12 September 2024
Andie Dovgan, Chief Growth Officer, Creatio
The UK is facing an IT skills gap crisis whereby the demand for technological expertise outpaces the supply of qualified professionals. A recent study by Forbes highlights the severity of the issue, with 93% of UK businesses reporting a shortfall in the IT skills necessary to meet their operational and strategic needs. Software development is particularly affected by this issue, with innovation hindered by a shortage of coding talent.
As businesses grapple with this shortfall, the competition for skilled IT professionals has intensified, particularly as tech giants and high-profile companies attract the lion’s share of available talent. This has left many organisations, particularly smaller businesses, struggling to fill critical roles and impacting their position in the playing field.
To address this challenge, more businesses are turning to citizen development and the solution it offers to bridge the IT skills gap. Citizen development refers to the practice of empowering non-technical staff within organisations to create software applications no-code platforms. These platforms provide user-friendly, visual interfaces that allow individuals without formal coding expertise to design, develop, and deploy applications that meet their specific business needs.
Democratising software development
Citizen development is a valuable tool for organisations seeking to democratise software development, enabling a wider pool of employees to contribute to digital transformation initiatives, without requiring extensive technical expertise.
These no-code tools simplify the development process by providing pre-built components and templates that users can drag and drop to create functional applications. Imagine assembling a puzzle, where the pieces are already shaped to fit together, but the user decides the final picture. This user-friendly approach allows organisations to tap into the creativity and domain-specific knowledge of their entire workforce, fostering a culture of innovation and continuous improvement.
What’s more, recent advancements in generative AI (Gen AI) have further streamlined the process, with additional features such as the ability to automate tasks, make design suggestions, and error correction. This makes app development faster, more accessible, and allows for greater customisation.
Driving digital transformation
Citizen development can significantly accelerate digital transformation efforts by reducing the reliance on external IT resources and speeding up the development lifecycle. In traditional models, developing a new application or digital solution is often time-consuming and resource-intensive, and consists of lengthy development cycles, rigorous testing, and multiple rounds of revisions.
No-code platforms can be used to augment and replace these legacy applications and can build both simpler applications for smaller teams and larger enterprise-wide solutions. In the latter case, a combination of citizen developers and professional developers can be used to create more complex applications – this approach, known as a "fusion team," leverages the strengths of both groups to deliver high-quality solutions.
With industry AI goals being reportedly hampered by a national skills shortage, as noted by CIOs, citizen development presents a solution. With citizen development, non-technical employees can rapidly prototype and iterate on applications, fostering a more agile and responsive approach to innovation.
For example, a marketing team could use a low-code platform to create a customer feedback app, a task that might otherwise require weeks of developer time. By empowering teams to build their own solutions, organisations can respond more quickly to market demands and internal needs, gaining a competitive edge.
Real world examples
Citizen development can be applied to a wide range of industries and business functions. In financial services, for example, it can be used to create applications for customer onboarding, loan approvals, and document management. In manufacturing, it can be used to build applications for order and invoice management, product lifecycle management, and lead and sales management. In healthcare, it can be used to develop applications for patient scheduling, medical records management, and telehealth platforms. And in retail, it can be used to create applications for inventory management, point-of-sale systems, and customer loyalty programmes.
Leveraging artificial intelligence
GenAI can significantly enhance the capabilities of citizen development platforms. For instance, it can be used to rapidly create prototypes of applications based on high-level descriptions, then refine these prototypes with visual no-code tools.
Moreover, GenAI can automate process creation by analysing internal process descriptions and generating corresponding automated workflows. This reduces the manual effort required for development and accelerates time-to-market.
In the future, we anticipate that GenAI will enable natural language interactions for refining applications, allowing non-technical users to modify interfaces and business logic through simple language commands. This will further democratise software development, making it more accessible to a wider range of employees.
Reshaping the way UK businesses work
The broader impact of citizen development extends far beyond individual businesses, with the potential to reshape the entire UK economy. By reducing the dependency on a limited pool of professional developers, citizen development can help to address the systemic IT skills shortage that is currently stifling innovation across the country.
The IT skills gap in the UK represents a significant challenge, but it also offers an opportunity for organisations to rethink how they approach software development and digital innovation. Citizen development not only addresses the immediate skills shortage but also fosters a more innovative, agile, and cost-effective approach to digital transformation.
What’s more, with GenAI's ability to generate custom code, even for those without extensive coding experience, we can anticipate streamlined workflows and exciting new innovations.
