Citizen Developers & Future of Business Applications

Transcript

Citizen Developers and Labor Market Imbalance

Sharjeel Sohaib (09:01):

Yep. That's great. Okay, so while I was going through your book a few themes or words really caught my attention, and one of which was labor market imbalance, like supply and demand are out of whack. So statistics support this argument, but I was just forced to think that is this only major reason for the rise of citizen development and what other factors are at play in the growth of low code, no code? 

Because partly we have heard a lot about this supply and demand gap that there's not enough supply of developers, so we need citizen development. But do you think there are other factors that played in the growth of low code no tools?

Phil Simon (09:45):

Absolutely. The first of all, the labor market imbalance isn't going anywhere. You, if you need doctors or lawyers or programmers, you can't just hit a button and create them, right? This is not file save as, it takes time to become a programmer and a good programmer. And then the book I write about how I obtained my certification in ERP software after 10 weeks, but I didn't know my ass from my elbow. And 10 years later I worked with the software, you know, pretty much every day of the week, give or take. But I wasn't certified anymore. So I was risky for folks, even though I knew that application cold. So the labor market imbalance isn't going anywhere. But yes, there are other issues. You know, IT departments have long waged this battle on shadow it, and it's easy to understand why. But increasingly, again, as I did the research, I saw that the IT departments were saying, look, we know that we can't meet your needs.

Phil Simon (10:39):

It's unreasonable for us to expect you to wait because many executives aren't waiting. This is in 1995, companies don't need to write a check for 3 million to spin up a CRM or an ERP application, Workday Salesforce, other tools with the software-as-a-service model, let people get going very quickly with very little in the way of upfront costs. 

And a capital expenditure is far higher than an operating expenditure. Now, the other issue is just this IT business divide. Even if you assume Sharjeel that the imbalance would correct itself, and let's say that it will in five years, the business landscape is littered with companies that couldn't launch the applications that they need. Researching the book, I discovered a problem that Gartner Research had in the late nineties, and they're one of the pre-eminent research firms around technology and business in the world, and have been for decades.

Phil Simon (11:41):

But even they suffered from the IT business divide, this notion that the business folks will fill out business requirements and explain the kind of app that they need, yet when it comes back, that's not what they need. So there's this chasm between the IT folks and the business folks. 

And if you think about it, citizen developers are uniquely suited to address that gap because they're the ones building the app. They may not be able to articulate the business requirements in a way that traditional IT folks or developers would understand, but they know what they need. So there are a bunch of different factors at play, but a lot of it starts with this imbalance, but that could wind up being a moot point because the tools now are so powerful, affordable, and extensible that you don't necessarily need developers for, I'd say a large percentage of apps. That doesn't mean that ERP and CRM applications go away, but if you look at tools like Bubble and Mendix and some of the other vendors that I cover in the book they let you do a lot more than create a cool spreadsheet.

Sharjeel Sohaib (12:45):

So let me just fast track our questions a bit. You start your book with a section called Isolating Cause and Effect. Now what's that? I really like the theme, but help me understand what do you mean by isolating cause and effect?

Phil Simon (13:04):

Yeah, well, in that context of chapter one, I'm attempting to explain the importance of technology in the workplace. And Stuart Butterfield, the CEO of Slack, now, part of Salesforce was an early media darling talking about how collaboration tools in Slack is certainly one of them, allowed us to remain not only as productive during the pandemic, but even more productive according to a number of studies that I cite in the book. 

But companies realized that they needed to give employees new tools because they could not go into the office, you couldn't do everything over email. In some cases people needed new hardware, or in other instances, people had a hard time working at home because they didn't necessarily have a fast internet connection and you couldn't have a Zoom meeting if there was a tremendous degree of latency. 

So when companies were spending, according to KPMG, something like $15 billion per week during the early months of the pandemic, this would've been an interesting way for us to conduct a natural experiment. What would happen if organizations gave employees better tools? This was a unique opportunity for us to identify that, and the results were mixed, but we would not have survived the pandemic professionally speaking without these tools. 

