Digital transformation offers substantial benefits, but it also comes with an ensuing increase in tech demands, pressuring an already overburdened IT department. Business environments are changing faster than ever, and organizations are struggling to stay afloat in a highly competitive market.
Organizations are seeking agile digital solutions to optimize costs, deliver results faster, and pivot promptly. Many are constantly revisiting their operating models and business strategies to address operational inefficiencies, deliver a better customer experience, and stay relevant.
Citizen development and IT teams create solutions ten times faster and ease the burden on IT. Low-code/no-code platforms enable IT departments to overcome challenges such as lengthy IT backlogs. Citizen developers build more user-friendly applications, so IT teams can focus on more complex solutions that add value. This is how citizen development mitigates the mishaps in IT.
The importance of IT and development in business
IT systems increase agility by helping companies collect accurate information, so businesses can solve problems and make more informed, data-backed decisions. IT personnel are a key component of traditional app development, customization, and maintenance.
With the rise of citizen development, non-IT personnel is gaining a more active role in the development process—something that helps them build better, more functional solutions. However, IT will still remain an active part of the process by stepping in to drive deeper customizations, enable data migration, and roll out periodical maintenance.
The current challenges, burdens, and pitfalls of IT
With the development process becoming complex, traditional IT teams face a slew of problems.
- Software developers overwhelmed by an unending IT request pipeline
- A growing shortage of skilled professional developers
- Inability to keep up with constantly evolving customer expectations
- Pressure from the ever-increasing demand for digital transformation
- Problems containing costs related to IT expenditure
- Challenges matching a business environment that changes faster than apps, software, and systems can correspond
- Hiring qualified software engineers because they’re too pricey
How IT and citizen development solve organizational problems
Citizen developers are individuals who create new functional applications that fit into their digital environments without formal programming training or written code. They’re members of business units, empowered problem-solvers with the drive and determination to use new tools and find solutions for their unique problems. Citizen development:
1. Inspires innovation and increases autonomy
With increasing digital literacy, more employees can become citizen developers and customize diverse tech features to build the digital solutions they need. Empowering non-IT employees to engage in the app development process substantially improves their digital experience. It helps them better understand tech capabilities and limitations, encouraging company-wide innovation, digital agility, and accelerating business sustainability.
It also increases job satisfaction, and strengthens employees’ sense of autonomy, enabling them to meet their needs without delays.
2. Improves efficiency and productivity development
Matching the fast digital transformation pace and staying relevant in customers’ eyes requires rapid, continual progress. Democratizing valuable development capabilities to citizen developers helps your company distribute the task of building powerful, creative apps, across a wider group of employees.
Adopting low-code/no-code tools can increase efficiency by 50%-90% and consume 70% fewer resources. They also promote resource sharing, enhancing organizational transparency.
Learn more: How to Supercharge Productivity and Innovation with Citizen Development
3. Encourages faster digital transformation
Citizen development can fast-track your digital transformation goals, helping your company release products and services quicker. Compared to conventional systems, low-code/no-code solutions accelerate app development by up to 10 times. When IT teams cannot deliver tech solutions fast enough, forward-thinking employees in 62% of businesses get frustrated.
Also, slow response times hinder the achievement of key business strategic goals. Tapping into your entire workforce, rather than just IT, makes it much easier and faster to digitize your company.
Learn more: How Does Citizen Development Facilitate Digital Transformation?
4. Reduces IT-related costs
Citizen development increases employees’ technical understanding, helping them maximize current resources and build enterprise citizen developer apps with existing tools. Citizen developers decrease software maintenance and licensing expenses and save the money you’d have spent purchasing third-party applications or hiring professional developers. Low-code/no-code platforms are more affordable than skilled developers who charge upwards of $300 per hour.
5. Address the shortage of developers
To combat the growing shortage of developers, your company can leverage employees' increasing digital dexterity in citizen development programs. With the right tools, citizen development and IT teams bridge the gap between software developer supply and demand, meeting your organizational need for apps. LCNC and citizen development inspire innovation and help employees design new apps easily.
Citizen development programs upskill employees, so they don't have to rely on IT help to solve simple tech issues. IT departments can then focus on more mission-critical projects.
Learn more: How Citizen Development Helps Build Technology Outside of IT
Benefits of IT citizen development to organizations
Following are some of the important benefits of citizen development with respect to IT in an organization.
Increases agility:
Citizen development boosts business agility, helping your company pivot quickly and react faster to meet new demands or overcome challenges. Your app development process doesn't have to take months, it can happen in days or weeks. Thanks to no code citizen development platforms with drag-and-drop interfaces and pre-built modules, non-IT employees can create custom apps quickly, without bottlenecks.
Empowering IT to complete strategic tasks:
Putting the power of IT into the hands of non-IT employees lets IT personnel focus their time and skills on the most urgent, complex development projects. Citizen development frees up the IT department of an ever-increasing to-do list of projects. With the rise of citizen developers, 80% of companies have freed up their IT teams to work on more strategic, higher-level projects.
Aligns app design with user needs:
Citizen development empowers the end-user to become the developer. Most citizen developers are subject-matter experts with a better knowledge base on the needed solutions. They know how to manipulate data to create more user-friendly apps that solve business problems at a much faster rate.
Learn more: How Low-Code And Citizen Development Simplify App Development
Reduces the burden on your IT department:
Nearly all IT teams are pressed for time and have limited resources. They’re unable to meet the increasing demand for new apps. Citizen developers with no-code/low-code platforms sanctioned by IT governace can relieve pressure on IT. This minimizes stress on IT and allows them to focus on monitoring citizen development programs more effectively.
Learn more: Why Should CIOs And IT Managers Be Aware Of Citizen Development?
How citizen development unites business and IT
When your organization empowers citizen developers with low-code/no-code platforms, they align business and IT. IT departments are less overwhelmed and incredibly more productive when citizen developers build their own apps and solve pressing problems. It also enhances overall company productivity.
Citizen development programs also decrease business operating costs, allowing IT to spend more on modernizing the company’s digital infrastructure. Citizen developers combat shadow IT, preventing non-IT employees from sourcing their own solutions without IT knowledge or oversight.
Citizen developers are here to stay, so it's best to harness their power and reap the maximum strategic benefit. Use citizen development to promote IT-business collaboration, reduce time to market and minimize operating costs.
Kissflow's citizen development platform can help your organization harness the knowledge citizen developers have on business challenges in the real world. You’ll empower them to build and deploy custom applications quicker, avoiding traditional IT bottlenecks and getting things done more efficiently.
