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Unleashing innovation using low

code/no code – The age of the
citizen developer
Greg Smith, Michael Papadopoulos, Joshua Sanz, Michael Grech, Heather Norris

Over the last decade we have seen the “softwarization” of As the saying goes,
products, services and experiences. Organizations that spent “software is eating
decades developing and improving their business models the world,” forcing
companies to change
and core capabilities have been outcompeted by those that
their business models
disrupted their own business models with software. It has
and operations. In a
been famously said that “software
highly competitive
is eating the world”1, and in today’s environment, ensuring
highly competitive environment, they have the required
organizations find it challenging software capabilities is
to fulfill the development and a challenge. This article
operational demands needed to shows how adopting
keep their businesses running, while low-code/no-code
continuing to expand and enhance techniques enables
their digital capabilities. businesses to widen
their options, providing
tools for non-specialist
In this article we will explore
“citizen developers” to
how enterprises can leverage
digitize and transform
today’s low-code/no-code (LC/NC)
their operations.
solutions – declarative2 development
options with relatively low learning
curves that provide the company’s
workforce with tools to easily create software to grow and
transform the business.

What is low-code/no-code (LC/NC)?

Complex tasks have been progressively simplified through

the use of technology and visual tools. For example, word
processing has been so affected and simplified by visual
programming that today’s average seven-year-old can
compose a well-formatted electronic document with
graphics in minutes.

1. “Why Software Is Eating the World”, Marc Andreessen, The Wall Street Journal, 2011
2. Declarative programming is a programming paradigm – a style of building the structure
and elements of computer programs – that expresses the logic of a computation without
describing its control flow.
Low-code and no-code tools are the latest stage in this
evolution. They allow anyone to create application
software through graphical user interfaces and declarative
programming. LC/NC development platforms provide tools
for designing applications or systems, along with their
required inputs, outputs and business logic. LC/NC takes a
visual approach to build business applications more efficiently.
This allows “citizen developers” – such as designers and
businesspeople – to build and test applications quickly,
without the need for developers.

Task

Event

Figure 1: Automated business workflow

Event

Low-code and no-code platforms enable average people to

create apps quickly, and then layer customization and added
features on top of them. With these options, enterprise
users may develop their own apps without writing a line of
code, or while keeping code to a minimum for any optional
customization. According to Gartner’s research3, “by 2024,
low-code application development will be responsible for
more than 65 percent of application development activity.”

The difference between low-code and no-code: Whereas

low-code solutions usually require some initial installation,
deployment and minimal coding skills, no-code platforms are
faster to set and much easier to use, and hardly require any
coding for the most basic functionality.

3. Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms–Gartner

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No-code platforms are good for building line-of-business apps

when you have limited IT resources and technically savvy
businesspeople. Low-code development platforms, on the
other hand, are a good choice for professional developers
who want to create long-term custom applications that will
help implement business requirements but have much higher
customization needs – such as pixel-perfect user interfaces.

Benefits of LC/NC

For any business undergoing a digital transformation, a LC/NC

approach to development can enable a wider range of people
and empower the workforce. It builds on innate creativity
and entrepreneurship to automate back-office tasks, which
can improve internal operations and execute ideas by quickly
moving them from inception to prototyping. It allows anyone
from the business without previous technical experience to
become a smart software generator, which takes the pressure
off IT and enables innovation to come from all sides of the
business. It also solves real problems that may not otherwise
get the attention they deserve by enabling the people closest
to them to solve them. Why not devolve processes and
capabilities back to their key stakeholders? This will also
allow companies to avoid offshoring in some cases, keeping
the solution closer to the problem. Furthermore, it will help
address a common challenge in software creation: how to
communicate requirements to developers.

Whether it is used as an innovation catalyst, to boost

productivity, or to address the developer shortage4, LC/NC’s
intuitive user experience, low complexity, and adaptability
have a double impact. It brings in new software that would
not have otherwise existed, and also decreases development
time for software that would have otherwise been
implemented in a classic manner. This results in faster time
to market and significant overall cost reduction (CAPEX and
OPEX) when applied properly. For example, low-code services
specialist Green Lemon Company worked with a logistics
company to create a vehicle-tracking dealer portal that went
from design to deployment in four weeks. The estimates
using the traditional development indicated a four- to five-
month effort5. Our own case studies (see Box 1 later in this
article) show similar time-to-value gains.

4. The New Frontier of Software Development–Salesforce research

5. Digital Enablement via Low Code Platform–TechMarketView
In addition, LC/NC solutions facilitate a user-centric approach
with great flexibility to adapt to customer needs and evolve
the solution. It skips front-end involvement of IT when starting
work on business-critical apps and brings them in when it is
time for live integrations, security, deployments and the like.

