Thanks to low-code rapid application development, every businessperson with an idea can become a “citizen developer.”
Citizen development is a powerful change agent for organizations looking to enable business professionals to contribute to application building without having to write code. According to Forrester the market for low-code tools, which can extend application building beyond professional developers, will grow from a few billion in 2016 to $15 billion by 2020.
The dynamics of today’s fast-paced global marketplace and the constant evolution of technology require that companies break out of their traditional silos and rethink how they do business within their business. And forward-thinking IT leaders have learned that loosening the technological reigns benefits them in many ways.
As organizations build more custom business applications without code, they stand to experience numerous benefits: faster time to solutions, simplified access to data, automation of complex workflows, reduced backlogs, better decision making, and empowering employees to solve their own problems.
But how do you ensure citizen development initiatives are successful? Like any major technology shift, citizen development won’t magically solve problems without proper structure and internal support. Here are several factors to consider to ensure you’re setting up citizen development projects for success:
How It Will Impact Your Staff
Great candidates for citizen development are typically individuals within the organization who are closest to a problem — and therefore in the best position to understand how to solve a business problem involving specific data and processes. These business professionals need the time and headspace to build apps: a recent report from Quickbase found that more people are spending time on citizen development for their jobs. In fact, 76 percent of citizen application builders consider developing applications as part of their day job. This number is up from 68 percent in 2015. While some companies may need just one citizen developer, others might require teams of app builders including business professionals, business analysts, business process analysts and IT professionals. Depending on needs, it may even make sense to hire people to focus solely on creating no-code or low-code apps.
Which Apps to Build With Citizen Development Tools—And Which Not To
Citizen development tools have the ability to support a broad spectrum of organizational needs. The same survey mentioned above found that citizen development platforms are capable of developing 26 different custom applications for a variety of top use cases. This includes everything from asset management and project management to IT help desk services and inventory management.
While some apps are perfectly aligned to citizen development, others require more traditional coding tools. When building your citizen development strategy, consider tiering the apps your organization is building by mission criticality and complexity, and then identifying what tools are best suited for each job. For example, to develop an entire ERP system you will want to turn to your development team’s high-code expertise. However, for developing an app that is less architecturally complex but can aggregate and manage data from ERP and other systems, no-code or low-code may be the best path.
What Your Policies Will Be
While citizen development can open up tremendous opportunities, without a framework of policies and support from IT, it can also contribute to shadow IT. A business professional working alone might not be aware of the security risks of using corporate data in a specific way, and accidentally leave their company susceptible to data mismanagement. That’s why citizen developer initiatives should seek to create strong working relationships between IT and business teams. This involves creating shared accountability for rapidly developing effective and secure applications for the organization. Approached this way, IT retains the oversight it requires to mitigate risk—especially pertaining to areas like permissions and data integrations—while business professionals are free to build, update and manage solutions, when and where needed.
How Internal Collaboration Will Be Organized
Collaboration around app development may need to look different depending on the apps your organization is building. Generally, there are three types of collaboration to consider for app development involving citizen developers:
- Business-Led: In this popular model chosen 62 percent of the time according to the report cited above, citizen developers in the line of business who have the knowledge and motivation to take primary responsibility for apps build 75 percent or more of an application. This model is best for projects that require empowering the line of business to problem solve, although IT staff may still be involved to ensure adequate security and compliance.
- Balanced IT and Business: The next most recurring model, deployed 21 percent of the time, involves IT and business partnering to co-create applications. IT builds the initial version of apps incorporating real-time feedback from business users who add business logic, reports and workflows.
- IT-Led: In this more traditional approach followed 17 percent of the time, IT builds 75 percent or more of the first version of the application but benefits from business professionals taking responsibility for maintaining real-time changes and updates of future versions. This model is preferred when IT would like to retain a higher level of control over application development, security, and governance.
Citizen development tools are quickly becoming indispensable for many companies looking to empower business professionals to contribute to solutions for business challenges. Consider the above elements in advance of your app development initiatives, and you’ll be many steps closer to achieving the full benefits citizen development provides.
Mark Levitt is the Customer and Market Insights Manager at QuickBase, the industry’s leading low-code platform for citizen development for quickly building, customizing and connecting scalable, secure cloud applications mapped to unique business challenges, all without compromising IT governance and control.
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