Citizen Development
What is a Citizen Developer?
Citizen Developers are end users who develop software-based applications for their own department – without advanced programming or IT knowledge.
In this article we take a look at how Citizen Developers operate in practice, what tools they use and why more and more companies are turning to Citizen Development for their digitalization projects.
Definition
What is a Citizen Developer?
A Citizen Developer is a professional who develops software-based applications for their own business department. Citizen Developers generally have no advanced IT or programming skills, but are very familiar with the individual workflows, requirements and challenges within their department.
Citizen Developers use so-called „low-code platforms“ and „no-code platforms“ to be able to develop their own applications without programming knowledge. These are development environments that largely or completely dispense with code input and instead provide graphical user interfaces and other tools for application development – including for example simple selection dialogs and drag-and-drop editors.
Studies show that the concept of Citizen Development continues to be adopted by more and more companies trying to advance their digitalization and process automation efforts in a more cost-effective and flexible manner. Citizen Developers relieve the burden on traditional IT and help companies to manage the increasing demand for new applications, driven not only by innovative business models and digital transformation initiatives, but also new technologies such as artificial intelligence.
A survey of 500 IT executives conducted by Salesforce and Pulse found that 72% of respondents use low-code tools to achieve greater efficiency in application development. Other market research reports and journal articles come to similar conclusions about the importance of citizen development.
Advantages
What advantages does Citizen Development offer?
Citizen Development is an innovative approach to corporate application development. Companies affected by the shortage of IT specialists can use Citizen Development to develop and deploy numerous applications within a short period of time and subsequently profit from automated workflows and other digitalization benefits.
Since Citizen Developers are end users who have in-depth knowledge about the unique characteristics of their area of application, this ensures that the developed solutions meet the operational requirements.
Furthermore, Citizen Development allows companies to react more quickly to customer and employee demands: Where traditional software development may be too slow to adapt to constantly changing market conditions, citizen developers can provide new solutions quickly and flexibly.
The most important advantages of Citizen Development at a glance
- Special expertise: Citizen Developers know the individual requirements and workflows in their department and are therefore ideally suited to developing their own solutions.
- Accelerated development: The use of Citizen Developers reduces the workload of the IT/development department and accelerates the development of software-based solutions.
- Adaptability: Applications created on the basis of low-code or no-code platforms can typically be easily adjusted – sometimes with just a few clicks.
- Increased flexibility: Applications can be quickly adapted to new industry or market developments
- Increased transparency: When low-code or no-code platforms are used for application development, the resulti