If we could meet in person, but we couldn't use these new technologies, I don't think that we would've come out as well. So the pandemic just represented this really once in a lifetime opportunity to determine if increased spending on technology would help make employees more productive. And it pretty much did.

Sharjeel Sohaib (14:41):

It was a really big event in terms of pushing out these technologies. But, I was also curious Phil, that, so we who have been in the space since last two decades, AgilePoint, and, we've been trying to solve the most complex problems that a low-code no-code platform can solve. And, I would say that we've been successful in doing that in terms of activating a lot of use cases that generally are understood to be not the domain of low code, no code. So I think the problem was there, but this COVID thing just, brought it to the surface like no other event code.

Phil Simon (15:35):

Yeah, I mean, the pandemic accelerated a number of trends, whether it was remote education, telemedicine, e-commerce. I know that e-commerce, just as one example was 18% of the economy in March of 2020. And at skyrocketed to 28% of the economy in April of 2020. Vladimir Lennon said that sometimes decades happen, I'm sorry, weeks happen in decades, sometimes decades happen in weeks. So things really did get intensified.

And I actually cite some research from the book about how a large percentage of business process automation software that organizations had earmarked actually went to no-code, low-code tools immediately afterward because they realized that employees could build tools that basically alleviated the burden of IT and reduced their backlog. I mean, some ridiculously high percentage of executives, according to a Salesforce survey, I think it was 72% if I remember correctly, said that they don't have the ability to meet their strategic objectives.

Phil Simon (16:38):

And this is it folks. So something has to give, you can't ask the, the VPs and the heads of the different lines of businesses to consistently be patient forever if you work with third party development agencies. Okay, that's a possibility. But my first book is called New Systems Fail for a Reason. So why not empower employees through these tools? Because the tools to your point Sharjeel are absolutely ready. They have evolved quite a bit from when I started using those 25 years ago, and I wasn't even the first person to use them.

Low-Code No-Code and Contemporary IT

Phil Simon (17:25):

Yes. Many people erroneously think of IT as this monolithic department, but in fact, it consists of two groups, and this is where we get the term DevOps, developers are the ones who are building new things, they're creating new systems, they're adding new features to existing systems, all that sort of development stuff. And that's critical because as I've said for years, this has been on the front of my website for a decade. Every company is a tech company; some just haven't realized it yet. 

The other nature of it is operations. So your folks who are charged with applying patches and security updates, maintaining the uptime of the system, those folks typically don't care as much about a new feature. In fact, they may resist that new feature or system because it may pose a risk to the rest of them. So Jean Kim wrote a great book called The Phoenix Project, which was the first one that I read about DevOps.

Phil Simon (18:18):

And I actually, during my days as a college professor used to teach from that book, and my students couldn't believe that such companies existed because it's, it tells the tale of this company Parts Unlimited, that's basically teetering on the brink of insolvency because it's, IT function is, and its systems are so dysfunctional, but those companies very much exist. 

So, you know, again, it's important to understand contemporary IT in that context.

And citizen developers, even though they don't have a traditional programming background, for the most part, still need to think like developers, if they're launching an application, they're going to have to support it. If they are going to have new people use it, they need to offer some kind of training. People need to be able to open a ticket. What happens if I'm a citizen developer and I launch an Airtable app, then I go on vacation for two weeks and, and nobody knows how to use it, <laugh>, well then no one's going to use the app. And then you cease to realize the benefits of those apps. So I think it's chapter 10 of the book, if I'm not mistaken, I go through the software or systems development life cycle, SDLC, because one of the audiences for this book is your citizen developer, your business analyst. And that person may not have experience writing Python or, or JavaScript certainly with the notion of being a de-facto developer.

Sharjeel Sohaib (19:39):

Oh, that's, that's useful to, to know. And, and you also talk about the great rebranding in the low-code no-code market. And you have categorized the space as well. So how do you explain that?

