We see it all around us: qualified developers are hard to find, and those working in companies are busier than ever. Today’s developers must not only build and maintain mission-critical applications, but also play a more visible advisory role for the business.
That’s why it’s essential to outsource development work to lay developers, insists Karen Odegaard, managing director of global IT at Accenture. “IT organizations today have a lot of unmet demands,” she explained in a recent podcast. “We find that when ‘citizen’ developers are empowered to build their apps, they can build solutions 10 times faster than if they relied on central IT solution delivery. There are great benefits for the people building these apps, as well as for IT organizations. »
According to her, IT organizations enjoy significant advantages: “You bring in the people closest to the problem to solve it. So you don’t need IT to translate it. And you’re likely to create solutions for problems that would never have caught the attention of IT. We, as an IT organization, also get visibility into this, and it arms us with knowledge to better solve problems for our people across the enterprise. »
Accenture has 14,000 user-created apps
For IT, “it’s a change in the way we develop applications,” she continues. “So we need to change the way we think about compliance and technology governance at the platform level, rather than at the application level, which is where we focus most today. In addition, ways will eventually need to be found to reuse and repurpose apps created by lay developers across the enterprise, to avoid a glut or proliferation of these apps that clog systems and networks. “We need to be able to harvest and centralize user-created innovations,” says Karen Odegaard. “You can imagine the strain that could be for an IT organization, so we really need to think about it, and see how we can scale it. »
According to Karen Odegaard, Accenture now has 14,000 user-created applications. She uses the example of a “team that created a compliance application”. She says, “They took a very disparate and complex process and gave it a rules engine to simplify it for their team. As a result, they see a 75% reduction in security incidents within their organization. Karen Odegaard also cites another example at Accenture: “My favorite,” she says, “is a team that created a consolidated view of the data that our leaders needed to see on the go, and they created a Power app specifically designed for mobile use to solve this problem”.
One of the main lessons learned from these activities is that “there are a lot of players in the ecosystem around no-code and low-code platforms. We needed to have a narrow set of use cases to target our platform to non-professional developers,” explains Karen Odegaard. “It becomes more difficult to decide what should live on each of the platforms that we have within our organization. There are also licensing implications to consider, especially with tens of thousands of apps now supported, she adds.
Show the way with concrete examples
To encourage the growth of user-created apps, Karen Odegaard urges developers to “show the user population concrete examples of how easy it can be, that anyone can do it.” Technology will also play a role in increasing adoption. “The RPA [robotic process automation] self-service is going to have huge benefits for our workforce, by enabling people to automate manual tasks themselves. »
From the perspective of non-professional developers, “the ability to design and build app experiences faster than ever before means they gain back valuable time. They are now automating their work. For high-value resources, like our developers and architects, we’re freeing them up to focus on the more complex solutions that create value for the business.”
Also, keep in mind that professional developers themselves can use low-code and no-code solutions to speed up their software delivery work.
Source: ZDNet.com