The changing digital landscape has seen low-code citizen development gaining popularity in organisations looking to take a more inclusive approach to development to build new functionalities together that bring the business side into the development to create solutions that are precisely relevant to the unique business needs.

Traditionally, new processes have been integrated into existing legacy systems by either building in-house or buying, deploying and operating with an off-the-shelf solution or packaged app, that limited opportunities for customisation.  With the in-house, code-based approach, it requires a longer development lead-time and new programmers to write code who may typically have very little in-depth knowledge of the business needs or processes.  

The low-code digital revolution has presented an opportunity for businesses who have been searching for a middle ground – a software platform that is faster and less expensive to customise in-house that doesn’t require rooms full of programmers.  Replacing coding requirements with visual models allows a wider range of participation across all business units and can include operations experts, CX leaders and marketers to work collaboratively with the managed technology back-end, to design new and updated application processes that are more closely aligned with business needs.

The benefits of the citizen development approach are driving its growth in popularity, with data from Gartner discovering is that citizen development is already a reality in many enterprises and results of a global study indicates that half of the respondents knew of active citizen development initiatives at their organisations, while for the group that did not have active initiatives, 13% are evaluating the idea with 4% of those planning to initiate citizen development within the next 12 months.

Leveraging no-code software, empowering citizen developers and working collaboratively with IT resources can allow businesses to put the power in the hands of people that can make the difference and deliver enhanced, results-focused capabilities that deliver a rapid return on investment.

Encouraging low-code citizen development initiatives can help democratise app development at scale and velocity while reducing pressure on IT resources to create new web and mobile apps and deliver a modernised technology infrastructure across the business.