IT leaders in the Middle East and Africa live in a “right now” world. Their colleagues and customers want to see digitalisation take place at a breakneck pace, streamlining processes and delivering new conveniences and efficiencies as it does. What the CIO may see as a wish list, other stakeholders see as an expectation list. However, as the reality of a lack of resources (and often of skills) comes crashing in, the wish list becomes an IT backlog.
This backlog can have several immediate and knock-on effects. Its very presence can be intimidating, or even demoralising, for IT teams. And because all the team’s time is spent whittling down the list, other great ideas to improve efficiency and enhance experiences get pushed to the back of the queue. IT is left with an overwhelming impression that they are constantly running to catch the bus rather than letting it convey them to a destination.
Let us consider the consumer market many of today’s developers are trying to please. Digital-native customers have no patience for delays. Therefore, delays in app development can be almost as costly as not building the app in the first place. This is evidenced in research by IDC which predicts that by 2026, the large majority (90 per cent) of organisations worldwide will feel the pain of the IT skills crisis, amounting to a staggering US$5.5 trillion in losses caused by product delays, impaired competitiveness, and loss of business. Customers will not wait; they will go elsewhere to the brand that has already brought the desired experience to market.
The need for speed
Faster app development requires getting into the weeds and understanding system interdependencies. Managing backlog reduces the effectiveness of IT leaders, which prevents the list from being appreciably reduced, which leads to a lengthening of the list, which further reduces the effectiveness of IT leaders, and so on. This vicious circle means that enterprise stakeholders can wish (or expect) until they run out of wishes (or expectations). The backlog will stubbornly refuse to budge.
For many years now, the MEA region’s IT heads have known that recruiting more developers in a skills-lite labour market causes technical debt to surge. Looking within is the way to progress. Right now, as far as digital experiences go, demand outstrips supply. And because IT departments are locked in a fruitless struggle that continually tries to match resources with requests, digital innovation has effectively been put on ice. Something must change if organisations are to clear the IT backlog.
In September 2024, Kissflow published its Citizen Development Trends report, which took a deep dive into one approach to the backlog problem – low-code and no-code solutions development. Business employees are domain experts who understand the data and workflow of each item on the expectation list better than any dev ever could. CIOs know these experts’ involvement as citizen developers would be a huge step towards eliminating IT backlog. According to our report, not only do 92 per cent of IT decision-makers see citizen development as crucial to the achievement of digital transformation goals, but almost two-thirds (65 per cent) see a reduction in IT backlog as one of citizen development’s key success metrics. Some 86 per cent of businesses polled had citizen development programmes in place, and almost half (45 per cent) had been operating them for more than a year.
Low code to the rescue
Low code will likely be critical to the economic ambitions of MEA nations. Earlier Kissflow research in the region showed that one-third (33 per cent) of organisations here face resource constraints in custom app development. Further, since the cost of third-party developers’ involvement is often outside budgets, 80 per cent of regional IT leaders are calling for an overhaul of the entire app development process. Anything less, they contend, would drastically delay digital transformation. This overhaul can begin with talented in-house domain experts who transition to the additional role of citizen developer. Not only can they address items in the backlog, but they can resolve them more quickly. Requirements gathering is greatly streamlined when the requirements gatherer and the requirements “haver” are the same person.
Low-code and no-code (LCNC) platforms allow us to democratise app development. These platforms eliminate technical barriers to application development, empowering business users to create powerful applications without the need for any technical expertise. The code was instead built in the background, translating citizen developers’ business logic into efficient systems. More complex projects remain the purview of IT teams, but an army of reservists is exactly what the doctor ordered to shave down the pending projects list and free up people to innovate more often. Success rates soar for both types of projects, and the business can rapidly deploy superlative digital experiences at scale.
Beating back the backlog
The IT backlog is a pressing issue for many enterprises in the Middle East and Africa, slowing down digital transformation at a time when rapid innovation is crucial. Low-code and no-code platforms offer a viable solution by empowering citizen developers—domain experts who can create apps and streamline workflows without needing deep coding expertise. By adopting these platforms, organisations can break the cycle of backlog stagnation, accelerate digitalisation, and meet customer demands more efficiently, ensuring their long-term competitiveness in a fast-evolving digital landscape.
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