Who needs high-code developers? Citizen development is here for Financial Services

Blog: Capgemini CTO Blog

If it is properly controlled and governed, citizen development can solve the desperate shortage of dev resources. Picture this: your people have a great idea to accelerate how you deliver on new business requirements. All you need to make it happen is some professional developers. Easy, right? Unfortunately, not. Finding highly skilled developers in the current marketplace is a challenge for every enterprise and in every vertical. Sadly, you aren’t the only business in the world with an IT need … and for low-stakes, non-critical business processes, the waiting list is especially long. So, this is where citizen development comes to the rescue.

“a ready-to-go army – people who don’t need business analysts to translate what the business requirements are, because they are the business requirement!”

Of course, we need to be careful to not over-romanticize the solution. There are legitimate concerns about how you keep control when you let the business into the sacred realms of IT. However, they need to be put into context; with strong governance financial services, organizations have a ready-to-go army of dev resources waiting to be unleashed – people who don’t need business analysts to translate what the business requirements are, because they are the business requirement!

How it can work

Done well, this is about empowering your employees, safely, to drive business forward. Citizen development enables all layers of your organization to create their own apps – without needing in-depth IT knowledge. They are given access to the right tool sets to create individual application experiences within a team that’s governed by experienced IT oversight. A shared IT backlog burden between business and IT can be shrunk at speed, by using each other’s knowledge to close the gap. Business users no longer need to rely on their “standard” office tools, but can also create the tools they need without waiting for IT to help them:

To keep control, we provide a low-code center of excellence (CoE) enablement team to market your low code environment within the organization in a federated model, while a centralized team handles value enabling and, on the platform, multiple business and IT teams can focuses just on delivering value.
The solution also unlocks the potential of any platform to become rapid by promoting reuse. Keeping the use case for the rapid application development in place is key to determining the architectural agility of your organization.

What you’re going to see happening

The gap between business and IT closing

By sharing the IT backlog burden between business and IT, you can start using each other’s knowledge to keep up the application creation process and improve business productivity – enabling IT to really focus on the core business critical systems for financial services firms.

An increase in company agility

The future is here. Big tech players are jumping on the bandwagon, so it’s easy to integrate with their existing IT landscape. By removing the dependency with IT, businesses can be agile to the situation and adopt quick changes to shorten the time to value.

Your workforce empowered

Today’s workforce is tired of constraint. They love freedom and agility, and they have untapped skills to deploy that will improve their own job satisfaction. By giving them the freedom to realize their great ideas, you empower them to empower your organization.

Be in control

With a community of expertise (CoE) structure you are in full control. A CoE guides your citizen developers to follow the platform guardrails, and coaches them to reuse existing components to ensure quality and integrity.

Be bold: adopt citizen development

At Capgemini, we have consultants who are masters on various low-code platforms. We do a free assessment and advise you on the right tool set based on your comfort level and preferences.

Instead of looking at citizen development as just a productivity enhancer, we think it’s about unlocking your people and your business to enjoy the full potential of rapid application development.

It’s time for a (r)evolution

By implementing a culture of citizen development, you can get the future you want and throw off the constraints imposed by scarcity of development resources. By giving your users, and therefore your business, tools to create their own agile workspace, you do much more. In short, it’s time for a (r)evolution.

This blog was authored by Vincent Fokke and Guido Bosch.