Last Updated on May 8, 2023 by Ossian Muscad
Organizations must periodically review their business approach due to inevitable shifts in the corporate environment. With most of today’s businesses under digital transformation, most IT teams are under a lot of strain dealing with core applications leaving massive backlogs. In this situation, citizen development can be useful.
By enabling non-technical staff to create specific programs, business organizations cope with backlogs and ease pressure on IT. Citizen development also adds knowledge and original perspective to creating business applications. Find out more about citizen development via the definition, why there is a need for citizen development and FAQs.
What is Citizen Development?
Citizen development is how non-IT-trained staff members adapt as software developers by using low-code and no-code technologies to create essential business applications. IT authorizes and reviews applications developed utilizing citizen development techniques.
Citizen developers can build and upgrade applications by dragging and dropping icons on these low-code / no-code (LCNC) platforms, which already contain the relevant lines of code. Simple visual tools on these platforms enable a variety of application tasks to connect elements between business sectors, perform actions and tests to ensure that the new code functions as intended, and deploy the new code.
The Development of Citizen Engineers
Citizen development is a concept that numerous businesses adapt to deal with challenges that have been harming enterprises and their ability to develop. It provides the following benefits:
- Increasing IT delays
- Constant changes in the corporate environment evolve quicker than the software and systems users count on.
- Developer talent drought and expenses
Citizen development is a technique to ease the strain on IT while equipping non-IT specialists with the ability to construct the business programs they need without consulting IT organizations.
Why is there a need for Citizen Development in an Organization?
In most firms, IT departments have a massive backlog of tasks, and these tasks make it harder to meet new demands promptly. They are usually overburdened by a continuous request flow of application lifecycle management, and keeping up can be difficult. This is where the need for citizen-led growth comes in.
Here are the top reasons organizations need citizen development:
- A recent study indicated that incorporating low-code solutions can enhance development efficiency by 50 to 90 percent.
- Citizen development enables the business to greatly enhance productivity, workflow automation, and app development speed.
Several organizations establish active citizen development projects or plan to have them. Business customers can create innovative, time-saving apps for their enterprises using low-code/no-code platforms.
What are the Skills Needed to be a Citizen Developer?
To create an effective citizen development approach, here are four essential skills that a citizen developer must have:
Comprehensive Know-how of Company Operations
A citizen developer must understand multiple company procedures, errors, and difficulties to create helpful business apps. This will help them review and design ideal processes and apps consistent with their organizational goals.
Enhanced Level of Technological Skills
An in-depth understanding of business processes must be linked with higher digital capabilities to establish a long-term citizen development framework. This includes knowledge of productivity analytics, document generation, and no-coding bot automation.
The Ability to Collaborate with Inter-departments
A citizen developer must function as a connector, ensuring efficient cooperation between business and IT to meet organizational goals.
Highly Driven To Train and Develop
Motivation to upskill is essential; customers must try to self-educate themselves and grasp the no-code abilities.
The Disadvantages of Citizen Development
While the idea of allowing full liberty to business people to tackle their unique productivity concerns looks tempting on the surface, a plan that’s not anchored upon IT governance and ignores how current teams are constituted is guaranteed to fail.
Standard citizen development or shadow IT leads to programs prone to data breaches, rapidly neglected when an employee quits their job, and so badly developed that IT must rebuild them as they become essential.
A Solution to Citizen Development
A “DIY” application produced by business users, regardless of how computer-literate they are, might not effectively handle ineffective guidelines such as security, stability, performance, and adaptability.
A cross-functional development model is a better alternative that delivers the entire-team collaboration that enables companies to leverage developer expertise and business insight efficiently.
By drawing professionals from business and IT to cooperate on cross-functional tasks that produce new applications, companies can take advantage of their diverse knowledge and skills.
The DATAMYTE Approach to Citizen Development
Choosing the appropriate technology is essential in achieving the goals of citizen development. IT must consider the requirements of their company and work in line with the organization to develop the processes and choose the technology that will allow more people to create software correctly. A modern low-code software development platform like DATAMYTE provides specific capabilities that enable diverse team members to participate and cooperate consistently.
The DataMyte Digital Clipboard, in particular, is a low-code automation software perfectly suited to handle citizen development ventures with the following capabilities.
- Reusable templates/ workflows. Apply the work of qualified developers through built-in workflows, templates, and drag-and-drop modules.
- Streamlined development platform. AI-assisted programming technologies are used to complement our user-friendly model-driven platform for development.
- Quick results. Acquire solutions promptly and lower the possibility that crucial apps won’t be developed.
- Security and Control. With the platform’s built-in safety features, maintain control and stop the low-code tool’s uncontrolled adoption. Utilize DataMyte’s Layered Process Audits to manage the landscape of available solutions.
- Collaboration. Work together on challenging features or integrations with experienced developers using built-in tools.
With DATAMYTE, you have all you need to embrace citizen development. Request a demo for more information. Then, get in touch with us today!
Conclusion
The citizen development platform from DATAMYTE is a full-featured platform that makes it easier to construct, test, and improve your workflow concepts. By enabling you to quickly learn how to produce a variety of applications without writing code, the platform helps you realize your abilities as a citizen developer.