When should you use LC/NC?

LC/NC solutions are ideal for non-technical staff members

who understand the business context and are best positioned
to drive and challenge requirements. A solution can start
with the business, and then be handed over to IT for
enhancements. This eliminates long IT backlogs6 or having to
procure services from external parties if the company does
not have in-house IT capabilities. Most benefits of a LC/NC
approach come when it is applied to productivity use cases
that require strong business knowledge or projects that have
limited initial investment and tight deadlines, and require fast
turnaround and flexible approaches. Typical applications are as
follows:

• Operational efficiency improvement: Automation of

manual and paper-based processes to increase accuracy
and quality while reducing costs. LC/NC platforms make
it easy to create applications for capturing information and
include ready-made connectors for integrating applications
into core systems. Most LC/NC platforms include workflow
automation. Workflow tools allow the people closest to
the business, such as a business analysts, to build the
processes and simple touchpoints needed for common
customer and employee activities. The tools have easy-to-
use graphical user interfaces to model processes, and some
allow APIs and pre-built integrations for a wider range of
use cases so workflows are fully integrated with in-house
and third-party systems. However, one disadvantage is
they can only provide part of the solution and offer limited
ability to alter the user experience; hence, further work may
be needed for full automation and integration with other
systems.

6. The No-Code Solution to Your Digital Transformation – Betty Blocks

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• Innovation and prototyping: An often-overlooked

capability of LC/NC solutions is innovation and “art of the
possible” applications. LC/NC solutions allow business
users – the people who best know and understand the
challenges and the vision – to unlock value by “smart
stitching” emerging technologies such as the Internet of
Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning,
and even blockchain together with older, legacy data. This
allows for an iterative test and learn-and-discover approach,
in which users create functional prototypes and iterate
towards fully functional applications.

•S
 mart stitching7: The availability of open APIs,
microservices, and developments around function-as-a-
service (FaaS) and serverless applications underline how
new-generation applications are moving towards collections
of connected services8. Over time, organizations often end
up with big suites of tools and systems (bespoke and off-
the shelf) from different vendors. This is usually the case
for global enterprises that have expanded and diversified
through both acquiring other companies and setting
up operations in new markets by building applications
quickly, without global IT growth strategies in mind. LC/NC
platforms enable rapid creation of pinpoint, domain-specific
applications, which, via connectors or building middle
layers, can be “stitched” together with legacy applications
to create end-to-end products. Businesses can use LC/NC
tools as tactical solutions to integrate different components
to “keep the lights on” while they decide if they need to
replace potential burning platforms in the long term.

7. Smart stitching (http://www.digitalproblemsolving.com/meme/smart-stitching)

| Arthur D. Little
8. Digital Enablement via Low Code Platforms – TechMarketView
 Business operations Internal systems External systems

Marketing
System A

CRM
Sales
Sales

Finance
System B Third-party system

ERP module 1
Supply chain management
Distribute ERP module 2

ERP module 3
Inventory

Third-party services
System 3

Help desk
Customer support

Help desk
Legacy New (LC/NC) Connector

Figure 2: Easy expansion of operation systems with LC/NC tools

In Box 1, we have summarized a few case studies in which

ADL has implemented LC/NC solutions to help clients:

Box 1 – LC/NC case studies

Mobile network operator value-added services: ADL used

LC/NC tools to design and implement a plethora of value-
added services (VASs) for a mobile network operator. These
ranged from the standard services of balance enquiries,
balance transfers, and credit top-ups to more innovative
services such as quiz games. The services were all accessed
via SMS or the USSD protocol, so there was no need for a
graphical user interface. The platform used the Java Business
Process Management (jBPM5) engine, with the input and
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business logic designed in a workflow graphical editor.

Though the technology used in this example has since been
significantly superseded, the core patterns and principles
have not. Engineers and developers would establish the core
API calls and system API functionality, and then hand these
over to business- and product people, who would use these
as “Lego” blocks to build the necessary functionality. The
platform served over 1 million customers, achieving speeds of
over 120 transactions a second and proving LC/NC could be
made efficient.

A robot-as-a-service (RaaS) platform for a global

company: ADL used a modern LC/NC platform to smart-
stitch together a number of off-the-shelf SaaS tools to enable
CRM (including leads and campaigns), inventory, subscriptions
and help desk. We set up a full greenfield RaaS platform
for the European entity of a global corporation. The solution
allowed for full customization out of the box for building
flowcharts and creating logical steps for the process to make
it repeatable, productive, and well structured. The solution
also had out-of-the-box connectors to a variety of additional
services, such as Amazon Connect, a cloud-based contact-
center facility that could also be fully customized using simple
drag-and-drop tools.

