Citizen development predictions for 2022

Mike Fitzmaurice, WEBCON's Chief Evangelist, and VP has more than 25 years of product, consulting, evangelism, engineering, and IT management expertise in workflow/business process automation, citizen development, and low-code/no-code solution platforms & strategies. His decade at Microsoft included birthing technical product management and developer evangelism for SharePoint products and technologies. Mike shares his 2022 predictions about why citizen development will face a reckoning, why low-code adoption will surge, and more.

2022 Citizen Development Predictions

Citizen development has been attempted for a decade now, and the industry is going to realize that delegating solution-building to power users has limits. The applications being produced are often too fragile to be shared beyond a few users and when they succeed, the amateur developer soon becomes a professional developer and changes careers. When it works, it’s beautiful, but companies will realize this is so rare that they can’t depend on it.

Prediction: Low-code adoption will surge but among professional developers, not business users.

Demand for applications has skyrocketed and the supply of professionals remains low.  Experiments with having power users build business applications are yielding fragile solutions with limited scope. Since you can’t add pro developers and you can’t add amateur developers, and you already believe in new methods, the only thing left is to adopt higher-productivity tools. Some low-code tools and platforms are stepping up to meet enterprise requirements for security, scaling, continuity, auditing, monitoring, deployment, and change management. They’ll get adopted if they get noticed.

Prediction: RPA will get a reality check.

IT will realize robotic process automation is really robotic task automation and if they don’t use it in concert with Digital Business Process Management, they’ll only speed up the wrong activities, and won’t really achieve anything resembling digital transformation.

Prediction: Waterfall will continue to refuse to die.

While commercial development efforts will continue to shift toward any of several methodologies based on continuous improvement, companies engaging with outside consultants will continue to demand fixed-price, fixed-term, one-and-done projects. It will keep waterfall on life support for the foreseeable future. I’m not proud to be saying this, but I’m not wrong, either.