Citizen developers are business users who create new or change existing business applications without the help of their IT departments.
Historically, when a business user needed to develop and implement a business solution, they needed to have it done by their IT department or external consultants.
This led to a lot of delays, high costs and lengthy projects being undertaken by the IT department.
By the time the project is implemented, the business needs might have changed, project sponsors might have lost interest and the change management might not be successful.
This has led to the need for citizen developers.
Citizen developers can quickly respond to the business need and create simple solutions that can fulfill that need.
What is Citizen Development?
Citizen development encourages non-IT-trained employees to become software developers by using pre approved low-code/no-code applications such as Microsoft Power Platform to create business solutions.
This allows the end users to become citizen developers and they can create and customize existing software programs to fulfill various business needs.
What are some of the advantages of Citizen Development?
Some of the advantages of citizen development include the following:
- It can help improve efficiency and productivity.
- It frees up the IT department so that they can focus on more important tasks.
- It increases the pool of talented, knowledgeable solution experts in the organization.
- It reduces the cost and time involved in creating and implementing business solutions.
- It improves the success and adoption of solution because it is created and maintained by the process owners.
Citizenship Development disadvantages
While citizen development has many advantages, it also has some disadvantages which include the following:
- The technology is constantly evolving so some components might become obsolete and this can break the solutions.
- Due to the evolving technology, the citizen developers have to keep learning and improving just to keep up with the changes.
- It can lead to inconsistency and duplication of efforts because the software development process is personalized and decentralized.
- Without strict governance, it can quickly become messy and hard to maintain the solution environments.