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Empowering employees to innovate as tech skills shortage persists

Eric Swift from ServiceNow explains how organisations can maximise the cyber potential of their workforce.

user iconEric Swift
Fri, 13 Aug 2021
Empowering employees to innovate as tech skills shortage persists
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Australia’s tech skills shortage has only been exacerbated by the pandemic, to the detriment of digital transformation progress. Recent research from RMIT Online and Deloitte Access Economics has identified a need for 156,000 new technology workers, with 87 per cent of jobs now requiring digital skills. This skills gap is set to cost the economy $10 billion in lost growth by 2025.

With the pandemic accelerating digital transformation across all industries, business leaders are realising the urgent need to address the digital skills shortage so they can continue to innovate and grow.

Enter citizen developers

Enter ‘citizen developers’— non-technical employees who use low-code development platforms to build their own digital workflows to solve business problems. When citizen developers can build visual, modular, templated workflows to streamline disconnected processes and eliminate mundane tasks, they can unlock new efficiencies and business value.

Many of these citizen developers have never typed a line of traditional code. Today, thanks to low-code platforms, new applications can be built in days and weeks, not months and years. Crucially, because these non-technical employees are typically on the ‘front line’ closest to the business problems they are solving, they often spot opportunities that would otherwise be missed.

Even better, by broadening the pool of talent involved in digitising and improving business operations, businesses can free up IT teams to focus on more strategic, high-priority projects. Instead of spending their time focused on relatively simple yet time-consuming tasks, or having to translate business issues into briefs for software engineers, IT teams can dedicate their energy to more complex projects that were previously out of reach. As a result, the overall innovation output of an organisation can shift significantly upwards.

Low-code application platforms are powerful because they empower any employee to rapidly build apps that solve big organisational challenges that they face every day. It’s no surprise businesses are starting to take note: by 2024, Gartner expects that the majority of tech products and services will be built by professionals outside of IT.

How to activate non-developer talent

The right tools can help to fill the IT skills gap, but to get it right, companies will also need to address some cultural considerations before they can successfully shift the responsibility for problem-solving from software engineers and developers to business subject matter experts.

Hiring for low-coding

The beauty of low-code platforms is that they are built to be simple and accessible: they streamline the development process, taking care of technical challenges, so that your employees time and energy can be focused on solving business problems.

To build your pool of citizen developers, businesses need to seek out employees who have deep business knowledge, and who understand the positive impact technology and digitisation can have on business processes.

Diversity also matters when recruiting citizen developers. Not everybody has access to the years of specialised training or the disposition and interest to write code. Research shows that low-code platforms broaden the range of people contributing to our digital future, increasing diversity and improving outcomes. The more capability we can put into the hands of creative problem solvers who know the business, the more impact technology will have.

Set them up for success

Once the business has identified its citizen developers, the key challenge is enabling and empowering them with access to the right tools, as well as training and ongoing support. By opening up a development platform to a larger group of people, you run the risk of application sprawl and over-development. The tools that you use must have the right governance standards and frameworks in place, to manage innovation effectively.

While new technologies draw early attention through effusive proclamations from early adopters, their long-term longevity is driven by use cases developed by users on the ground. New use cases for low-code application platforms are springing up every day. Encouragingly, we’re seeing a wide diversity of our customers build their own low-code apps with the ServiceNow App Engine: one aerospace customer developed a low-code app that reduced manufacturing transportation incidents by 20 per cent.

Create and foster community

To sustain a thriving citizen developer program, business leaders must create a positive, productive community, supported by the IT organisation. There needs to be active engagement to provide training and support, so the business experts can focus on business issues, while access, security and governance are handled by IT teams.

Support and collaboration are key. Most low-code platform providers host forums where members exchange tips, tricks and solutions, and simple tactics like hackathons guided by experts can introduce employees to low-code development in a structured setting to help them succeed.

In a world where digital transformation is a key determinant of business success, low-code developers are the fuel for organisations to keep innovating. Low-code tools can enable talented employees from across the business to innovate and digitise processes and workflows that might otherwise sit on the IT backburner. With the right criteria and safeguards in place, they can help organisations overcome the gap in tech skills, support digital transformation initiatives, and increase efficiency and business growth.

Eric Swift is vice president and managing director ANZ at ServiceNow. Swift is a technology business veteran, having worked at Microsoft for over 20 years prior to joining ServiceNow.

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