All Hands on Tech

4Citizen Development Using Low-Code/No-Code Tools¹

The use of low-code/no-code technologies to create IT applications is at the heart of the citizen development movement. There are numerous prognosticators who have argued that the world will need far more application programs than IT professionals can produce; the IT research house IDC speculated that 750 million such programs will be needed by 2025.² Low-code/no-code (LC/NC) applications are expected to fill the void. Another prognosticator, Gartner, has speculated that 80% of technology products and services will be built by professionals outside of IT organizations by 2024—the year this book is being published—and LC/NC technologies will enable this production.³ Of course, we’ll never know exactly how many or what percentage of applications will be developed by citizens using LC/NC tools, but it’s a safe bet that the number and percentage will be high.

So what do we mean by LC/NC technologies? Simply put, they involve using simple interfaces instead of traditional programming to create new programs or modify existing ones. There are many versions of this phenomenon, ranging from point-and-click and pull-down menus all the way to generative AI. The latter can easily generate code and, if prepared and prompted correctly, can also generate entire applications, web pages, mobile apps, and online games. LC/NC tools—and no doubt eventually generative AI—are even being used to create manufacturing applications.

Some argue that ...