Phil Simon (19:54):

Yeah, well, no-code, low-code is a fairly recent term. I think I trace it back to 2013 from a Forrester report. I don't have it exactly in front of me, but we used to call it visual programming and tools like Microsoft Access, you can visually create a database or a database query if you can use a mouse, not a keyboard. Now, if you've, just to pick on access for a second, because I used to be very good at it, I haven't touched it in a while, but if I join an employee table with a job code table or a payroll table, then I can look under the hood and see that I've created Jets SQL L or structured query language. And that actually served me well when I started to work with some different tools, because I basically had taught myself some stuff without even knowing it.

Phil Simon (20:41):

So these visual tools have been around for a while and, and not just with databases. Also, also talking about websites is another great example. Squarespace is a low-code, no-code tool. I run a WordPress theme called Divvy from Elegant themes, and I can drag and drop, and I don't have to use my keyboard at all, but because I'm a geek and I want my website to do more than just the basics, I will put in some j-Query and I mess around on Code Pen and throw in some CSS and some PHP to make my website pop. And I think my website is pretty decent but it's taken a lot of time. So there are all sorts of different categories. In the book I talk about things like Swiss Army knives, I'm talking about some of the tools like Noha and Coda and Alman Act that let you do a bunch of different things.

Phil Simon (21:28):

There are other tools around what I'll call work and project management. Here I'm talking about Smartsheet Smart Suite, click up, QuickBase, smart Suite, those, those types of things. Monday dot com's, another one. Then there are what I'll call these multi-use app builders I'm talking about here, stacker, bubble Blaze, Casio, Mendix, a few of those. There are also plenty of tools around automation and chatbots, whether that's Zappier or Workato, I don't know how you pronounce that, IFTTT, Air Slate. There are plenty of form builders out there, whether it's Formstack or Jotform type form, a bunch of other ones. And there are tools that are specific to commerce payments and transaction like Solaris or Orinda. There are other sorts of data tools that are out there. Whether you're building a dashboard in Microsoft Power BI, and Tableau lets you do some amazing things.

Phil Simon (22:25):

I used to teach data visualization as a college professor, and then there are these spreadsheets on steroids. Smartsheet again shows up there, rose spreadsheet.com, Airtable. So there are these different categories and, and one of the biggest challenges of the book, SGI was actually creating a taxonomy. It was a very challenging endeavor, and evidently Forrester and Gartner have struggled with it because they don't fit into a box the same way.

If you were writing a book, you might start with Microsoft Word to create the manuscript. If you were building a model, you'd use Microsoft Excel. If you were delivering a keynote presentation, you would use PowerPoint. So we immediately start to think in terms of which single application meets our needs.

But with no code, low code, that gets a lot blurrier and it's hard for people to get their head around. When I first started teaching myself Notion, I, I didn't know what to do with it because it didn't do just one thing. It actually does about 10 different things. So in that chapter, I think its chapter four, I make the point that it is difficult to create this type of taxonomy with any kind of accuracy. And of course, vendors come and go, they launch new functionality. So if one company does one thing and its competition doesn't, it's only a matter of time before that other company starts to catch up. 

Rebranding of the Low Code No Code Tools and the Market Taxonomy

Sharjeel Sohaib (23:44):

I think that's the point about the taxonomy of this market that's called low-code, no-code, BPM, Citizen Development that we might need a separate episode for just dealing with the taxonomy thing. So you mentioned that low-code no-code skeptics, who are they, and do we need to win them over or just leave them alone and move ahead.

Phil Simon (24:13):

Well, just the first question first, they're the folks inside organizations, whether they're in IT or they're in sort of a managerial role, maybe different line of business who just don't think this stuff is particularly useful or powerful or extensible. Or maybe on the IT side they admit that they can be powerful, but they look at the security ramifications and that these tools are inherently insecure. I think that's insane, but those types of people are out there in terms of winning them over. I just don't see how they're going to have a choice. I'll go back to a point that I mentioned earlier. If you are telling your head of sales or marketing or human resources that they have to wait two years before you can even look at their form for a new application or an enhancement, Hmm, well that's a non-starter. 

Sharjeel Sohaib (25:05):

Yes.

