoiled or they don’t have that as part of their culture. How have you found companies do that successfully?
Malcolm Ross: Yeah, it’s evolutionary because what you’re getting at, it’s no longer a technology problem, it’s a cultural challenge inside organizations. And over the past several decades, we’ve grown in thinking here’s business, here’s IT, and they are distinctly different business units. And when you set these artificial barriers of the departmental structures between business and IT, it creates almost a natural conflict as well. I’ve been in meetings where business and IT could not literally sit in the same conference room together because of the hostility. IT would think that business doesn’t understand the complexities of managing the architectures and keeping up to date. Business is saying, “IT is not responsive enough, they’re not meeting my needs.” And there’s a hostility there.
So, what needs to happen is really a breakdown. If you look at the modern companies that are succeeding today, the Ubers, the Lyfts, Facebooks, things like that, there almost is no business and IT. They’re almost one integrated company and IT is an essential part, or the act of software development, is an essential part of how their business works. So, that’s probably the first thing, is starting to break it on those lines and moving these merged teams together that they have a shared common goal in that they’re investing, the business is thinking about software development as their business, as how they go to market.
And that’s a cultural breakdown of these hierarchal structures and bringing them together. And then centralized IT’s role, then, is not necessarily doing every project because you have people sitting with the business doing the projects, but really establishing the standards of the organization. Things like information security, making sure that the way information is handled is secure, things like user experience, having established user experience model for all applications, things like SOA [service-oriented architectures] that you have standards for which I’m going to expose information APIs so that it can be easily reused across the enterprise.
That’s shifting where pure IT’s role is not to through individual project delivery, but overseeing IT strategy across the entire company while merging IT with the business functions more directly as well. So, that’s not easily done, and especially you’re breaking down oftentimes decades of cultural hierarchies that have been established and trying to merge these business units together.
Getting developers into the field to learn the real challenges
Bill Detwiler: So, if you’re speaking to someone on the IT side and the development side, so if you’re talking to a dev stack and you’re talking to senior developers, you’re talking to team leads and to department heads, what would be your advice for them to get started in trying to break down some of those barriers? So, if I’m coming at this from that side of the table, what type of outreach or what type of processes do I need to put in place both for my team and myself to shift our role in the process to oversight and to encourage the lines of business to take on some of that responsibility themselves, but also do so in a way that meets guidance and policy requirements like you talked about?
Because I think a lot of people want to do that, and I think a lot of companies are like “Oh, this sounds really good and so we know where to start.” But if you’re coming at this and you’re a team lead, if you’re the senior director of engineering at a company and you’re sitting here going, “OK, well, how do I move the ball the first step? What are the first steps that I need to take in this process?” Is it going to executive leadership? Is it trying to make grassroots inroads with the head of finance or the head of HR to say, “You know what would be really good, is if you had this person on your team or let me identify the people on your team who can help us use these low-code and no-code tools.” How do you get started?
Malcolm Ross: Obviously everyone’s different in where they are in their journey. Some companies are very modern, some companies have legacy to deal with. I’ve worked with some companies like major utility water companies and some other big trucking companies, and what I recommend to them where you have these oftentimes not just decades, but century or more of legacy of interactions is IT needs to get out of the cube, right? They need to get out of the office. In the water utilities company for example, I said, “Well, if you’re trying to build mobile solutions for someone who’s in the field, IT, you should take the guy out of the cube or the gal put them in the suit, have them go into the sewer pipes and the water pipes and live the experience to the business users.” There’s that respect that needs to be built.
Another example, Appian has built several contact center solutions for organizations. And one of the things that when we were building contact center solutions is I was shipping my engineers to contact centers in remote areas of Kentucky and Salt Lake City and saying, “I want you to sit in that contact center and work the phone for three days. You want to handle calls, you want to live their experience.” And that doesn’t just give the IT person a perspective of what the job is really like for what you’re building solutions is for, but it also builds respect with the business. The business sees the IT person as, yeah, they’re helping me do my job, they’re here in the seat next to me, they’re here in the sewer pipe with me cleaning out gunk and they’re looking at what my job does.
Oftentimes, again, in some of these legacy industries like utilities and energy and trucking, you have people who have been doing that job for decades itself, as far as maintaining utilities, and there’s a level of respect that has to be established. And the business needs to see IT as a participant in what the mission of this corporation is. So, that’s part of the cultural side. And then once you establish that respect like, “Hey, yeah, I’m part of this business. I’m not just this outside IT organization. I’m part of you to help derive new solutions.” Then it’s also establishing COE tools. But what IT needs to do is look seriously at their stacks. And oftentimes you get in this technical debt trap, right, where you love to build new solutions but I spend 80% of my time just maintaining yesterday’s applications.
