Dive Brief:
- The worldwide market for low-code development is expected to reach nearly $27 billion in 2023, according to Gartner research released Tuesday. This is almost a 20% increase from 2022's $20.5 billion in spending.
- Citizen automation development platforms are the fastest growing low-code tools. The technology is estimated to grow 30% to $953 million in 2023 from $732 million this year.
- “The evolution to low-code didn’t happen overnight,” Jason Wong, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, said. “There was rapid application development before low-code and [fourth generation language tools] before low-code, but what really drove this newest generation of new low-code is cloud and SaaS.”
Dive Insight:
Low-code has the potential to empower workers outside of IT to create tech solutions for everyday problems, but the added manpower comes with its own issues.
Without clear parameters, duplicate applications or shadow IT can occur, bringing with it security and compliance concerns.
“IT has been grappling with the governance of SaaS applications and cloud and managing the data and integrating into on premise data centers or with legacy applications,” Wong said. “So it’s not a new challenge, but it’s just a different perspective now because low-code allows the distributed development of capabilities like never before.”
One option is to blend business, subject matter experts, technologists and others into a fusion team, according to Wong. Fusion teams allow workers to solve problems under the watchful eye of IT professionals who can ensure that compliance, governance and security standards are upheld throughout the process.
Organizations can also create a framework for citizen development. ServiceNow’s framework involves a four-step approach: enroll, evaluate, enable, develop and deploy.