Phil Simon (25:05):

If you tell them they can go outside to build something with a third party firm or an independent software vendor, that's probably going to be more expensive. And the success rate on those projects tends not to be very high. In the book, I cite some research to that effect. Or the third option is give the people the tools that they need to build the apps that they need. Now that doesn't mean that I can, I don't care how good you are at Airtable or Notion; you're not going to supplant an ERP or Supply Chain management system for a Fortune 100 company. I just, I don't see that happening anytime soon.

And it certainly isn't going to happen now, but I found that no code is particularly useful to glue apps as well as even with the case of Bubble, there's a case study in chapter seven, if you've got this idea for an MVP, a minimal viable product, you can actually create it before you're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring developers and signing up with AWS and all those other things.

Phil Simon (26:07):

So I, I really don't see how you can tell folks to be patient when there are tools that are out there and people can use without their developers aren't there. So something has to give. And when I did my research, yeah, it became obvious to me that more IT folks, particularly in senior roles, were throwing up their hands and saying, all right, look, if you build it and you support it and you don't call our IT help desk in open tickets, then it's on you <laugh>. And I don't feel like that's becoming the prevailing mindset.

Again, not the universal one, but the prevailing one certainly compared to five years. And again, all the research that I did supported the notion that this, no pun intended, that this market is growing. I mean, there's a reason that 80 of the top 100 fortune companies run Airtable, right? Yeah. It's not because they're bored and they have nothing to do. It, it fulfills the legitimate business need. And I think it's something like 50% of the top 1000. So to the naysayers who say, oh, this is a niche product. No one uses it <laugh>, you know, that just the data belies that argument. I just don't see how you can credibly make it.

Evaluating Citizen Development Platforms and Playing the Long Game

Sharjeel Sohaib (27:12):

Yeah. That makes sense. So you've also captured citizen development in action in the form of few case studies in the book without naming names. Do you recall a particular example that inspired you?

Phil Simon (27:26):

There's a guy named Charlie Melendez who worked at his family's party business. So they would deliver tents and party supplies, and they required trucks. And there are a couple of examples in the book, but this one struck me as really interesting because when I spoke to him, he's probably 20 years younger, full head of hair, but he reminded me of a younger version of me.

He built an Airtable base that automated the following manual process. So the company's got about 80 truck drivers based in Florida, and for 20 years they were recording voicemails. And the limit on a voicemail is 90 seconds. So try telling 80 drivers in 90 seconds what their schedule's going to be. <Laugh>, you have to speak very quickly, and it's very easy for someone to miss that and have to listen to it again, or the person recording it to have to rerecord.

Phil Simon (28:24):

And then there were people who just never listened to it. Right. You couldn't force them. So through Airtable, he created a no-code app that blasts out every night a text to each driver of their schedule in their language of choice. And it may not seem like the sexiest business problem to solve, right. It's not fixing Twitter, <laugh> <laugh>, but it's, I mean, that's exactly what I'm talking about in the book. And I like the fact that that isn't the most glamorous one because there is, when I wrote my book, the New Small, back in 2010, in the US alone, there were 28 million small businesses.

I don't know what that number is today, but at least in the United States, we saw, I think it was the formation of 4 million businesses in 2021 because people either got laid off or they finally reevaluated their lives. So the that example I like quite a bit because it was just one person who spent a couple of days and he solved the problem that had been plaguing this business for 20 years, and he did it so well that he wound up expanding it into some other areas.

Phil Simon (29:32):

And, and now the guy Charlie Melendez is a full-time Airtable developer, and he's doing very well for himself. So these tools aren't that complicated. And it wasn't like he had a programming background. So that, I mean, I like all the case studies in the book, but I like that one because it reminded me if it went back in year in time, 20 years and had a full head of hair, I probably would've done something similar if I worked for my family's party.

Sharjeel Sohaib (29:56):

I like the example that you brought up. So there's a way that you explain different approaches to evaluating low-code, no-code tools, and I can see some approaches like single vendor approach, skunkworks approach. Correct. And others. So did you see these approaches in organizations during your research? And what data did you look at while coming up with this categorization of approaches?

