At the end of October, Gartner – leading research and advisory company in the technology world, presented their view on the “Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020”. This happened at Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2019, in Orlando. And the echo of their findings has been spreading around, letting everyone to discuss what’s next.

Many people were not surprised to see trendy topics like machine learning (ML), robotic process automation (RPA), Virtual reality (VR), managing personal data, IoT, cloud computing, blockchain, and artificial intelligence. But actually, Gartner presents additional perspectives for these technical domains and their usage, which is great and worthy to get deep into.

But there is something new on the list. Any guesses? It’s something that was in Sappience’s “What’s next” list when we built the company earlier this year. That’s right: Democratization of Expertise through low-code/no-code. Here is what Gartner has to say on this trend:

“Democratization is focused on providing people with access to technical expertise (for example, ML, application development) or business domain expertise (for example, sales process, economic analysis) via a radically simplified experience and without requiring extensive and costly training. “Citizen access” (for example, citizen data scientists, citizen integrators), as well as the evolution of citizen development and no-code models, are examples of democratization. 

Through 2023, Gartner expects four key aspects of the democratization trend to accelerate, including the democratization of data and analytics (tools targeting data scientists expanding to target the professional developer community), the democratization of development (AI tools to leverage in custom-developed applications), the democratization of design (expanding on the low-code, no-code phenomena with the automation of additional application development functions to empower the citizen-developer) and democratization of knowledge (non-IT professionals gaining access to tools and expert systems that empower them to exploit and apply specialized skills beyond their expertise and training).”

Some of the Sappience Insights:

  • Speaking about ML, AI, Blockchain, IoT, etc. is great. But actions speak louder than words. And so, what’s needed is to have the thing done. These trendy projects do not need to be so far away from the business. Embracing the low-code concept and start making steps in this direction on a Low-Code Platform is the accelerator to go there faster and smoother. And the trip to these innovations is teamwork. A team consisting of technical and business people – seasoned programmers and citizen developers.
  • To empower the business people with a tool to innovate, in areas out of their technical skillset, is a key to democratization. We have already discussed in previous posts the issues related to a shortage of technical resources and time. The low-code phenomena resolve multiple problems at the same time – removes a big chunk of skills limitation, reduce time, allows the business to be a driver of innovation, not just a user. That’s what we call democracy.
  • Another insight from a customer perspective, but this time from our position as a customer. Because as a product provider, Sappience is also a customer of the low-code idea. Being able to provide unprecedented time-to-value to our customers, is only because our team has a democratized platform to build on. Just an example: having the AI Builder in PowerApps latest release, is paving the path to accelerated AI products and projects that are boosting our customers’ business.

Definitely, the technologies are changing the way everyone is doing business, but it’s up to all of us to guide and navigate the change. And when the people who have great ideas can make a positive impact, then they should be empowered to do so. Isn’t this democracy all about…?

The full press release about Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020 is published here and Gartner has all the credits for it.