CITIZEN APPS
What types of applications are typically being built by citizen developers? The sky’s the limit, said Shah. “Citizen developers are technology enthusiasts,” he said. “They use their creativity and skills to make life easier by building applications tailored to the specific needs of the business or their own needs. For example, a citizen developer might automate daily processes or productivity tools like custom dashboards for tracking data.” This includes a range of apps, “from simple departmental productivity tools to replace burdensome spreadsheets, to complex and mission-critical business applications,” said Ross. “Professional IT developers typically fill specialty roles, providing oversight of development best practices and building reusable extensions to the low-code platform that expand the platform capabilities. The more missioncritical an application is, the higher level of involvement professional IT provides to ensure proper governance and operation.”
Often, citizen developers “will start with the typical optimization or automation of my business process’ type of solutions,” said Rappelet. “For example, if an employee is, on a daily basis, exporting data into a report, does some transformations, and sends the report out to colleagues for further discussion, low-code tooling can automate this in a few clicks and provide that employee and its team a huge time saver. I also see many business units digitizing their service so they can become more customer-oriented, faster, and increase their reliability. For example, exposing statistics models in a self-serving app rather than working through a ticking system or email to gather requests, manually run the model, and sending back the results.”
LOW- AND NO-CODE RISKS
As with every promising technology approach, of course, there are risks; low and no-code tools are no exception. For starters, employees need to be comfortable with the tools. They “are only helpful if the people using them know how to use them, so companies need to match their technology investments by also upskilling their employees,” said Henderson. “For example, while an analytics automation solution can make getting insights from data a lot easier and faster, if employees don’t understand how to prep, blend, or work with data, then they’ll continue to rely on lean IT teams to do the work for them.”
There is an issue of low- and no-code being a new source of unmanageable silos. Enterprises need to avoid having “the same process being done dozens of different ways, each without proper documentation, auditability, or compliance,” said Bachenheimer.
As a result of the rise in low- and no-code approaches, “The role of IT is shifting from delivering applications to enabling the business,” said Phillips. “But there are essential functions that should still be centrally managed by IT. This includes overall enterprise and solution architecture, as well as governance of platforms, data, security, and integrations. With IT ensuring central governance and guardrails are in place, business users can create applications and workflow automations safely.”
Siloed thinking can be a challenge in low- and no-code environments. When business users create applications in a silo, “the focus is rarely an end-to-end problem, but rather a solution that ends where their departmental responsibility ends,” cautioned Mo Ladha, vice president of product management at Camunda.
“Beyond siloed solutions, there will be long-term challenges when it comes to maintenance, scale, quality, security, governance, and standardization. Developing an application is a structured process, and the risk of applications launching without a designed development lifecycle can put the business at risk and negatively impact the customer experience; a structured product lifecycle is critical to ensuring quality project outcomes.”
In addition, low- and no-code tools may be inhibited by limited functionality, “which has proven to be an issue for some applications that require extensive customization,” warned Turner. “If a unique functionality is necessary and isn’t available in the low- and no-code platform, a software development team will need to intervene and write custom code. In this case, integrating the customized code itself can be costly and time consuming for the organization, therefore undermining the value of the low-code attempt.”
IT managers and professionals need to stay involved to assure safe and productive experiences for citizen developers. Without proper governance from IT management, “citizen applications become difficult for IT departments to maintain, leading to fragmented systems, the accrual of massive technical debt, and security and compliance issues,” said Ross. “Enterprises need to recognize that this shift is already in motion and take action by establishing formal IT governance and configuring security guardrails specifically around citizen development.”
In addition, with a proliferation of citizen developers and user-created apps, there is a risk of “ending up with a jungle of unmanaged and unsecured applications,” Rappelet said. That’s where IT professionals also need to step up and assure strong governance. “The IT department should be involved when opening up your company to the low- and no-code tooling. They have been building, maintaining, and supporting systems for years, so they know the risks and pitfalls in terms of security, manageability, and governance. This does absolutely not mean that IT needs to block low-code tools, nor that IT needs to be involved in all application development, only that it is advised to establish a common understanding and provide guidelines on the use.”
While combatting IT skill shortages and IT costs, “some businesses will take on low-cost applications that serve niche needs, creating numerous data silos that lead to quality and governance issues,” noted Carolyn Musa, product manager with Boomi. “To address this, we will see more CIOs partner with their C-suite peers and adopt low-code tools that allow professional and citizen developers to build more apps with limited resources.”