Democratizing IT: How Low-Code/No-Code and Citizen Development Can Digitally Enable Business Subject Matter Experts

Contact person: Björn Binzer

Given the pace of digital technological advances and a faster-than-ever changing economic environment, organizations worldwide are under increased pressure to continuously adapt and renew themselves to stay competitive (Kohli & Melville, 2019; Drechsler et al., 2020). This momentum, commonly referred to as digital transformation, is consequently boosting the demand for digital solutions and digital talent (Hoogsteen & Borgman, 2022). Though coping with digital transformation challenges is a top priority for organizations of all types (Matt et al., 2016), only few initiatives realize their intended goals and objectives (Forth et al., 2020; Wade & Shan, 2020).

While an organization’s workforce is considered a key factor in succeeding with digital transformation initiatives (Bughin et al., 2018; Eden et al., 2019), organizations particularly struggle to meet the ever-increasing demands for digital solutions and automation whilst facing a shortage of digital talent (Breaux & Moritz, 2021; Carroll & Maher, 2023). For instance, the German industry association Bitkom reports that roughly 96,000 IT positions were vacant in Germany in 2021, with software developers and architects in biggest demand (Bitkom Research, 2022). This IT talent gap is widening globally and is expected to intensify in the near future (Breaux & Moritz, 2021).

In effect, a growing backlog is arising on central IT units’ sides (Hoogsteen & Borgman, 2022). Many IT units are unable to meet the demand resulting in delays, longer waiting times and frustrated business unit stakeholders (Carroll et al., 2021b; Lebens et al., 2021). This lack of IT responsiveness has been found as one of the major reasons for the preference of business units to act autonomously and the occurrence of the phenomenon of shadow IT (Kopper, 2017) and its associated risks (Klotz et al., 2019).

To overcome the dilemma between the IT talent shortage and increasing demands on IT units, the concept of citizen development has gained increasing attention in practice. The term refers to the empowerment of employees in non-IT functions (so-called citizen developers) to design, develop, and deploy their own lightweight digital solutions based on IT tools that are provided, recommended, or at least tolerated by core IT units (Binzer & Winkler, 2022; Gartner, 2022).

Of central relevance to the concept are low-code/no-code (LCNC) development platforms such as Microsoft PowerApps, OutSystems, or Mendix (Di Ruscio et al., 2022). LCDPs represent cloud-based environments that use advanced graphical user interfaces, visual representations, drag-and-drop facilities, and reusable components to enable a simplified and rapid process for developing lightweight software solutions (Di Ruscio et al., 2022). The high level of abstraction of LCDPs leads to enhanced ease-of-use allowing subject matter experts with minimal or even without any programming skills to create their own digital solutions (Sahay et al., 2020).

While there is a vivid discourse on citizen development in the practice community, only few research articles deal with this novel phenomenon (e.g., Hintsch et al., 2021; Hoogsteen & Borgman, 2022). Nonetheless, some recent works raise the awareness for citizen development (Carroll et al., 2021a; Lebens et al., 2021; Binzer & Winkler, 2022; Hoogsteen & Borgman, 2022; Carroll & Maher, 2023), an overview of this emerging stream of research is yet missing. Given that research on the phenomenom is currently in its infancy, this project strives to intensively and profoundly explore diverse aspects on different levels of analysis.