Doug Wilson, Managing Partner, Breakthrough TechnologiesFor 20 years, I’ve worked with a variety of companies to develop software and apps to meet the needs of their enterprises. Some are big, and some are small, but all of them usually need someone to build them a digital solution to a simple problem. Even though the solution to their problem is relatively simple, getting a custom-built solution far too often costs an arm and a leg – well outside the budgets of many companies.Let’s be clear here: app and software development is one of the hottest markets around. Our educational institutions can’t churn out developers fast enough. Some people come to development in high school, some find development in college, and some turn to development after trying other careers. Even so, some projections estimate that there’s going to be a shortage of 1 million developers by 2020.While training and offshoring can help offset these shortages, it isn’t enough. That means that we have to empower individuals to take software development into their own hands. That’s where no-code citizen development comes into play, and every organization, including communications ones, should be following this trend and jumping on it.Citizen developers are ordinary users who are empowered with tools and platforms to build customizable applications that solve his or her unique problems. By using no-code and low-code tools, they can create application software through graphical user interfaces and configurations instead of traditional computer programming. In other words, they don’t need to learn coding languages, don’t need to understand the latest database tools, and don’t need a computer science or software engineering degree.Moreover, given its simplicity, learning no-code development can be done by everyone within an enterprise, including CEOs, HR, IT, Project Managers, and everyone in between.This is something all communicators should be doing, and getting down the basics of low-code platforms could be a real asset to communications companies big and small. For companies today, data management is more important than ever, but many find streamlined data management processes elusively difficult to obtain. Companies have more data to manage, compile, track, aggregate, sort, collate, and tabulate, and there simply aren’t a lot of customizable systems out there that give users a simple interface to do all of these things.That’s why we built one. Realizing that the apps many businesses need begin and end with data, we built a platform called Loco. Most business applications are about two things: allowing users to manage data and allowing users to manage documents. Loco was built to streamline and integrate both processes, and provide access to that data and those documents whether you’re on your desktop, tablet, or phone.This means that if you’re a communications company, you can custom build enterprise apps that serve as your client management system, HR system, IT request system, and sales pipeline. You can build an application to manage information from weekly team meetings, including agendas, attendees, minutes, and follow-up items. And you can tailor each application to whatever your unique needs are and have them all in one interface. You can also install apps from the built-in App Library to get started quickly.For budget-conscious communications businesses, this is an efficient solution that allows them to meet any need they might have. It can replace complex systems of spreadsheets and desktop folders, which could, with increased adoption of low-code and no-code technologies, become a thing of the past. It sounds like a cliché, but since the user is empowered to invent the data and the structure, the possibilities are truly limitless.Make no mistake: citizen development is the future. At some point, most companies are going to need to seek a software solution. The choice will be up to them whether they pay someone else an exorbitant fee to do it, or whether they get on board with citizen development early and take it into their own hands.