Why Manufacturing Needs Citizen Developers - Forbes

Everyone has their own way of marking the passage of time. For some people, it’s haircuts—every 6 weeks on the dot. For others, it’s taking a monthly measure of their children’s height, a way of making sure they’re not missing the miracle unfolding right before their eyes.

Me? Recently I’ve been marking time by the number of no-code and low-code start-ups that bring in 8-digit funding rounds.

And how fast time is moving!

It seems that every week a new low-code/no-code company pulls in an impressive fund raise, and the trend isn’t set to slow any time soon. According to Gartner IT , the market for low-code alone is set to grow 23% this year alone. Further, the firm found that the market is shifting. In the next four years, half of the purchases of low-code platforms will occur outside of IT departments, a massive shift for what began as a tool for simplifying application development and management for IT teams.

So in this post I want to take a second to look at what’s going on here, at what it really means when business users take up application development themselves.

It turns out, this shift is going to be critical to keeping manufacturing competitive in the years to come.

Bring on Citizen Development

There’s a simple premise behind the massive influx of cash toward low/no code platforms (the market is expected to exceed $45B by 2025).

The more people who can develop software, the more software gets written. The more software that gets written, the faster businesses move. The faster businesses move… you get it. Giving business users the ability to design applications, automate the “bad labor” that exists in every job, and integrate the disparate tools in their stack translates into huge dollars, driven by the twin forces of improving productivity and eliminating waste.

Fairly recently, this phenomenon has been given a name: citizen development. Today, folks in putatively non-technical roles aren’t just expected to do things with software. They’re expected to extend their existing software or bring in new software solutions to address existing inefficiencies. From there, it’s a short leap—much shorter than you’d think—to charging business users with writing their own software.

Citizen development marks a tectonic shift in who writes software.

Need for systems that can be built up and torn down fast

Much of the commentary on citizen development and no code/low code has focused on the imbalance between the need for software and the number of software developers working today. As one executive put it, “It boils down to the scarcity of computer scientists.”

The problem is, I’m not so sure a lack of computer scientists is really what’s going on here.

There’s a huge benefit to citizen development that a focus on labor market imbalances misses. And that’s the fact that business users often have the best sense of the outcome they’d like from a solution. If they can write the software themselves, that gets rid of the ungainly dance of requirement gathering, and prevent the details of a solution from getting lost in the game of telephone between developers and users. All without paying additional developers’ salaries.

So if software is eating the world, citizen developers are making sure our diet stays under control.

Further, focusing on the lack of professional developers misses something about the role that software plays in contemporary businesses.

The pace of change these days can be punishing. Fewer organizations are building for posterity because what works now won’t work in a year. What customers want now isn’t what they’ll want in six months.

So what do you do? Do you tangle up resources in a constant game of cat and mouse? Or do you resign yourself to building systems with a shelf-life?

Citizen development gets you out of this bind. If business users are able to build up and tear down software as it’s needed, the organization saves. No wasting time on projects with no short term value and dubious long-term prospects. No wasting developer hours on 1000s of iterations of 1000s of applications. Let folks who understand their processes improve them as they need it.

Give individuals the ability to build software and deprecate software as needed.

What it means for manufacturing

At this point, I need to answer the question: “Okay, fine, citizen development… But what does any of this have to do with manufacturing?”

The reality is that manufacturing needs citizen developers in order to thrive in a business landscape characterized by change, acceleration, and disruption.

The first reason why manufacturing needs citizen development is simple. There are tens of thousands of manufacturing firms that don’t have a single IT person or staff developer. Are we saying that these companies either need to, A.) pay a firm or consultants to write software for them, or, B.) that they have to work without the benefits of software for the vast majority of their processes? What a sad Industry 4.0 this reality would be.

Rather, these companies need to empower their workers to become citizen developers so that they can make in-house built software a part of their working model without increasing headcount.

Second, fewer and fewer manufacturers have the stomach for the “forever systems” of the past.

We’re breaking out of a time when the standard was to buy a million dollar MES, wait 2 years between signing the contract and rolling it into production, and accept that 70% of your money is going to professional services. And it doesn’t stop once the system enters production. Need a line of code to change? Open your wallet. With citizen development, operations teams can build robust systems themselves without shelling out for closely guarded organizational expertise. Lower (or no) CapEx, more control, more agility, no decade-long commitment to a single system—that’s what citizen development gives you.

Finally, it’s about time that manufacturing software caught up to the reality that manufacturing lines change. All the time they change! The need for citizen development here can best be summed up by a recent conversation I had with a lean practitioner at a large multinational manufacturer.

He told me about how his company had struggled to come up with an andon system that worked across cells. On one cell, a “genius electrical engineer” had wired a complicated, custom andon system that let a worker signal an alert with custom colors for downtime reasons. It worked great for years.

And then the cell needed to change. And then the cell needed to change again. And then the electrical engineer left the company. So their custom andon system—which only ever worked on that cell—was down for good.

Recently, however, the engineer who told me this story let me know there was a happy ending. Instead of re-wiring a custom solution, they used a no code platform and a few cheap, off-the-shelf smart bulbs to create a new andon system. It only took a few hours to build. Anyone at the company can use it. Any one of the citizen developers at the company can write and reconfigure the software that the andon system runs on—you don’t need to rely on the expertise of a genius electrical engineer.

This, to me, is the promise of citizen development in manufacturing. Faster development. Less commitment to a given piece of software. Power to the workers who need it.

What is manufacturing going to look like when every worker can build software as sophisticated as the products they manufacture?

Toward Citizen Development

I started this article by drawing attention to the fact that VCs are having a field day with no code companies. There’s harmony here. The same reason VCs are attracted to no code—the ability for their portfolio companies to iterate and test their market at a rapid pace—is exactly why no code and citizen development is necessary in manufacturing. Citizen developers let manufacturers build and test solutions at a rapid pace with little cost.

Bring on the citizen developers.

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