Citizen development: A key to beating IT backlog by accelerating app delivery

Dinesh Varadharajan, Chief Product Officer at Kissflow, explores how citizen development is transforming the way organisations address IT backlogs, enabling faster app delivery and empowering non-technical users to drive innovation.

For many years now, the MEA region’s IT heads have known that recruiting more developers in a skills-lite labour market causes technical debt to surge. Looking within is the way to progress. Right now, as far as digital experiences go, demand outstrips supply. And because IT departments are locked in a fruitless struggle that continually tries to match resources with requests, digital innovation has effectively been put on ice. Something must change if organisations are to clear the IT backlog.

In September 2024, Kissflow published its Citizen Development Trends report, which took a deep dive into one approach to the backlog problem – low-code and no-code solutions development. Business employees are domain experts who understand the data and workflow of each item on the expectation list better than any dev ever could. CIOs know these experts’ involvement as citizen developers would be a huge step towards eliminating IT backlog. According to our report, not only do 92 per cent of IT decision-makers see citizen development as crucial to the achievement of digital transformation goals, but almost two-thirds (65 per cent) see a reduction in IT backlog as one of citizen development’s key success metrics. Some 86 per cent of businesses polled had citizen development programmes in place, and almost half (45 per cent) had been operating them for more than a year.

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