Every business likely has tedious manual processes that a new or improved app could help solve. The problem: there aren't enough IT developers to work on it. This is how a growing number of companies are bridging the app development gap: helping non-IT employees become "citizen developers" by using low-code platforms to build new business apps on time.
Why IT Can't Satisfy Most Employee Requests for New Applications
Computer software developers have always been in their prime. Software maintenance, including fixing bugs, applying updates, and resolving security vulnerabilities, has historically consumed the most IT department time and budget. Everything published is used to drive the digital transformation of business operations, customer service, and often the very nature of your products, services, and goals. That doesn't leave much, if any, time for employee inquiries about apps that would help them digitize tedious manual tasks. And even then, the traditional app development cycle, from planning to design to deployment, often takes months, sometimes years. Hiring more IT developers is not a viable solution. Most companies don't have the budget and a lack of qualified candidates means that hiring can take months. One solution is to hire employees who want to become citizen developers to create apps that solve their everyday problems. After all, employees are in the best position to identify challenges that new applications could solve. These are also the same challenges that IT is unlikely to detect or have the bandwidth to create. Low-code development platforms allow people with little or no programming or computing experience to build their own applications using pre-existing code modules. (Unsurprisingly, IT professionals also use these tools when appropriate.) The best low-code platforms have drag and drop GUIs. If you've used a website or blogging tool, you know them well. What the citizen developer has to do is select the appropriate modules, create information tables, event/action descriptions, etc... and, depending on the circumstances, edit or write a few lines of actual code. To the user, these applications resemble forms, applications, portals and control panels on the screen of your computer, tablet or smartphone, created or provided by IT. What kinds of tasks and problems are best suited for low-code development? While low code can be used to solve more complex problems, common tasks like assigning, tracking, and submitting a request are of interest to new citizen developers. These may include:- Simple shapes
- Task management
- Reproducible processes
- Excel-powered processes
- Execution of the request
- Transform business trigger / action rules into apps