Ever heard of a “low-code, no-code” platform? Think of it as a paradigm, says Southeast Asia Kissflow Associate Vice President Rakesh Nandakumar. “In (our case), we are into application building,” he explains in an exclusive interview with Manila Bulletin Tech News. “We build any office application you want using low-code or no-code.”

Kissflow clients need not worry about understanding coding to build anything, he insists. “What you need to (have) is a basic understanding of what your (business) problem is and what you think will solve it.” A company which requires a purchase request process, for example, “can simply drag and drop and build everything. With AI (artificial intelligence), I can give them a prompt for a purchase request. It will build an entire process out and show it (and ask) if they would like to make any changes.”

The company has been supporting clients in fully digitizing their operations in the Philippines since 2013, according to Nandakumar. The platform’s Citizen Development paradigm invites firms to undergo no less than cultural change in three areas: technology, people, and processes. It’s an opportunity to fill the “huge technology gap” in organizations when “a majority of Asia missed the dot.com change in the 2000s. “We never built core systems or secondary systems which the Western world built,” he opines. “We missed this technology.”

Citizen Development also presents an option for people to contribute to their companies with “application capabilities for their or others’ consumption using tools that are actively not forbidden by information technology. That’s exactly why we are in this market,” he shares. “We know that the culture of this place is to see how I can grow, how I can make my work better, easier; how I can make people around me feel happy. Citizen development kind of does that – you go and solve problems which you and your peers are facing by yourself by putting your hand up and saying, ‘I can take a dig at that.’”

Organizations with more than 1,000 people should consider a Citizen Development program, Nandakumar posits. “There’s a need for a system (with that size). Otherwise, you will not be able to trace and collect all the data. When you bring in the scale, suddenly you have problems in every part of the program. That is when you should start thinking. (When an entire) business tries to solve all work problems via a single platform, and solve it in a way that (the company) sets, then it becomes a Citizen Development program.”

Based on Kissflow’s experience in the Philippines, the executive says the resourcefulness and ability of Filipinos to adopt to change are valuable when organizations transition. “You can copy technology, but you cannot copy people,” he points out. “For somebody to come into this clarity, tremendous courage is needed to acknowledge that change must transpire. It’s a two-way challenge – the way I give you the solution and the way you receive it. I can simply say I’m not going to take up any changes.

“(Filipinos) always want to do a bit more if given a chance,” he continues. “Whenever you give an opportunity for people to grow, they’ll always feel that that’s the culture of a place. What AI does today is accelerate and make jobs easy for folks. Is there going to be some sort of a job loss around that? Before computers and after computers (were introduced), have I been jobless? No, your job transformed. Has there been reduction in manpower in some aspects of the work? Of course. But people tend to upgrade. AI will become a way of life.”

To learn more about Citizen Development and Kissflow, visit https://kissflow.com.