Phil Simon (30:28):

I read a few articles attempting to quantify the percentages. But their own admission, the authors of those articles said, this is more anecdotal. I haven't seen any anecdotal studies. I'm sorry, any formal academic studies on it. In terms of my research, I'll go back 25 years, <laugh>, I've seen as a consultant, as someone has worked on the client side and into plenty of conferences and meet lots of people, I've absolutely seen all these things in action.

I can recall one client engagement, I won't mention the name, but it was a frozen foods company that locked down everything. And the CIO once said in a meeting, I wish I could ban Microsoft Excel. And I'm thinking to myself, okay, well then what are you actually giving folks? Because, they are going to need to do some kind of data analysis. Unless you want them to use a pen and a paper, that's not reasonable.

Phil Simon (31:24):

The single vendor approach I'd seen a bunch of times my friend Lowell VanCamp, who's the CIO o of EdTech Company here in Arizona where I live, is all about Microsoft. But then there were other companies that I came across that had landed on two or three different low-code, no-code tools. Others were experimenting with different ones, so kind of skunk works. There were some companies that said, look, it's the Wild Wild West.

People can use whatever they want. And again, there are those companies that pretend that this isn't happening and they try to ban everything. So I don't say that there's a correct approach because I do think that it's contextual. What works for one company in one industry with one type of employee population may not work for another. But I can't say that I'm a big fan of the, pretend it doesn't exist category, because this gets into my previous two books.

Phil Simon (32:12):

But employees are generally fried and it's not because they're doing all sorts of cool things. It's because they're attempting to replicate remote work in-person work remotely. Asana did some interesting research, the anatomy of work, and it was something like 38% of the time employees said they were working on work. 

In other words, it wasn't the good stuff, like writing a book, doing research, doing design, whatever it was, finding a document, trying to schedule things trying to connect to some application. And they couldn't do it because their password and their username didn't work. So yeah, the benefit of these tools, I think is, is so pronounced. 

And if you look at the millennials which is definitely one of the target audiences for this book, they look at career development as; I think it's the second most important thing behind pay. It's ahead of vacation. So the company that says, look, we want you to get good at this tool we're going to give you training, isn't just solving a problem. I would argue they're also inculcating a sense of loyalty in their employees. And to the extent that a lot of jobs are hybrid or remote, maybe they're less likely to leave if they can get a 5% raise because they feel like their manager and their organization is looking out for them.

Sharjeel Sohaib (33:26):

You, you mentioned millennials, but I, I see they are, even the previous generations have, have seen it firsthand that there are way better ways to work. Especially I've seen a lot written and talked about the elimination or reduction in commute time. So I think nobody loves to commute.

Phil Simon (34:00):

Draw Poag is a, is a really interesting guy. I follow his newsletter on CK and he's written before about people don't hate the office, they hate the commute to the office in the United States pre pandemic, the average commute was 35 minutes. So let's say that's an hour and 10 minutes a day. You make that five days a week, that's five hours and 50 minutes. If you can reduce your trips to the office to just three, you save two and a half hours a week that you could use to exercise or spend time with your kids or whatever you like to do. Yeah. So again, getting back to my previous book, I just, you know, people like Elon Musk can kick and scream all they want. And in the short term, you might have to tolerate your boss saying, everyone needs to be in the office Monday through Friday, nine to five, but don't tell me that you won't start poking around for jobs on LinkedIn.

Phil Simon (34:49):

Yeah, I know April of 2021 announced that the number of jobs with the word remote in them had spiked 357% from the year before. So, you know, it'll be really interesting to see how that plays out. But I do think that hybrid work and the adoption of no-code, low-code tools, signal to the employees that we don't just look at you as a number, we want you to have a quality of life. 

Yeah. And I'd much rather work for a company that embraced that than a company that said, look, the technology sucks and you have to be here all the time. And if you get home at seven o'clock at night after a two hour commute each way, then that's just work. It's not supposed to be fun. There are people who think that way. I'm not one of them, but if I have no other information and I could bet on a company full of those folks and a company full of the more progressive folks, I'll bet on the second company any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Sharjeel Sohaib (35:42):

This kind of reminds me of a section in your book that says, play the long game. And I'm a big fan of playing the long game. Cause you could see people, you know, latching onto new technologies. Okay, here's what I heard about, you know, low-code, no-code in this analyst report, or it's trending right now. And you say, play the long game. So what's your message for leaders who want to play the long game?

