An IT Revolution and Business opportunity!

Self-service and citizen developer

An IT Revolution and Business opportunity!

It is estimated that the self-service, or citizen developer model will increase tremendously over the coming years. This development has been made possible by the rise of low code platforms like the Microsoft Power Platform. Even though this is promising from a creativity and productivity standpoint. It also puts completely new requirements on the traditional IT service. The challenge, as always, is to find a balance where we encourage citizen development to increase productivity and engagement, whilst ensuring a secure and maintainable IT environment.

Introduction

Gartner defines the citizen developer as:

“A citizen developer is an employee who creates application capabilities for consumption by themselves or others, using tools that are not actively forbidden by IT or business units. A citizen developer is a persona, not a title or targeted role. They report to a business unit or function other than IT. All citizen developers are business technologists. However, all business technologists are not necessarily citizen developers. There is no required designation of proficiency or time allocation for citizen developers, but they must be legal employees of an organization.”

The key definition from Gartner lies in the: “All citizen developers are business technologists. However, all business technologists are not necessarily citizen developers” For most companies this means, in my personal view, that we have not yet seen many of these individuals, but a large increase is to be expected.

A similar term is “Self-Service”. While this may be different in some contexts, generally speaking, it would mean almost the same thing. In this document the term self-service and citizen developer will be used interchangeably.

The first appearance of the term “Citizen developer” comes as far back as 2009 from a senior Analyst at Gartner – Eric Knipp:

“Future citizen-developed applications will leverage IT investments below the surface, allowing IT to focus on deeper architectural concerns, while end users focus on wiring together services into business processes and workflows. Furthermore, citizen development introduces the opportunity for end users to address projects that IT has never had time to get to — a vast expanse of departmental and situational projects that have lain beneath the surface.”

The key takeaway here is the last part of IT constantly seems to suffer from resource and time constraints. It is an interesting fact that central IT teams are always shorthanded and that there is a constant backlog of things to do. Why is that?

The heart of the problem lies in the definition of what IT is. Traditionally and depending on the user, almost all things that can happen on your laptop, becomes a “IT issue” at some point – simply put, IT is synonymously with support. This is an inaccurate and outdated view.

If you agree to the above premise, then it should become clear to all that the traditional role of IT is outdated and needs to change.

It is estimated that in the U.S. alone there will be a deficit of 500,000 developers by 2024. We are facing an IT revolution. To simply increase the IT staff is neither feasible nor efficient.

Enter the citizen developer!

What fueled this IT revolution that we are now facing?

Well, one thing we already touched, the constant lack of IT resources and a perpetual backlog, but this alone could not give rise to the revolution alone. Backlog or not, a person with no skills in SW development could not just simply start creating its own applications

Enter the “low code/no code” platform!

The single most disruptive change in IT for the last 20 years is by far the introduction of the so called “low code/no code” concept. The LC/NC platforms introduce an abstraction layer between the actual SW and the “development environment” Through simple and easy to use forms, a citizen developer can create applications, automations, and integrations. One such platform is the Microsoft Power Platform.

It is important to notice that not all parts of the MS Power platform are suitable for a citizen developer, many aspects of this platform still require a specialist competence.

It is beyond the scope of this document to go into any details about the vast power platform, but we can at least conclude that it is being constantly developed and improved by MS.

Self-service concept as a service

Self-service and for that matter, also citizen developer concept must be viewed, not as a clearly defined and well-established format, but rather a lucid concept and therefore, perpetually open for redefining.

Having said that, this does not mean it is vacuous. There is a world of difference between allowing citizen developer to create internet facing websites with data directly connected to core ERP system on the one hand and allowing users to author a simple report based on clearly defined and well secured data from a warehouse on the other.

So, we seem to be facing a scale. On the one extreme, citizen developer would have full access to the power platform, making it possible to use all the possibilities there are, on the other end of the scale, we close all possibilities for users to explore and use any aspect of the tools. Neither of these two extremes are realistic nor desirable.

For obvious reasons keeping this platform open for all to use as they want is a huge security risk, however completely closing the door for citizen developers is long term a poor strategy – this change is coming whether you want it or not.

Short term, self-service is about enabling the business users to take ownership of their data. By enabling self-service and citizen developer concept, we engorge users to feel responsible for their own data. This is at the core of both the solution and the problem.

Governance model

To address the above-mentioned challenges, we need to establish a governance model

Center of Excellence

A CoE is an organizational model to drive innovation, share knowledge and improve cross functional collaboration, to break down information silos and drive business value, whilst at the same time maintaining governance and control.

The layered approach

Another key concept would be to define the citizen developer challenges in layers. We can see four distinct layers of view that individually can be controlled and therefore make up the core governance model.

Application layer

The application layer is the main component of the power platform

Environment layer

Your application can reside in a different environment, for example a development environment or a test environment.

Data connector layer

The data connector layer represents the various sources that can be used in the power platform to connect and use data. For example, there is one to use for connecting to Dataverse, there is a different connector for SQL server and so on. In fact, there are hundreds of different connectors, each one specific to a source system or source service. Access rights can be applied to each connector.

Data layer

The final and lowest level of access is the actual data itself. We can control this normally via user roles. For example, access to the data in our tabular models is controlled via row level security.

Conclusion

This revolution is coming, and your company do not want to miss out on this as this change could mean great opportunities for you, however, approaching this without a clear strategy could be very costly is it could contradict other (Master data, IT security etc.) strategies.

If you want to know more about this topic, contact RE:SOLVR