Democratizing Development: Empowering the Citizen Developer
What happens when the thing you want to buy requires long development times, high costs, and a very specialized skillset to produce?? You save your money and plan ahead. ???
OR??
You do it yourself ??????
But what if that thing you need is a new house? A new car?? Gaining the skills and expertise needed to make your own is probably longer than waiting for a craftsman to build it from scratch.?
But what if you’re a company who employs craftsmen? You know there are people beyond your current customers who would benefit from your services, but the costs or the lead-times are impractical for them. Since there aren’t enough craftsmen to scale your current business model, a paradigm shift is required to expand production.? Sound familiar??
Historical Handle?
In the early 1900’s, craftsmen dominated car manufacturing in a very similar way. Blueprints guided them, but they also relied on their finely tuned artistic and mechanical skills to custom fit each part for each car.? These creations were amazing and worth the time and money they required, but most of the population was left out of the benefits of these personalized technologies.? Sure, there were trains and street cars, but a paradigm shift to personalized transportation for the average person (beyond the horse ?? ) would require a new production platform.?
Seizing on this opportunity, Henry Ford famously leveraged mass production to build a car that the average citizen could afford and maintain.? Assembly lines, interchangeable parts, and reusable models made it possible for more people to make careers in production.??
By 1914, six years after introducing the Model-T, the revolution was under way.? The Model-T wasn’t the fastest or most prestigious car, but it revolutionized transportation AND the way we build things.?
领英推荐
Future Foundation?
Fast forward to the digital age, and most companies are struggling to setup the IT infrastructure needed to support their business.? Do they buy or build what they need??? Standard ERP systems and customized software are expensive to set up and maintain (compare that to trains and street cars above).? Likewise, do their technical developers have enough bandwidth to support the demand?? And what tools does that leave available for the average worker in this digital age?? They use Excel of course. ?? (Read that as ride their horse.) ????
Seizing on this historical rhyme, Microsoft’s low-code Power Platform seems to be leveraging Ford’s mass production blueprint. With Power Apps release in 2016, they’ve been steadily improving the whole cloud platform to allow the average citizen worker to have a scalable toolset to build modern business processes at the local and enterprise level. With THIS, the “citizen developer” is emerging. Saving time on repetitive tasks, cleaning up data, and creating advanced analytics has never been more important.?
No, the Power Platform is not perfect, and low code does not mean low complexity, but the continual improvements in the Power Platform tools are certainly helping to fill in the gaps that IT can no longer support.? These enterprise tools will require some standardized building principles to get the full benefit out of them (something to discuss in more detail in the future), but they are a big improvement over Excel, SharePoint, or the Access databases people have leveraged to do their jobs.?
If your company is not leveraging low code tools yet, the barrier to entry has never been lower to begin. You'll also discover the hidden talents of the people you work with. Let them amaze you!? What are you waiting for? ???