Limitations and barriers of LC/NC

LC/NC solutions offer significant benefits, but, as might be

expected, they are not a panacea. There are some limitations
to consider:

•T
 echnical savvy: Although LC/NC solutions make it
possible for non-technical people to build applications, there
could still be barriers to entry from a technical point of view.
Aspiring users of LC/NC solutions need to at least know
how to operate the tool itself, as well as be aware of some
“technical” concepts, such as APIs and databases. For the
fully customizable LC/NC options, some code will still need
to be written, possibly within the LC/NC tool itself – even if
they are basic requirements such as bits of Javascript, CSS
and simple SQL queries. Employees need to have the basic
technical skills to use the tools, or be able to acquire them,
potentially with some light support from the IT team.
•L
 ock-in: All LC/NC development platforms result in lock-
in, unlike conventional application platforms. For example,
you can’t take an app created using Google App Maker and
transfer it into Microsoft PowerApps without rewriting the
entire application. Some platforms, such as Camunda, allow
you to port your application to a different cloud, but not
generally to a different tool. Note that vendor lock-in does
not have the same perfidious risk of the old days, when
there was complete dependency and prices were constantly
increasing. Healthy competition between vendors helps
drive both innovative new features and functionality on LC/
NC platforms, while keeping prices down (and, indeed,
reducing year on year). In our view, this is an acceptable risk
as long as the competitive differentiation enabled by the app
is low.

•C
 onstrained performance: LC/NC development
tools decrease the amount of time needed to build an
application. However, the applications that result from LC/
NC development are rarely optimized for performance and
efficiency due to the abstract, declarative nature of LC/
NC solutions. Simply put, if you need an app that runs as
quickly as possible and consumes the fewest resources,
you will have to write bespoke code and go as close to the
silicone as you can. However, this does not mean “low” or
sluggish performance – this constrained performance refers
to low parallelism, rather than an unpleasant experience.
Most day-to-day users won’t care or even notice that the
platform showing a well-designed and well-thought-out
business dashboard is consuming, for example, 10 percent
more memory and 5 percent more CPU power than a non-
LC/NC equivalent. LC/NC platforms will thus do very well,
and modern platforms can scale to millions of users with
reasonable requirements if executed correctly.

Introducing LC/NC solutions into the organization

Companies looking to implement LC/NC solutions should

consider a number of important priorities to ensure success.

1. Establish business value-add and link to strategic

objectives

Before embarking on any implementation, it is important to

understand the value that the LC/NC application will deliver
to your business and how it links to your strategic objectives.
Spending time in a discovery phase will not only validate
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whether an LC/NC solution is needed in the first place, but

also contribute to a shorter development phase later on,
which will lead to savings across the life cycle. Then you will
need to consider the type of application that best fits with
your organization, and finally the organizational changes you
will need to implement for its adoption to succeed. This is
not just about having the right tool, but also knowing how
to engage stakeholders and streamline processes, roles and
responsibilities for them to contribute.

Determining how LC/NC tools can best serve your strategic

objectives will depend on your organization’s capabilities
and enterprise architecture. Traditionally, there has been
tension between IT and business departments. The former
is incentivized to retain tight control over the application
landscape to ensure stability and maintainability (which often
leads to a rise in “shadow IT”), while the latter prioritizes
speed of development and cost control.

2. Put the right system architecture in place

The appropriate architecture and organizational structure

can help facilitate the introduction of LC/NC solutions and
relieve the tension between IT and business departments.
The introduction of a tiered architecture can help separate the
technical and non-technical aspects of a system. IT users can
then focus on the technical details of the application, while
others make use of LC/NC tools that focus on business logic.
LC/NC tools can make use of the functionality offered by
technical components of the system without being concerned
with how they were implemented. Figure 3 highlights how
this can be achieved with a three-tier architecture:
 Mobile devices Traditional devices

Experience Layer
User interfaces can be built directly by business users to create the best
user experience – and allow for quick iteration

Logic Layer
Business logic can be built purely with LC/NC tools. This helps reduce communication overheads
between business and developers as business users know their required business logic best

System APIs Layer

Software developers still code the system layers, which require significant technical
know-how (i.e., of SQL or noSQL to query databases in a transactional manner)

Cloud IOT On premises Databases Legacy Files FTP

enterprise SFTP
systems
Figure 3: Tiered architecture that enables citizen developers

