What is Citizen Development and What Value Does It Bring to Organizations?
Original: https://cli.im/article/detail/2103
By Wang Jiwei
In traditional development models, if a business department needs to develop an application, it must turn to the IT department. The IT department's backlog and development progress determine whether it has the resources to meet the rapid demands of business departments.
This contradiction means that most application development requests in organizations require scheduling. The chronic shortage of development talent in many organizations further exacerbates this issue, making it highly likely that any development request will be added to the queue of unfinished projects.
With the evolution of software technology and development models, the popularity of no-code and other technologies now enables business users with surging demands to develop applications and systems themselves. The widespread adoption of these technologies has increased the proportion of citizen development within organizations, making it the primary mode of application development in some enterprises.
These "citizen developers" leverage their creativity in their respective business roles, developing applications that better suit their needs. They can deliver task-centric software faster, without relying solely on IT departments to decide projects. Employees familiar with business processes can use their knowledge to create various solutions that support their daily work and the organization's overall goals.
Starting with Citizen Development
Citizen Development, directly translated as "公民开发" in Chinese, is often referred to as "全民开发" or "平民开发" domestically, possibly due to cultural differences between East and West. In other words, what is called "全民开发" in China corresponds to "Citizen Development" abroad. (Note: Except for definitions and references to relevant reports, this article uses "citizen development" throughout.)
Different institutions and organizations have provided various descriptions for the definition of Citizen Development.
Siemens Mendix believes that citizen development refers to business users without coding experience using IT-approved technologies (such as low-code) to build simple business applications to enhance their daily productivity or improve existing business processes.
IT professional media TechTarget defines citizen development as a business process that encourages employees without IT training to become software developers, using IT-approved low-code/no-code (LCNC) platforms to create business applications.
The Project Management Institute (PMI) considers citizen development one of the most exciting business movements today, enabling project managers and other change-makers to create applications using low-code and no-code platforms without complete reliance on IT departments, at a fraction of the cost and time.
According to PMI, Citizen Development will become a disruptor of this new norm, as many low-code/no-code platforms have already demonstrated to their clients and partners.
In practice, LCNC has proven its ability to significantly reduce the complexity of application development at minimal cost. To date, many organizations have begun adopting citizen development in their operations to stimulate rapid change and establish a unique footprint within their communities, thereby benefiting overall productivity.
In summary, citizen development allows non-IT employees to build business applications using low-code and no-code platforms. In turn, they can improve business processes, enabling IT teams to focus on more business-critical activities. With increasing digital agility, more employees are becoming citizen developers and creating applications on their own. In many organizations, citizen developers exist in departments such as human resources, R&D, finance, and customer service.
About Citizen Developers
In China, those engaged in citizen development work are defined as "citizen developers."
Gartner defines citizen developers as employees who use tools not explicitly prohibited by IT or business departments to create application features for their own or others' use. Citizen developers use low-code and no-code tools to build internal applications, including creating integrations, workflows, and processes within existing tools, as well as delivering new software from scratch.
Citizen developers should be business experts in their respective fields. They understand how processes/domains operate within the business and have the insight to improve them. They also include business personnel from various industries, departments, and roles who possess demands, skills, and experience. These individuals only need suitable IT tools to upgrade into citizen developers and subsequently develop the solutions they need to support organizational operations.
Supported by IT, citizen developers build applications to solve business problems. They use no-code and low-code application development tools to create new business applications for themselves and other employees. They have a deep understanding of organizational or departmental processes and possess advanced digital skills. This enables them to create efficient business applications and easily automate workflows.
For organizations where application development constitutes a significant portion of their work, the importance of citizen developers is self-evident. Adopting a citizen developer organizational framework for program development and business operations means lower technical investment, faster development speed, and higher business output. Even in small and medium-sized enterprises with fewer systems and lighter development tasks, citizen developers can optimize business processes by developing automation programs, playing an important role in cost reduction, efficiency improvement, and digital transformation.
The Value of Citizen Development
The value of citizen developers to organizations can be reflected in the following points:
Increased Productivity. Productivity significantly improves when the IT department is overwhelmed. Organizations can design, build, and deploy applications in days or weeks, rather than months. Citizen development enables IT to focus on more critical issues, such as core system scaling, enterprise-wide applications, and legacy modernization.
Faster Application Development. In a rapidly changing business environment, speed is a necessary condition for success. When IT cannot deliver new solutions on time, 62% of visionary employees feel frustrated. Using low-code/no-code platforms to build applications can reduce development time by 50%–90%.
Higher Employee Motivation. Providing employees with the technical skills needed to create enterprise applications increases their motivation. They create digital tools based on their own needs and feel empowered as they solve business problems and improve processes.
Cost Reduction. Hiring top-tier developers requires high compensation, which is why 84% of organizations use low-code/no-code tools to alleviate IT pressure. Furthermore, due to citizen development, companies hire fewer developers, saving millions in labor costs. Citizen development also allows employees to share resources and tools, thereby minimizing costs.
Promoted Collaboration. In previous development models, software development was left to the IT department, which had little collaboration with other departments. Low-code/no-code tools promote collaboration by uniting disconnected teams around common goals. Non-IT employees without coding and programming knowledge can also collaborate with the IT department to develop applications that fully meet company needs.
Additionally, a good citizen development program is an important means to achieve the advantages of digital transformation. Developers make significant changes based on their professional knowledge, seeking solutions to their unique problems by developing programs themselves. This improves productivity and enhances customer experience, significantly boosting the happiness index.
The Era of Citizen Development Has Arrived
The citizen development model is being adopted by an increasing number of companies worldwide. It provides non-IT business experts with appropriate technology and IT support to build the basic applications they need. Employees building their own applications can perform their work more effectively, reducing the company's operational costs and decreasing the IT backlog.
In fact, the less efficient the IT department is, the greater the organization's demand for the citizen development model. When this contradiction becomes more acute, driven by the continuous pursuit of cost reduction and efficiency improvement, many enterprises begin to introduce no-code/low-code platforms, turning business personnel into citizen developers and allowing them to build the applications they need in a shorter time.
These applications, quickly built from the inspired ideas of citizen developers, combined with advanced data analysis techniques, provide tangible value to enterprises.
In the gradual application of low-code/no-code, many organizations have found that the rise of citizen developers is driving the development and deployment of enterprise-led digital solutions. As more citizen developers emerge within enterprises, their focus areas have expanded from simple application development to citizen application integration and citizen scientific data analysis, among others.
With the application of the citizen development model in more fields and the surge in the number of citizen developers, the era of citizen development has thus begun.
Gartner predicts that by 2023, the number of active citizen developers will be at least four times that of professional developers in large enterprises. By 2024, 75% of large enterprises will use at least four no-code/low-code development tools in IT and citizen development initiatives, and 80% of technology products and services will be built by non-technical professionals.
A McKinsey study found that organizations that empower citizen developers score 33% higher on innovation measures than those that do not.
ZDNet data shows that 72% of IT leaders say project backlogs prevent them from working on strategic projects. The rise of citizen development will take software demands away from developers and make it a collaborative effort across the organization.
Additional data indicates that over 80% of companies say citizen developers are becoming increasingly important to their teams. 82% of enterprises believe that citizen developers will become even more important within two years.
These data points all indicate that the era of citizen development has arrived.
About the Author:
Wang Jiwei, a veteran of the IT industry, commentator on technology and industry economy, currently focuses on IoT and industrial internet, specializing in digital transformation and business process automation, committed to exploring new opportunities for industrial upgrading in the IoT era. Author's public account: Wang Jiwei Channel (ID: jiwei1122)