Phil Simon (36:10):

I mean, a bunch of things. For starters you can't just hit a switch. There's a muscle memory. I remember when we started lockdown and companies said, all right, what does Automatic, the company behind WordPress do? They've been a distributed company since 2003? What does Basecamp do? The company that used to do oh, they still actually do Basecamp, but I think they used to be known as 37 Signals. What does GitLab do? Darren Murph is the oracle of remote work, and GitLab started in 2014. 

So when the pandemic hit, they had six and a half years of being remote. So the idea that you could just hit a switch and change all the tech and change the culture and change the management philosophy is insane. It's going to take time and some people aren't going to be comfortable with it. And you have to have a serious discussion about whether those folks are going to change and forget big companies.

Phil Simon (37:03):

Sharjeel, I actually mentioned in the book a couple of case studies that did turn out so well because I was working for a company as a vendor, whereas a partner, and I'd been through their manual process a few times and said, you can do this a lot better. And I would explain it to someone and that person would agree with me and run it up the flag pole and go, yeah, we're not going to do it that way. 

And I just think, if you think that everyone's going to be on board with this, that's crazy because there is a change management aspect to it, right? I mean, if you look at the data around managers and remote work as much as, at least in the United States, Americans by and large want to work remotely if they can. According to a SHRM study, I think it was something like 75% or 80% of managers I quoted in the last book wanted everyone to go back Monday through Friday, nine to five.

Phil Simon (37:53):

So these tools are great, and hopefully in the book I did a respectable job of explaining their benefits and their limitations, not just in theory, but through these case studies and stories and offer tips based on a practitioner's point of view, not in academics. 

Hopefully the writing is very accessible. But there are plenty of people who are going to resist this. But I, I mean, the trend is inarguable. The notion that we should only use tools that proper developers have built for our company and proper systems that only the experts can maintain, just doesn't match up with the level of resources in most companies. 

So something has to give and, and hopefully this book will find an audience and convince folks that, you know, there is basically a third way beyond asking people to be patient or having them hire third parties. 

And think the pros of no-code low-code tools are so far greater than their cons. That again is a discussion about how you do this and hopefully the book does frame that discussion in an intelligent way. 

Sharjeel Sohaib (39:03):

To our listeners my understanding is that Phil would soon have a, a second kind of version of this book as well. I'd not call it a version, but another book on Low-Code as well. Cause this, this niche is demanding a lot more knowledge that than is available right now. And I think there's a very welcome one.

Phil Simon (39:36):

This came out two weeks ago, so give me a little bit of time.

Sharjeel Sohaib (39:39):

But what I'd like to do is maybe we could have another discussion a few months later around more in-depth topics around the enterprise use cases and enterprise sort of story of low-code, no-code as well. Because, that's another beast to tackle and I know your experience could help our audience, you know, get their head around that as well.

Phil Simon (40:08):

I mean, based on the previous books I've taken a similar approach and then a healthcare company or some other type of organization might have me do a webinar or something or hire me as an advisor or to give a talk at what are their events, assuming we're having in-person events. Cause I did try to cast a wide net within this niche, if that makes any sense. This is not a healthcare practitioner's guide to no code or a retailer's guide to no code or how all companies use Mendix or Bubble or, or some of the other tools. Hopefully it raises awareness of what I think is a very important industry.

Sharjeel Sohaib (40:42):

Yeah, definitely. I think really love talking to you, Phil. And my message to anyone listening out here is to grab Phil's book. It's a very important addition to an industry that still needs a lot more knowledge to educate you customers, vendors, and other people within the space. So thank you Phil. It was a lovely conversation. I really enjoyed and learned and hope the guys listening anyone listening would have also enjoyed it. So let's stay in touch and we'd have another go at it sometime later.

Phil Simon (41:23):

Thanks for having me on the Podcast.

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