Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023.  Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

The Future of Development Requires a Divide and Conquer Approach

By Mike Fitzmaurice, VP of North America & Chief Evangelist, WEBCON

Most companies want to save money, but it's in times of uncertainty when saving money and cutting costs suddenly jump to the front of the priority line. Since an all-SaaS approach's costs add up quickly, companies will look to building applications more often than in the recent past. Moreover, those Investments in development and innovation will need to be focused and purposeful; companies won't be able to afford to let team members spend time on activities and tasks that aren't delivering positive bottom-line results.

The hype around the idea "everyone's a developer now" will be a casualty of this. The notion of employees diverting time to building their own automation solutions (i.e., citizen development) at the expense of their regular day jobs will be regarded as risky at best, wasteful at worst. For that matter, it may not be wise to have a person who performs a manual task work on crafting the entire automation solution; while they likely know what needs to be automated and improved, they're probably not the right person to know how to make that happen, let alone do so quickly and efficiently.

With that in mind, here are three things to keep an eye on in 2023:

Prediction: Low-code will be forced to grow up

The demand for digitalization and new applications that surged in 2020 isn't abating. Most companies that turned to low-code tools for help saw incremental improvements, but not radical change. The problem was that they've still approached each application like a bespoke tailor, or a commissioned art studio. What's needed to churn out many applications at scale is, in essence, an application factory approach that promotes reuse, governs customization, and relies on platforms rather than holding them at arm's length.

Prediction: The refactoring of citizen development

With a global recession hanging over us, having employees divert time from their regular jobs to building their own applications comes with risk.  In all but the simplest cases, it asks users to become mini-IT managers, and when time and money are tight, that's a tall order. Moreover, these employees have important work to do that has nothing to do with citizen development, making the latter a distraction from company objectives. What does seem to work is a "unite and conquer" approach that pairs citizen designers (who keenly understand the problem/need) with professional developers (who deeply understand how to build effective applications), pooling their strengths and sharing responsibilities.

Prediction: A reality check on automation

Interest in and usage of automation tools have surged in recent years, so much so that companies haven't had the time to look at the big picture. A large share of automation efforts prioritized tasks users found annoying, not questioning whether the tasks held strategic value. In some cases, this has led to well-automated activities that add up to a bad process. With automation having gone mainstream, analysts will have time in 2023 to apply business process management discipline to organize this activity toward the best possible results.

Conclusion

It might appear that the worst of the global pandemic is behind us, but its economic ripple effects will be felt for years to come. Companies looking to come out ahead need to be able to do more with less, and do it in a way that is easily measurable.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mike Fitzmaurice is responsible for developing WEBCON's North American presence, evangelizing its Business Process Suite, and advocating overall best practices in workflow and business process automation, digital transformation, and citizen-assisted development. Fitzmaurice's technical evangelist efforts around Microsoft SharePoint were critical to its evolution from an internal startup to an enterprise mainstay. He is a frequent and sought-after speaker at industry conferences, webinars, and symposia, and has served as a key force multiplier to others' work in marketing, competitive sales, partner relations, and engineering.