And I go and get a small sliver of my time actually building new solutions, which is often the trap that IT falls into is you’re just optimizing memory, you’re making sure CPUs stay or the computers stay online. You’re doing patches to application web servers, you’re just doing things that the business doesn’t appreciate, and it’s just janitorial work of IT. You need to look at this stack, identify all the things that you’re doing janitorial work for, just keeping the lights on, and find solutions that extricate yourself from doing that work. Cloud-based low-code solutions are exactly that, where we automatically upgrade, we automatically patch, we automatically secure, we maintain the architecture for you so you can focus on innovation, which is another benefit of low-code tools is to refocus the attention of the people who use these low-code development tools away from just maintenance and back onto innovation as far as the total amount of time you spend.
And then as you look at the architecture, then starting to establish that COE as well, once you have that credibility with business, then I can start to dictate and it’s like, “No, this is the way you need to handle information. There’s GDPR today, there’s serious ransomware attacks going on. We need to protect this company against these IT threats.” That’s the IT center of excellence’s job. We need to establish standards of IT and how everything’s going to get done. So, it’s a multilayered process and when you think about the things that need to go on, but starting with that first, the business-IT respect collaboration is probably the most important area.
Bill Detwiler: I love that sentiment and I’ll give the audience your little information, full disclosure. I started my IT career, my first enterprise job was in a public utility. And for new folks that would come in, that would say, “Well, why are these systems failing? Or what’s this hardware failing?” We’d say, “Yeah, that’s because you’ve never been to a coal-fired power plant.” In Kentucky for folks that can’t tell from my accent. But once you got out there and you saw some of the environments that the lines of business were operating in, then you understood their challenges, and I will agree with you 100%. It provided a mutual respect and mutual understanding because IT and the networking folks and engineering folks understood what people were working with on a day-to-day basis and vice versa.
The lines of business folks said, “Well, you actually took the time to come out here.” So, I wholeheartedly agree on that. Well, Malcolm, I’d like to wrap things up because I think this also leads to a really important point and something that I’ve heard many folks mention, which is bringing those software development processes closer to the lines of business, right? So, whether it’s both IT going down and being involved and walking in the shoes of the business, but it also allows those lines of business through citizen developer programs to have folks who are already intimately familiar with their situation participate in that development process.
So, for companies that have done that successfully, I don’t want to say pushing software to development down, but it’s just bringing software and application development closer to the business, are there any recommendations that you have not in process or you’ve already talked about for ways to do that, I guess, to have the right people within the lines of business use these low-code, no-code tools so that they can participate in the software development process?
Managing the process so you don’t end up covered in paint
Malcolm Ross: Yeah. Again, I think a lot of us lived through this with Microsoft SharePoint as well when the promise of SharePoint was, “Hey, I’m going to have a portal environment that’s going to let everyone share their information.”
Bill Detwiler: If you could get it to run and it wasn’t slower than everything in the world.
Malcolm Ross: Yeah. I have a whole slide I talk about the history of SharePoint where I equate it to going to Michael’s and buying the best paint set, right, and you just imagine that if I buy the best paint set and I give it to my children, they’re going to produce Van Goghs and Picassos and beautiful works of art. And then the next slide I have is a child covered in paint, right? So, with great power comes great responsibility as Spiderman’s uncle says, but that’s the challenge with low-code tools as well. Yes, citizen developers can participate in the application development process. Don’t end up with a child covered in paint.
You still need to be an active participant in the standards practices of how software is built, and that center of excellence is very important. So, it needs to be metered, it needs to be controlled, it needs to be measured while also it needs to be empowered. You need to empower the business to satisfy themselves more quickly while often having times that regulatory authority managing as well. So, that’s a really tough balance to do. How do you give people freedom while also still maintaining control in that sense?
And again, low-code tools are pretty much the core of that. It’s going to give you the mechanism to do it. It’s also, as I mentioned before, going to give you the mechanism to also not just paint yourself into a technical debt corner. As people do these things, they’re going to build up technical debt because they’re going to build applications that you rely upon and they need to be maintained. And cloud-based low-code tools again, they focus on automatic upgrades, automatic security. There might already be FedRAMP certified, PCI certified, HIPAA certified.
So, you get this architecture that’s protecting you a bit from technical debt, but the human element is the hard part, managing those expectations, giving people freedom to do development with a tool while also having a SDLC that controls how things are getting into production and measured over the long term.
Bill Detwiler: I think that’s a great place to end it because I think that is the challenge, right? Setting up those guardrails, setting up those bumpers, both technically and on the human perspective, and it’s a challenge, but it’s a good challenge because I think in the end, it gets you to a place where you can be more agile, where companies can bring software to market and respond to business needs more quickly, which as we’ve seen in the last year with the COVID pandemic and people rushing and accelerating their digital transformation plans, it is really critical to survival especially when you have a dramatic change in the business environment. So, Malcolm, again, thank you for taking the time out to talk with us. I really appreciate it and hope you’ll come back.
Malcolm Ross: Cool. Thanks, Bill. It’s been a pleasure.