Low code strategy

Timothy Chester

I started my career nearly 30 years ago as a programmer, working on student information business processes at Texas A and M University. It was an exciting time to be in IT—full of innovation, problem-solving, and the thrill of building new things from scratch. Back then, I preferred a basic text editor over commercial development tools because I wanted full control over the product and preferred a deep understanding of how the code worked. But nearly three decades later, as a CIO, my perspective has shifted completely—custom development is time-consuming, expensive, and risky from a data privacy and security standpoint. Outside system-to-system integration, building IT solutions from scratch is usually a bad idea. Today’s Dispatch delves into the reasons behind my change of heart—and why low-code development emerges as the more prudent choice in the era of GenAI.