With constantly evolving market trends and customer expectations, modern businesses are expected to create more enterprise applications than ever. However, growing software and application development requirements mean that IT departments are always understaffed. This can result in businesses developing a significant IT backlog and reducing efficiency. Ultimately, this can impact profitability in the long term. Furthermore, a widespread developer shortage has resulted in a significant skills gap that could stunt any budding enterprise’s growth and scalability. Research has shown that 64% of IT executives say that tech talent shortages hinder the adoption of emerging technology.
The situation has driven many enterprises towards citizen development to satisfy application development requirements and facilitate long-term organizational success.
What is citizen development?
Citizen development refers to empowering employees with little to no traditional coding experience to build powerful and high-functioning enterprise applications. These employees use low-code development platforms that provide the necessary building blocks to create enterprise applications. These low-code citizen development platforms are extremely instrumental for democratizing enterprise application development that could potentially transform your business’s current and future productivity.
How Citizen Development Can Transform Business Application Development
Nearly every organisation has started or already has a digital transformation strategy in place. Traditional tech methods wouldn’t be enough to satisfy the surging enterprise application requirements. Citizen development initiatives can be more and more valuable with advancements in technology, aiding businesses to be digitally progressive.
Citizen development can have a wide variety of benefits for your business, such as:
- Streamlining and optimizing various complex aspects of enterprise application development
- Reducing the length of the development cycle
- Supplementing a lack of available skilled developers and organizational resources
- Maintaining and updating applications version efficiently
- Specific customization of UI to meet the requirements of targeted end-users
- Enabling skilled developers to work on higher-level, more complex projects
A recent study by Gartner has forecasted that there will be approximately four times as many active citizen developers at large enterprises than professional developers by 2023.
How To Identify and Empower A Citizen Developer In Your Organization:
1. Identify Employee Potential and Development Issues
The first step to identifying a potential citizen developer within your organization is determining which employees are already utilizing low-code platforms, citizen development tools, or using forms of shadow IT. Furthermore, you should also determine the primary development issues end-users face to understand which issues citizen developers wish to resolve.
2. Establish Clear Goals and Objectives
Your business must clearly establish each citizen development initiative’s short-term and long-term goals and objectives. Pre-define the role of a citizen developer compared to a skilled software developer. Determine which types of enterprise applications you wish to create and outline how citizen developers can benefit from being directly involved in enterprise application development processes.
3. Implement Low-Code Development Tools
Choosing the right low-code tool to help your business implement successful citizen development initiatives is crucial. Your business’s choice of low-code tool can determine consequent efficiency, provide citizen developers with required functionalities and facilitate a significant competitive advantage for your business.
The low-code platform that your business chooses to implement must have the following:
- User-friendly UI
- Drag-and-drop feature
- Scalability options
- Visual modeling capabilities
- Automated data analysis functionalities
Furthermore, the platform should be equipped to integrate data across numerous channels, applications, and legacy systems while enabling citizen developers to constantly update applications with less downtime.
4. Effective Training for Citizen Developers
Most low-code platforms are extremely user-friendly and accessible. But citizen developers within your organization would still require a certain amount of training and development opportunities. This would give them clarity on development criteria and what is expected of them.
Research indicates that approximately 70% of citizen developers with no prior experience with low-code development learned how to build enterprise applications in less than a month.
Embrace Citizen Development to Accelerate Application Development
With digital transformation becoming a need for many businesses, citizen development has become an effective and future-proof strategy. By allowing business users to build solutions quickly, the IT teams are given room and scope to explore and focus on more business-critical activities.
Your business can empower citizen developers within your organization by identifying potential employees and various application development issues. Low-code development platforms can be extremely beneficial for facilitating effective citizen development initiatives. Drive your business to sustainable success by optimizing development costs, eliminating IT backlog, reducing the length of the enterprise application development cycle, and much more.
Kissflow is a leading SaaS software company offering award-winning low-code & no-code work management solutions used by organizations in over 160 countries. Kissflow’s offerings include product platforms for workflow management system, low code application development, procurement cloud solution, digital workplace, project management, and community management, all of them designed to simplify work. Kissflow powers more than 50 Fortune 500 companies such as Airbus, McDermott, Reckitt Benckiser, and Olympus. Kissflow is featured as a leader in G2, the world’s largest user reviews aggregator and by renowned analyst firms Gartner & Forrester. Kissflow has a globally distributed workforce of close to 400 employees.
