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Contributed on September 7, 2020

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It’s Time to Embrace Citizen Development in your Organization

Blog: NASSCOM Official Blog

Advancement in technology has empowered employees with some powerful capabilities to solve their business problems. Specifically, low-code platforms have inspired so-called citizen developers to create their own solutions to solve their business problems without relying on the IT departments of the organization.

Citizen developers are motivated individuals and problem-solvers from the various verticals of industry who have sound knowledge of the business processes they are associated with and have passion and ambition to participate in the development of applications to solve their business challenges themselves.

There are a plethora of advantages that come with encouraging the citizen development initiative in the organization such as faster time to market, cost benefits, and transparency.

In this article, we will focus on five additional benefits that citizen developers bring that will compel IT leaders, to embrace and promote the citizen development initiative in their organization.

1. Accelerating innovation by empowering the experts
   There is a huge and rising disparity between the necessities for businesses to innovate to serve their clients better and the availability of the technological expertise and innovation competencies they actually possess.

   IT departments of many small enterprises do not have sufficient resources to meet every demand that comes in. Similarly, large enterprises have a long timelines due to existing backlogs. Therefore they prioritize every demand according to its impact on business. This gap in the supply and demand exemplifies the need for citizen development in the organization.

   Low-code platforms empower citizen developers to build their solutions allowing more processes to be automated faster and granting “local experts” the potential to solve their problems themselves.

   Low-code platforms give the power of innovation in the hand of the enterprise users who are the frontline workers and have sound knowledge of the business process they are associated with and have some technical knowledge to create their solutions without relying on the IT departments of the organization to fulfil their business demands.

2. Rapid development of custom applications
   When the IT departments are already overburdened with huge IT backlogs and various requests, creating altogether new solutions by IT teams can result in a longer waiting time.

   IT leaders can fill the void between the available IT resources and enterprise users by promoting citizen development and enabling enterprise users to create solutions to fulfil their business requirements. Low-code platforms empower users with the rapid development of custom applications using a model-driven development approach to create applications to meet their business requirements.

3. Collaboration between business and IT
   Citizen developers aren’t highly qualified programmers. Professional IT programmers have software development experience that helps them to address various strategic practices that offer significant value to the organization. Citizen developers can make a positive contribution by collaborating with the IT department to quickly create solutions for the business processes with which they are associated.

   Citizen development can result in greater collaboration between business and IT. IT departments can lay down the guidelines under which citizen developers can exercise the benefits of the low-code platforms and can contact IT departments for any assistance if required. By mediating these citizen developers, each department can collaborate, culminating in a stronger partnership and better alignment between the business and IT departments.

4. Enabling business agility
   Business agility is the ability of the organization to rapidly adapt to changes in its environment while staying responsive to business and consumer requirements.

   – Here are a few of the benefits of business agility:
   – Evolutionary development of applications
   – Faster delivery and deployment of applications
   – Faster Innovation and Iterative development
   – Enhanced customer experience

   Rather than sitting back and waiting for IT to help, citizen developers can cope with the issues directly using low-code platforms. Citizen developers can quickly innovate, iterate, and develop applications in real-time to fulfil their business requirements.

   By allowing citizen developers to create their solutions for their different business processes or challenges, the organization can become more agile to adjust effectively to the dynamic business environment.

5. Reducing Shadow IT Shadow IT has always been a problem for an organization. Shadow IT refers to the unauthorized implementation of softwares and other technical solutions without approval from the IT departments. Interrupted by long waiting times for viable solutions, enterprise users have switched to Shadow IT to create business solutions for their respective departments.

   In partnership with IT, Citizen Development provides frontline workers and enterprise users a way to leverage innovation at the pace of Shadow IT. Low-code platforms can help to significantly reduce the problem of Shadow IT in an organization by providing the controlled and regulated environment authorized by the IT departments to citizen developers to create their business solutions.

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