Shift Write — The Rise of the Business Technologist
I am a self-taught coder. Like many, my software engineering journey started 10+ years ago with my desire to build a product (in my case, music software). I quickly ‘caught the bug’ and continued to develop my coding skills through books, online tutorials, and eventually working as a professional software engineer. Within a couple of years, my ability to code became a ‘super-power’ that I was able to leverage as a key differentiator in my career.
In 2015, I started working as a Venture Associate at Lux Capital. I had a deep passion for startups and was excited by the opportunity to meet entrepreneurs. I also wanted to better understand the mechanics of venture investing. When I started, my job description was to perform a series of deal diligence tasks such as competitive analysis, founder research, market sizing, etc.
However,
While working in the office, I started to notice a shocking number of manual tasks that were being performed by my peers (at least it seemed shocking to me at the time).
Two Quick Example Tasks I Noticed:
- Every quarter, we needed to collect financial data from each portfolio company. This was being done by manually sending emails to each founder, awaiting responses, sending reminders, and eventually pulling all of this data into a spreadsheet.
- I constantly noticed conversations between partners around who in their networks had particular skills such as molecular engineering, computer vision, commercial real estate, etc.
Given my skills with python, I was able to apply a very particular lens to these activities. Mainly, the lens of a software engineer. I remember thinking, these processes could be both improved and expedited through code. Therefore, I’m going to use my programming skills automate (and improve) them.
In other words, I was a Business Technologist.
What is a Business Technologist?
While I didn’t realize it at the time, my experience at Lux Capital was common for a growing number of individuals at organizations large and small. Mainly, there is a growing movement of Business Technologists.
Business Technologists — Individuals, outside of engineering or IT, whose primary job entails writing software.
Examples include developers hired in marketing, data scientists hired in finance, or software engineers hired in sales.
According to Gartner, Business Technologists now make up 41% of employees on average (varies by sector).¹ The rise of trends such as code bootcamps, fusion teams, digital transformation initiatives, and at-capacity IT / SRE teams.
Shift Write — Empowering Business Technologists to Write More Code
Business Technologists are underserved by No-Code / Low-Code (NC/LC) tools, but deeply over served by cloud solutions like Amazon Web Services.
Over the past few years, there has been a major focus on NC/LC platforms and how they empower ‘Citizen Developers.’ In the past, I’ve discussed the shortcomings of these platforms and their limitations:
Business Technologists are different than Citizen Developers in that they are capable of writing code.
Here, I want to summarize some of the key reasons why NC/LC tools are deeply under serving Business Technologists.
- Skill Applicability and Transferability — I recently interviewed a Business Technologist who spent the time learning a No-Code platform that was purchased by their company. The problem for them is that these skills are non-transferable to future jobs. If they transition to a new job that doesn’t use that platform, they lose their superpower. Meanwhile, code is universally applicable.
- Diversity of Use Case Limitations — Certain NC/LC platforms are good for different types of tasks. However, most Business Technologists are building a multitude of varying tools for different use cases (servers, ETL tasks, Data Analytics, Workflow automations, etc.). Very quickly, there is a sprawl of different technologies they need to manage and learn within the NC/LC ecosystem to achieve what they can with a single programming language like python, go, or SQL.
- Code is Still the Best Abstraction For Computer Instructions — Despite the myriad concepts for visual programming, writing code is time tested. Mainly, writing code is a very useful way to lay out business logic and no visual programming language has matched it in efficiency.
To Summarize, Business Technologists do not want No-Code / Low-Code platforms. They want tooling that empowers them to write, deploy, and share applications they are coding.
Despite the rise of Business Technologists, business leaders have been slow to accelerate and invest in these creators.
Consequences of Lack of Investment in Business Technologist Tooling
Despite the rise of Business Technologists, investment in them has been slow and this has real consequences for a business.
- Slowdowns for IT/SRE teams because these groups rely on them for provisioning infrastructure. In our interviews with IT leaders, a large majority report that requests for infrastructure outside of core engineering now takes up more than 20% of their time. That is one day each week of work going towards supporting Business Technologists!
- Shadow-IT — When there aren’t tools and infrastructure support, individuals start finding work arounds for deploying and executing their programs. This can lead to serious security vulnerabilities and a lack of observability about what’s running / touching company data.
- High Activation Energy — When a business technologist is frustrated by the lack of support, it decreases their ability and willingness to create process improvements for their teams.
- Orphaned Programs — A business technologist who wrote a useful program leaves and either takes the knowledge with them, or the program continues to run but without anyone realizing.
To Conclude — Shift Write: Invest in your Business Technologists and enable them to write code.
Business Technologists are a force multiplier on work teams by facilitating a ‘technical lens’ on business problems. These engineers are rapidly enabling digital transformation by empowering teams, across the entire organization, to build tooling, products, and process improvements. Unlocking them is one of the most impactful things an organization can do to push digital transformation.
However, without the correct investment, this same trend can lead to tooling sprawl, Shadow-IT, security vulnerabilities, and a lack of observability.
About Me
Jesse Orshan — I am the CEO/Co-Founder at WayScript.
WayScript is an internal developer platform (IDP) that makes it easy for Business Technologists to write and deploy secure code for their team’s internal tools, data pipelines, and analytics. With WayScript, technologists do not have to rely on core engineering/SRE teams to build and deploy automations, scheduled tasks, and other business processes. WayScript is SOC-2 Type 2 compliant, highlighted as a key technology partner by New Relic, and trusted by teams at Volvo, Heap Analytics, Hopper, Shopee and more.
Footnotes
