In this session, industry leaders discussed the trends that are already taking hold within their organizations and shared their predictions for software in the next five to ten years. Sarah Shenton, COO of the Goldman Sachs Value Accelerator, moderated the discussion. She spoke with:
- Paul Walker, former Managing Director at Goldman Sachs and Board Member at Unqork
- Max Gelfer, North America CIO at Chubb
- Kfir Godrich, Global Head of Technology at BlackRock
A world after code
Paul Walker, former Managing Direct at Goldman Sachs and Board Member at Unqork, predicted the demise of coding as the principal activity of tech organizations.
“When I take a look at enterprise software of the last 50 years, we’ve solved some amazing business problems, but we’ve solved it through actually writing code—COBOL or FORTRAN or C or JavaScript, ” said Walker. “I think the future of enterprise software is finding ways that we can have less of that tech debt related to code through architectures that look exactly like codeless architecture.”
Technology debt is business debt
Gelfer made the case that code-based software of the past always came with tech debt baked in. The future will be about avoiding that kind of debt as much as possible.
“We talk about technology debt, but we’re not talking about business debt,” says Gelfer. “Technology debt is business debt, and we need to think about how we can stop accumulating it.”
Getting processes right
Godrich is a fan of the codeless approach to development, but he believes it still requires a clear vision of what codeless is and what you want to accomplish with it.
“If you utilize codeless in a modular way and understand the way in which you are abstracting processes, you’re going to be very successful,” he said.
However, Godrich reminded the audience that software should begin with a deep understanding of what you want to do and the processes you need to build to do it successfully.
“Actually understanding the process that you’re trying to put technology around—I think that’s the number one challenge,” Godrich said.
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