The Rise of the Citizen Developer

The NOCODER Issue #2

It is no secret that there was already a huge anual deficit of software developers, by the end of 2019. When the pandemic hit, the need for social distancing drove the demand for digital solutions through the roof, making the continued reliance onto the small number of people that have software development skills untenable.

NOCODE to the rescue

A new surge of tools focused on the creation of digital solutions without programming was well underway in 2019, and the rise in demand for these solutions driven by the pandemic helped increase their momentum. Several new tools started to see the light of day in the wake of the attention being lavished on the pre-existing ones.

NOCODE tools allow people without programming skills to create a wide variety of digital solutions, making them de facto developers, though not coders. These regular people that take it upon themselves to create new solutions using these tools are now being generally referred to as Citizen Developers.

Rise of the Citizen Developer

As more companies are adversely affected by the restrictions imposed as a consequence of the pandemic, more they require alternative ways to do business. The employees that take on the challenge to attempt to meet their digital needs without relying on the IT team to do it for them are earning new skills and thus opening up new professional paths down the road. When combined with the support of the IT team in choosing the best tools for the company’s requirements, this can lead to results that not only help maximize the results of the work, but also helps to reduce the spread of what is generally called shadow IT.

The organizations where the IT departments are more “enlightened” are jumping on the opportunity to substitute the myriad of spreadsheets that are generally used to actually run a company for solutions that allow for greater control and security over how data is handled and flows through the company.

This has not gone unnoticed by the tech giants with Microsoft, Google and Amazon making moves towards joining or reinforcing their position in the NOCODE space. Microsoft has strong position in the Corporate World as their Power Apps platform is generally included with their Microsoft 365 offer, leading to a huge number of companies already having the right to use it, even if they don’t know about it.

Google has gone shopping in the NOCODE space, while Amazon brought out into beta status its Honeycode service in 2020.

At The NOCODER we will be following closely how the NOCODE space evolves and how the companies large and small respond to the new services coming out at an accelerated pace.

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