In the world of IT, there are many transformational forces at play that promise to completely rewrite the way organizations do business going into the future. One of these key trends is the rise of the citizen developer; like most other key trends in IT, the organizations that learn about this trend and adapt to it quickly will be in the best position to reap the benefits of it.
What Does Citizen Developer Mean?
The term, “citizen developer,” was coined by industry analyst firm, Gartner, to describe any user who creates business applications using development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT.
The key factor in the definition here is that, a citizen developer is not a traditional computer programmer; although they may have a technical background and some understand of the way an application infrastructure works. Citizen Developers do not build applications using code. In fact, most citizen developers have a non-technical job role, such as business analyst.
The reason these people are able to build business applications with relative ease is that new tools have made it possible to build applications without in-depth coding abilities, and cloud computing has made it significantly easier to deploy those new applications once they’re built.
The Business Benefits of Citizen Developers
The citizen developer movement represents a quicker, easier way to connect business users with the tools they need to fulfill their job roles. As a result, citizen developers bring a variety of different benefits to the organizations they work for, including increased speed and agility, lower costs, and more efficient use of existing resources.
In the old days, a business user that needed an application would most likely have to go through an outside organization to have the application created. That outside organization could be the IT team from within the same company, or an external application development agency; the common factor is that the people building the application would not be the same people who ended up using the application.
This arrangement is problematic for a number of reasons:
- It can be more expensive than having business users create their own applications.
- It prevents IT resources from focusing their time and effort on more strategic, high-value tasks.
- There’s always a very good chance the final product won’t solve the exact problems the business team needed to solve in the first place.
In cases like this, the business users need to be able to describe their needs in a way that the application developers can understand. In spite of their best efforts, the potential for some idea or concept to get lost in translation is always a glaring probability.
Basically, citizen developers help businesses because they do away with all of the problems and drawbacks that existed in the old way of doing things. For instance, citizen developers are often business users themselves, so they have a better understanding of what their fellow business users need an application to do. This increases the likelihood that the final app will actually meet those needs. By cutting the reliance on IT programmers and/or high-priced external development teams out of the equation, companies can save a lot of time and money.
Utilizing citizen developers allows companies to produce applications faster, build applications that meet the exact business requirements the first time, and free up IT by reducing backlogs and allocating their resources to focus on bigger problems, which is a better use of their time.
Why The Citizen Developer Trend is Taking Off Now
Simply put, citizen developers are poised to become a more important part of business, simply because we are living in a time where business users need a better way to build applications quickly. At the same time, technology has made that new, faster, and better way possible. The coordination between the need and the solution has become almost perfect.
That said, just because the citizen developer movement has started does not mean all organizations will benefit from it equally. There are things organizations must do in order to empower the citizen developers that work for them.
The first thing all organizations must do is give potential citizen developers the tools they need to succeed. As we mentioned earlier in this post, new technology is what makes the citizen developer movement possible; if employees don’t have access to this technology and corporate approval to use it, they will never become citizen developers.
If your organization is just starting to jump on board the citizen developer movement, there is a lot you still need to learn, but the benefits are definitely worth it. Now is the time for you to make it happen. Start looking at vendors that provide tools for citizen developers today! You can give your citizen developers an inside look at appsFreedom to see if it works for them by getting a free test drive today.