By opening up application development to “citizen developers” who do not have technical programming skills, new applications can be built collaboratively by joint teams of business users and IT staff. This removes the disconnects that can otherwise often plague the development process due to IT people and business users misunderstanding one another.

Citizen development enabled by Low Code No Code provides a real opportunity to digitise the subject matter expertise and judgment of senior business staff as they inject their experience and knowledge directly into the application by developing it themselves. Their intellectual capital is transformed into a corporate asset available to all users.

Digital transformation drives a lot of change to ways of working across the organisation and, unless carefully managed, this can sometimes result in push-back by users. With applications being developed jointly by business users and IT staff, the likelihood of positive buy-in across the organisation to the new applications and procedural changes is far more likely.

By getting citizen developers directly engaged in creating new applications, delivery times are substantially reduced and positive outcomes are achieved faster. It’s not simply a question of having more people available to work on the project: this approach significantly eliminates the need for IT staff to engage in lengthy dialogues with business users so as to develop a detailed understanding of how the process works, and removes the risk important issues being “lost in translation”.

However, whilst Low Code No Code can bring all of these benefits, it is critically important that this way of working occurs within a suitable governance structure - otherwise there is a danger of a “shadow” IT environment being created that lies outside the security and other controls routinely implemented by the IT function. The necessary governance should ideally flow from the organisation’s overall Centre of Excellence (CoE) that is set up to drive the holistic digital transformation initiative.

We would welcome the opportunity to talk to you about how Low Code No Code could be used to transform application development in your organisation, and how to set up and manage the necessary governance safeguards.