Supporting Knowledge Integration with Low-Code Development Platforms

By doing away with the necessity of writing code, low-code development platforms (LCDPs) offer to open up software development to non-IT employees. Consequently, they hold promise for har-nessing specialized knowledge that is distributed across an organization for innovation. While the adoption of LCDPs is accelerating in organizations, academic scholars are yet to focus on their particular characteristics and their potential to support knowledge integration between the busi-ness and IT. We examine the research question: how can LCDPs support the integration of spe-cialized business and IT knowledge during innovative application development? Using the knowledge-based view as a conceptual grounding, we conduct an exploratory study of selected LCDPs. We find that LCDPs can support business and IT units to integrate rather than transfer their specialized knowledge. We show how one particular digital technology – LCDPs – can play an operant role in innovation and help bridge the business-IT gap