Embracing Citizen Developers give Companies a Competitive Advantage

The term Citizen Developer is becoming common place in business these days. So, what is a citizen developer? They are on the front line of every business unit in a company. They develop business applications using IT-sanctioned tools and run-time environments. Embracing the citizen developer represents a paradigm shift in how companies think about software development. Where in ages past IT was the only organization to develop and support business applications, now some of this is provided by the local business units in the form of people who are both technically savvy and have a strong sense of how to run the business.

"They don’t believe coding knowledge should limit an organization’s ability to drive success" Joe D365

Citizen developers are not your IT department. They may not even be coders. "That’s because they don’t believe coding knowledge should limit an organization’s ability to drive success." Citizen developers have been around for a couple of decades now. They may have been referred to as your “Power Users” or process-automation experts. But these were the go-to people in your departments who could do “magic” with a simple Excel workbook. By adding some VBA and coding-extensions they could create a pseudo software system with your off-the-shelf office automation tools.

These citizen developers help business units enable rapid application development by creating proof-of-concept systems. These applications help justify future large-scale and enterprise solutions that IT may eventually develop. The traditional IT development project may have a 6 to 12-month development cycle, with long lead times, which is not an option in today’s rapidly changing business environment. Then, once a system is developed it’s nearly obsolete; as constantly changing business requirements are the norm.

However, citizen development projects usually take between 1 to 3-months on average. They enable adaptive development for business processes that continually change. Putting small to medium scale development in the hands of the business units also stimulates innovation. Innovation comes from the diverse background of people and their work experiences. So, by empowering people in the business units with the tools to self-develop, you’re encouraging greater innovation and problem solving.

What then is IT’s role in the new digital economy?  Now IT can focus more on data security, governance, compliance, hosting, infrastructure, enterprise systems, and more complicated strategic projects.  No one can escape the impact and importance of IT at every level of a company. However, there is no reasonable way a company’s IT department can process the volume of IT work necessary to keep up with the demands in every department these days.

What about “Shadow IT” - isn’t the citizen developer just making things more complicated and putting the company at greater risk? Some define shadow IT as software developed and used within organizations without explicit approval from the IT department.

I started my career off as a software developer. Then I moved into the role of business process owner and had to leave software development to my old IT friends. As I bridged the worlds of IT and business unit, I was uniquely positioned to know how and where to best leverage technology. In the day, IT would hunt-down shadow IT and quash any innovative or creative solutions that business units were able to develop using “sanctioned” tools. Simply adding VBA in your spreadsheet or JavaScript to your web-page put you in the cross-hairs of shadow IT. But that’s beginning to change, especially since companies and their IT departments better understand the power of utilizing citizen developers. By providing “sanctioned” citizen development environments and tools, IT reduces the risk of shadow IT. By embracing the business unit role of citizen developer, IT encourages shadow IT to come out of the shadows and into the light to be properly supported and help mitigate data security risks for the company.

IT... needs citizen developers to keep up with the demand...

What’s enabled the rise of citizen developers?  The introduction of more low-code / no-code visualization and 4GL development platforms is on the rise. IT is beginning to support the idea that they need citizen developers to keep up with the demand of small to medium sized applications and providing the necessary tools for these developers to be successful. In the past, end-user application development was typically limited to single-user or work-group solutions built with tools like Microsoft Excel and Access. However, today’s end users can build departmental, enterprise and even public applications using shared and cloud computing services.

Development tools like Sharepoint, Cognos, Mendix, Salesforce and many more, help make the citizen developer a powerful player in companies today. Even in the field of AI/ML (artificial intelligence and machine learning), various AutoML applications like Alteryx, KNIME and DataRobot are helping create a kind of “citizen data-scientist”; which enable rapid/repeatable ETL (Extract Translate Load) capabilities that have built-in AI/ML and statistical analysis.

Business units need to empower their own people to become citizen developers. People who know the business and can help drive transformation, foster innovation, help automate day-to-day processes, enable speed-of-change, solve complex business problems. This kind of knowledge-work is engaging and will help energize citizen developers, resulting in companies retaining these talented workers by providing creative and innovative projects to work on. This then becomes the competitive advantage that will help drive a company’s success.

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