Everybody talks about it nowadays, but what does it mean? It is the development that is done by a citizen developer, which Gartner describes as follow: “A citizen developer is a user who creates new business applications for consumption by others using development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT.”
So citizen development is the development done by a non-developer who has the skills and knowledge to make a business application — this completed within the pre-defined IT standards in his/her IT environment.
Why now?
For more than 10 years, motivated and often smart people in medium and large businesses created small applications themselves by use of Excel or Access, this to automate their daily business processes. This sounds like a good thing, which it also is in its pure form, however this is horrible for the IT department because:
· after a certain amount of time this application will need some support
· extensions are often very hard because there was no real architectural plan available during the first building phase
· the data of the company could be stuck in this application, which makes it costlier to do future migrations
· the employee who created this application leaves the firm, and nobody knows how this application even works
Because of all these reasons citizen development has risen. By allowing citizen development tools, the IT department will still have everything under control and the business can guide in the governance of all these tools.
By who?
Citizen developers are the persons that know business processes best, this because they have an active role in them. Off course they should also know how to think in a functional way and should know their way in IT.
Last but now least, they should be social — this because they will need the help of IT and will need to ask their colleagues about some extra information. After building they can even roll-out their application to their colleagues with the help of the supporting IT department.
And how?
Microsoft is already of great value for small, medium and large enterprises with Office 365. With the launch of PowerApps and MS Flow, they now allow citizen developers to take an active role in the process of building a successful digital workplace.
