Low-code: bridging the public sector tech skills gap

Industries across Australia, from financial services to the public sector, are transforming so fast that they’re almost unrecognisable from pre-COVID days. The pandemic has accelerated the digital and experience demands on public sector agencies from both citizens and governments, which have been further fuelled by the growing need to urgently modernise struggling legacy systems and drive digitised service connectiveness that is now expected.

To continue delivering desired outcomes, public sector organisations need to constantly innovate and transform. However, this puts increased pressure on IT departments, which are struggling to keep up with demand at a time when developer resources worldwide are scarce and the public sector is battling in a fiercely competitive marketplace with the private sector to attract digital unicorns.

This isn’t a revelation and significant efforts are already being made to build capability by recruiting new talent. These include incentivising through improved remuneration and workplace flexibility, exploring partnerships with educational institutions to accelerate learning and development, and even leveraging whole of government models such as the excellent work being undertaken by the Australian Public Service Commission through its APS Digital Professional Stream. More generally, strong efforts by professional bodies including the Australian Computer Society are also being made to boost the nation’s digital capabilities and competitiveness.

However, these efforts are generally forward leaning programs that will better position the next generation for success longer term. From my vantage point, I see a more immediate opportunity to take advantage of resources already on hand. There is currently a significant and exciting workforce transformation opportunity forming in government.

Driven by a lack of skilled professional developers to manage increasing demands, combined with a growing job role revolution occurring through increasing automation and AI, traditional work roles are being fundamentally disrupted. This means there is a new opportunity for both staff and organisations to reset. Specifically, this reset will merge business and IT over time and leverage the best of technology and the deep experience of workers to reimagine organisational capability and the way business in the public sector is done.

Meeting in the middle with low-code

This merging of business and IT streams demands organisations to democratise digital enablement through low-code platforms. Low-code enables organisations to harness and fast-track traditional business experts and knowledge workers into new digital roles of the future government workplace. They also support greater collaboration between IT and business, as the technology expands the tech team by proxy and turns business users into app developers without the need for experience in coding.

This approach fast-tracks the workforce to greater value, supports transition to new digital career paths and shapes smoother organisational change management for those impacted by the increasing digitisation of work. This change management is a crucial step in the process. Digital transformation is bigger than just technology. It has the potential to disrupt organisations and customers, and needs to be managed as a foundational piece of any initiative.

By training traditional business users in low-code, organisations maximise the valuable experience and deep capabilities of staff, enabling them to make an impact for longer, while providing a clearer vision to navigate the impacts of technology. This allows organisations to enhance service and energise the workforce for the challenges ahead with fast-tracked digital skills and capabilities to support innovation and deliver for citizens.

Act fast or get left behind

Leading industry experts agree that this low-code revolution is coming, and fast. In fact, in its ‘Impact of Low Code on Tech Consulting and Outsourcing Services’ report, analyst firm Gartner predicts that by 2025, 70% of new applications developed by enterprises will use low-code or no-code platform technologies, up from less than 25% in 2020.

Most organisations recognise that digital business needs are accelerating. Forward-thinking organisations understand that waiting is no longer a viable option. They are taking action, empowering business users to build and automate new solutions themselves through collaborative, easy-to-use, low-code enterprise application development platforms.

In essence, these tools make application development accessible to business users and non-programmers. Anyone, regardless of technical ability, can build applications to automate workflows — with drag-and-drop functionality, intuitive process flow capabilities and visual guidance. This empowers people beyond the walls of IT to take ownership of projects, streamline common development tasks, increase productivity, fast-track to new digital job roles and ultimately, free up development resources.

By enabling business users to build their own applications, developers are empowered to prioritise higher impact projects. This means they can engage in more interesting work and be more productive, significantly improving business value and the employee experience, which is a significant selling point in Australia’s highly competitive market.

Public sector organisations and their technology leaders are faced with a choice, and from where I sit the answer to deliver real outcomes is clear. Embrace agility and enterprise reusable low-code platforms to blend the best of all worlds. Empower agencies to configure applications to meet business needs in an agile and low-code environment. Leverage common OOTB shared frameworks and accelerators to get started quickly. And ultimately, share and extend value to deliver real outcomes for citizens.

Image credit:©stock.adobe.com/au/tippapatt