Citizen development : WHAT is it ?
Citizen Development is essentially a low code or no code approach to software development that enables people to create software programs without needing to know anything about underlying complexities of programming languages.
Citizen developers : WHO are they?
These developers do not need to be experts in any technical programming language and need not write a single line of code to produce some very appealing functional apps which are mobile ready, works across modern browsers and drives efficiency and multiplies productivity fetching immense ROI. The world of a non-professional developer is getting expanded to reach new horizons.
They have little to no formal education in coding, but take advantage of low/no code platforms, to build apps that streamline business processes. They are non-IT trained individuals or a non-professional developers which business process knowledge and acumen to design and implement solutions.
WHY do we need them ?
The bigger question in our minds : why do we need this kind of development? at a glance this is absolutely needed in the current scenario to accommodate the demands of the modern world where an organisation needs to respond quickly to a changing marketplace. Any delay in what is the need of time can mean loss of millions of $$$.
These DIY developers fill a critical role as IT departments are
constantly struggling with insufficient staff and resources to meet all the
demands put upon them. A survey by IBM in 2014 found that 80 percent of cutting-edge enterprises were
turning to citizen developers to plug these gaps. These
line-of-business users, with little or no programming background, are building
applications that automate processes, improve efficiency, strengthen
collaboration and help customers.
HOW does this kind of development work?
Drag and Drop or Point and Click of controls on the canvas to create functional and responsive user screens, complex flows is possible within a time frame which seemed very intensive going the traditional way of coding.
In the business world, this phrase citizen development has evolved along with IT, now the business users do not need to depend upon IT to get their applications build or deployed. With the right roles and security a power business user should be able to easily create their own apps with a great User interface, workflow associated with the business process and provide a great reporting dashboard tailored to the audience.
This is possible via a range of platforms out there - Nintex, Power Platform,Quick Base etc.
Power platform is gaining a lot of attention since Microsoft is aggressively targeting their efforts on making this platform easy to design, build and deploy.
Check Check... beware!
Governance for citizen development is certainly one area of concern, it should be tightly controlled. This kind of development is pretty new and trending and needs to be controlled before it goes out of bounds for the organization. An organization certainly does not need every business developer creating multiple, duplicate apps for any processes just because they have the ability to do it, and a tighter control of what kind of apps gets in front of the employees, the external clients etc. etc. With rights comes huge responsibility and management of these is equally important for avoiding the mess of unlimited number of apps that is possible..
This is where IT department comes into picture for controlled governance of users and security groups for app development and deployment and consumption, Environments provisioning and defining who has access to do what. A focus group to align with the visions of the organization to streamline the number of apps and kind of apps that gets out into production, the quality assurance and training needs identified for end users and manage the life cycle of this app development. Just because the development time is greatly reduced lets not sideline the other aspects that can work against the entire principle of the citizen development.
Drop in your comments for what you think of this development!