The system API layer will hide the complexity away from
users further upstream. Developers and technical resources
with intimate knowledge of databases, servers and other
important components will be responsible for this layer. The
team responsible for building and maintaining the system API
layer will also have the tools necessary to safeguard critical
systems from improper use of applications further upstream.
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The Logic Layer will make use of the functionality offered

by System APIs without being concerned with complex
concepts such as database queries and cache management.
Business users could plug into system APIs with LC/NC tools
to rapidly create new applications based on their knowledge
of user requirements. New insight and value can be created
just by combining existing data and capabilities. The Logic
Layer is where LC/NC tools shine because they allow for
quick creation of complex business logic by the people who
know it best. The Logic Layer is effectively protected, as
the system API – created by technical people – provides the
guardrails for performance and security.

Last, but not least, the Experience Layer allows users to

create the UIs/UXs they need.

3. Use good change management practice

Statistics show that between 60 and 85 percent of digital

transformation projects fail due to lack of good change
management practice and technical skills to execute9.
Researchers have highlighted how critical change
management is to driving a successful outcome. They
stress the importance of communication and prioritization,
especially during the set-up and pilot phase. Simplifying
development to offer productivity gains and speed of delivery
will require introducing corporate development to non-IT
roles, which can be a significant change and cultural hurdle.
Without the right training and governance structure, IT will be
quickly overwhelmed with product quality and management
challenges, and maintenance will become unsustainable.
Tools should enable incremental learning, but it is also
important to conduct training sessions to teach and enforce
good practices. An organization might need to update some
of its development guidelines to accommodate non-IT roles
within the software development life cycle and make the
business accountable for the quality and success of the
solutions implemented. Collaboration between business
and IT is key – CIOs should act as enablers and champions
of change by consolidating communication tools, piloting
and encouraging new ways of working, and streamlining
processes to foster closer collaboration.

9. Successful Digital Transformation. How Change Management helps you to hold

course – Siemens
4. Use minimum standards initially

When working with LC/NC platforms for the first time,

the organization’s focus should be on meeting minimum
operational process and quality standards early on. A
faster pace will follow as applications shift from traditional
development approaches, in which IT is fully responsible, to
a model in which the business is at the center and realizing
objectives is in the hands of the people on the operational
front line, who have better understanding of business
functions.

5. Adopt an agile development approach

If an IT capability already exists in the organization, the

introduction of LC/NC does not need to disrupt the delivery
framework. As an example, in an agile scrum, the principles,
processes and ceremonies will still be followed, but benefits
will be maximized by combining the fast decision-making
of agile with the fast development speeds of LC/NC. Small
adjustments will need to be made to adapt and improve
the processes that come from this new way of developing,
in which demands on non-IT stakeholders will increase,
requiring collaboration to be tighter and more frequent. The
same quality assurance rigor that is applied to traditional
development should still apply. Apps need to follow the
mandatory development life cycle to include testing, security
checks and controlled deployments before going live.

Insight for the executive

We don’t believe the skill of writing code is becoming

obsolete or software developers will lose their jobs anytime
soon – with low-code tools you can do something, but some
skills and technical knowledge are still needed to understand
how you should do it. We do believe that LC/NC platforms are
finally achieving their purpose, giving citizen developers the
power and simplicity to build software. They save time and
money, while accelerating the pace of digital innovation and
transformation within organizations.
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One of the biggest strengths of LC/NC platforms is that they

allow us to take advantage of the innate problem-solving
skills of human beings by removing at least a significant
portion, if not all, of the barriers to implementing software
solutions in today’s softwarized world. Simply put, LC/NC
enhances the potential of innovation. This should resonate
with organizations that have realized the necessity to become
software driven if they are to survive, and even thrive, in the
coming years. Ultimately, the benefits of LC/NC platforms are
crystallized in their ability to empower entrepreneurial people
in the organization to unleash their visions, ideas and creativity
with minimal support through building smart software
solutions.
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Greg Smith
is a Partner in Arthur D. Little’s London office and a member
of the Digital Problem Solving Practice.

Michael Papadopoulos
is a Chief Architect in Arthur D. Little’s London office and a
member of the Digital Problem Solving Practice.

Joshua Sanz
is a Manager in Arthur D. Little’s London office and a
member of the Digital Problem Solving Practice.

Michael Grech
is a Manager in Arthur D. Little’s London office and a
member of the Digital Problem Solving Practice.

Heather Norris
is a Consultant in Arthur D. Little’s London office and a
member of the Digital Problem Solving Practice.