Citizen developers can mitigate the growing shortfall of pro coders—but with great empowerment comes great responsibility.
Changes in technology require changes in culture, skills and processes. At the University of Waterloo, where I am the author and instructor of our online Digital Transformation Certificate, our work is based on this fact.
A perfect example is low-code/no-code technology, the use of which has been growing in many organizations. This paradigm allows people with low or no programming skills—so-called citizen developers—to create custom software applications, bypassing the need for professional coders. According to a 2021 report, Gartner predicts that 70 percent of new applications will use low-code or no-code technology by 2025.
The year 2025 is also on track to see a shortfall of four million developers globally, according to the 2021 IDC report Quantifying the Worldwide Shortage of Full-Time Developers. In most organizations, developer skills are in high demand and it is common for there to be substantial backlogs in their work. As the pace of digital transformation continues to accelerate, the opportunities to develop applications with significant organizational benefit will only increase.
Recruiting and training more developers will not solve this problem, but low-code/no-code could, by enabling many more non-developer employees to participate in application development. These citizen developers are the focus of substantial debate on how low-code/no-code should be applied.
Low-code/no-code technology precipitates a myriad of changes in organizational processes and practices as well as in relationships with customers and suppliers. Low-code/no-code increases the power of non-developer employees to make significant changes to business-critical aspects of the organization—and this creates challenges.
The Pros and Cons of Low-Code/No-Code
Consider the following example. Judith is the CEO of a medium-sized manufacturer of plumbing supplies. Within her management team she has seen a growth in pressures for application development and she sees low-code/no-code as a possible response to this. She has asked the team to provide examples of what they would do with these new tools.
Finance said that organizational costs could be more closely monitored and managers could be held more accountable. Human Resources said it would make employee data more accessible to employees and their supervisors, and use bots to automatically respond to common HR queries. Marketing said it would be better able to exploit customer data to refine messaging and provide more frequent advice on product development. Operations said it would help manage their warehouse activity amidst increasing inventory due to the company’s growing product range.
Judith reviewed the examples that had been put forward with concern. Each of the ideas would need to be considered carefully. She could see problems with some of them that would benefit from modification after input from others. For example, she was concerned about giving Finance more ability to intervene in operational cost decisions, she was not keen on having employees interact with bots rather than people, and she was wary of anything that made it easier for Operations to hold more inventory.
Judith also had her own idea about the priorities for change in the functional areas, based on the organization’s strategic priorities, which were not always aligned with the desires of the departments. She was worried that distributing application development throughout the organization would create disruption and undermine her ability to control daily activity and the corporate strategic direction.
The developer bottleneck that existed in the company paced the technological change in the company. Limited capacity meant that work had to be prioritised and was subjected to a review process that provided some degree of input from those impacted by the change. Low-code/no-code would remove the capacity constraint and enable technology-based change to happen much more quickly, with its own significant challenges. Judith was unsure about how to proceed.
How to empower employees for digital transformation
Other organizations have dealt with this problem in a variety of ways. Some have accepted the implications of low-code/no-code, introduced it, and managed the consequences as they arose. Others have implemented procedures and rules that govern the use of low-code/no-code (slowing the pace of change and trying to ensure that it is consistent with strategic priorities), while some have decided that the risk of citizen developers is too great and have opted not to implement it at all.
The dilemmas organizations face with low-code/no-code effectively demonstrate the human and organizational challenges of digital transformation. According to a 2021 McKinsey report, only 30 percent of digital transformation projects are successful, and understanding these challenges and how to address them is necessary to improve the success rate.
Judith’s challenge was not technical. Low-code/no-code overcomes technical skill and capacity constraints, addressing one of the main issues organizations face in exploiting technology. Low-code/no-code can accelerate digital transformation, and those that can adopt it effectively are likely to achieve a substantial competitive advantage.
The adoption of low-code/no-code tools raises the question of empowerment within an organization. Until today, organizational processes and culture have been largely focused on minimizing variation and ensuring performance objectives are achieved reliably and cost-effectively. For many years business schools have advocated empowering middle managers and employees, but the effort has been slow in practice. This has been a limiting factor in digital transformation, which requires willing participation in continuous improvement and innovation throughout the organization.
Empowerment enables people throughout the organization to make change happen, but that change needs to be consistent with the organization’s strategic priorities. This requires everyone to have a good understanding of the priorities and a good level of commitment to them. It also requires a performance management system that is capable of providing visibility of, and accountability for, the impact of empowerment. Empowerment is not just about providing power; it also requires knowledge, commitment and accountability to apply that power for business benefit.
Effective empowerment is necessary to realize the significant strategic potential of low-code/no-code technology. Enabling citizen developers without it carries a substantial risk of organizational harm.