By Betsy Burton
What Do You Do About Low-Code/No-Code Citizen Developers?
The answer to this question is easy. You embrace them. You train them. You integrate them into your governance and architecture efforts. You encourage them to work like developers in IT. You provide them with resources to be successful.
You don’t ignore them. And you don’t try to stop them because you can’t.
I have been thinking a lot about all the development of applications, services and apps that is happening outside the scope of the IT department.
Specifically, I have been thinking about the fact that low-code/no-code development, which is quickly becoming pervasive, is and will continue to make it easier for non-IT developers to create important if not critical business applications.
And further how code assembly and code generation will only increase this trend.
So, what do you do about this and what lessons can we learn from the past?
Citizen Developers Are Not New
Since the beginning of the PC revolution in the early 1980s, citizens have been able to develop solutions to meet their everyday needs.
Think about Excel. This was a radical tool (at the time) that enabled financial planners, CFOs, managers, and sales teams to perform complex calculations and store data outside the scope of IT.
And what did IT leaders do? For the most part they ignored it, and so organizations ended up with hundreds if not thousands of unmanaged spreadsheets supporting business needs.
Even today, I know organizations that largely support their budgeting and planning processes on independently created and managed spreadsheets.
This trend happened again with the advent of PC-based databases.
Organizations ended up with hundreds of Access, dBase and SQL databases that were not integrated with enterprise databases.
IT leaders either ignored these, or worse called them “rogue IT” or “shadow IT.” Data quality issues was the norm between these disparate databases.
And then we did it again with SharePoint, with Portals, with analytics, and then services.
IT leaders tried to lock them down, squash them with architecture boards, and stop them with standards. This just leads to IT leaders banging their heads, and business developers ignoring IT rules.
We need to change these dynamics. Citizen developers are here to stay. So, what are you going to do.
Low-Code/No-Code Developers are Developers
We have got to find a different way of interacting with citizen developers than in the past.
I am writing a note as we speak on best practices for supporting Citizen Developers. However, in the meantime, there are a few principles we need to embrace.
There is no such thing as rogue or shadow IT; development outside IT is development.
This doesn’t mean it isn’t all right or required. But if we don’t look at it as any other investment in information technology, it will remain unmanaged and likely chaotic.
You can’t stop development by citizen developers. The low-code tools and no-code tools and capabilities as well as the general technology knowledge of citizen developers, are becoming more and more sophisticated.
This will become even more evident as AI-enabled tools, such as predictive analytics and generative AI become common.
In addition, there are many cases where citizen developers may know more than IT developers about a specific subject.
Your enterprise architecture must not be just about IT architecture.
Organizations must figure out how to use business architecture to empower and guide citizen developers. And then use technology, information, security, and solution architecture to integrate the efforts of citizen developers.
This will improve the security, quality, and reliability of your entire architecture, not just IT.
Bottom Line
The ability for citizen developers to develop powerful applications, services and apps is only increasing with the advent of low code / no code tools.
You cannot control or ignore them, because they will go off and create what they need (or think they need) to get their jobs done–but you can and should guide them.
Not everything citizen developers are developing is the right thing for the business or your technology portfolio.
By integrating their efforts, providing positive guidance, and training, and making them part of your team across business and IT, leaders can decrease the amount of chaos and increase the value of development investments across the organization.
SEE BETSY AT TRANSFORM 2022!
Aragon Research’s analysts will be discussing, ‘The Top Ten Technologies for 2023 and 2028? on Thursday, December 8th at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET.
To see the full list on-demand, register here!
This blog is a part of the Business Transformation blog series by Aragon Research’s VP of Research, Betsy Burton.
Missed the previous installments? Catch up here: