Citizen development: a stairway to business heaven

There is a growing demand for app development in most industries. The main reason is that IT departments can’t meet the demand for applications on time due to limited resources, other priorities, and required detailed specs from the business to build apps.?

Last episode I introduced the definition of a citizen developer, the disruptive side of low-code, and what citizen development and digital transformation have in common. This episode we are diving deeper into the benefits of citizen developers, the movement of citizen development over the years, tips on how companies can best implement it. Let’s jump to it.

The benefits of Citizen Development

Citizen developers are business users who can create their own applications with little to no coding knowledge. Citizen developers are different from professional developers. The biggest difference? The amount of coding. While in no-code platforms a Graphical User Interface (GUI) enables developers to build solutions without coding, pro code platforms generally rely on code.

Many companies underestimate the power of citizen developers. Almost every IT department faces the same difficulties: they have limited and expensive resources, are responsible for developing enterprise-wide solutions, and poor communication with the business slows down their processes.

Adopting citizen development enables IT to solve these problems. Low-code and no-code solutions ensure that all employees in companies can help build applications. This makes organizations less dependent on the IT department. According to a survey of Aimultiple , 80% of organizations state that citizen developers have given IT departments more breathing room. Also, according to another survey by Aimultiple, low-code users were 12% more likely to say that their app backlog has improved. And last but not least, low- and no-code tools require no/minimal training. The ‘ease of use’ is the most common word describing low-code no-code platforms.?

Innovation starts with the business and then transfers to IT. IT provides Citizen Developers with a platform for innovation within a controlled environment.

The Citizen Development movement

Rapidly changing business conditions have driven the need to speed up digital transformation initiatives and business process optimization. As a result, a growing number of organizations are enabling “citizen developers ” business domain professionals who understand the business process and challenges but may have little to no software development experience to create business applications using low-code no-code platforms to solve their business needs. Business teams are now building solutions that were previously highly dependent on IT resources, giving rise to this new class of citizen developers.?

In a article by KPMG advisory mentions the prediction that, by 2024, low-code no-code application development will be responsible for more than 65% of app development activity. Moreover, KPMG states that by 2024, 75% of large enterprises will be using at least four low-code development tools for both IT application development and citizen development initiatives. The surge in citizen developers and low-code automation is driven by the benefits they bring to organizations meeting the ever-changing needs and wants of customers and the market.?

Tips to implement citizen development?

Becoming a citizen developer is less about technical skills and more about mindset. Empowering the workforce through education and training to become citizen developers will drastically improve the chances an initiative is successful. People that are comfortable with technology, have a deep understanding of the workflow and business processes, and have a sustainable motivation are most likely to become successful citizen developers.

Also, many employees within an organization already possess the required skills to develop automation. Organizations can encourage technologically savvy employees to collaborate with trained developers, drastically reducing training time and costs. For this, it’s important to encourage inter-organizational collaboration to leverage existing expertise from other functional areas.

As mentioned the previous month, citizen development is here to stay and the technology is ready for it. I’m excited to see what citizen development will bring to the world in the near future. Subscribe and stay tuned for the next newsletter, wherein I will discuss the latest developments and dive deeper into citizen development fusion teams .