The Rise of Citizen Developers

In today’s digitally-driven economy, IT has become the soul of enterprises. Simultaneously, it requires a lot of people across different organizations to be able to design and develop applications that help move data to where it is required. Fundamentally, IT has gotten a lot greater than the IT professional or developer — IT has become the business. 

This shift to a digital, decentralized, and collaborative work environment has brought about the rise of citizen developers. As corporate IT developers emphasize more on developed and global projects, citizen developers can become supporters of organization-wide development, and their projects can make efficiencies and speed up business outcomes at both the organizational and local levels. 

This blog focuses on the job of the citizen developer. What is a citizen developer? For a clear understanding of this phenomenon, we characterize citizen developers as users who build and use their scripts, projects, algorithms, or systems developed to perform business operations or back the business objectives as a whole.

What is a Citizen Developer?

A citizen developer (CD) is somebody who uses no-code or low-code development tools to make new software applications. That is significant given the extreme deficiency of developers with enterprise-level coding skills. Aspiring citizen developers become familiar with the fundamentals of developing and changing digital work processes. They should likewise show that they understand the organization’s principles and best practices for software development.

Role of Citizen Developers

Citizen developers will apply their business knowledge and expertise to automate business processes for themselves, their teams, or their organizations. For instance, citizen developers in finance may automate month/year-end reports or use automation to consolidate spreadsheets; finance managers in customer support may automate contract statements or customer touchpoints.

With serious no-code tools and the correct administration, citizen developers can move away from side-by-side methodology. Citizen developers would then be able to do the entirety of the actual work, as long as they work inside the limits of the organization’s approaches on data security and other security parameters.

Rise of Citizen Developers

The rise of the citizen developer is an extension of the consumerization of IT. Surely, citizen developers develop applications that regularly offer a user experience (UX) like that of mainstream applications. The functionality might be very unique, however, the Rapid Mobile Application Development (RMAD) platforms allow these developers to develop wonderful applications that are very user-friendly and easy to use, something that is not generally the situation with IT-developed applications. 

Numerous IT departments have application backlogs that stretch from a couple of months to a few years. Citizen developers are reducing the burden on IT to create enterprise mobile applications. With citizen developers liable for mobile strategy, IT can generally leave it to them to create mobile applications for the organizations overall. IT would then serve more in a support role that provides skills and services depending on the situation, for example, custom integration of a low-code application.

Final Thoughts

Progressively, the term “citizen developer” refers to any non-technical, full-time businessperson that sees digital process automation as one of the numerous product tools used to develop productivity and proficiency, eliminate the revisions, support higher-value tasks, and coordinate team activities. Their tools (low-code and no-code) will affect everybody – similarly as personal productivity software and social media changed how businesspersons and society perceive work.