Business users have either been trying to build their own software-based solutions or customize existing solutions for years now, but with limited success.
Today, however, such ‘citizen developers’ – often with little or no programming experience – are able to leverage a combination of trends and technologies to augment their ability to create increasingly sophisticated applications.
At the center of this citizen developer trend is the rise of low-code/no-code platforms and tools – especially the ones at the ‘no-code’ end of the spectrum. The vendors of many such tools have specifically created these easy-to-use tools for citizen developers.
This trend toward citizen development, however, isn’t new. After all, we’ve seen plenty of ‘user productivity’ tools over the years that provided value in their day, but also led to the challenges of Shadow IT: the proverbial app running under someone’s desk – unmanaged, ungoverned, and of questionable quality.
The million-dollar question: have we turned a page in end-user productivity, or is this whole story just shadow IT all over again?
No Person is an Island
Sometimes citizen developers create some or all of their applications outside of the IT organization, working essentially alone, with no support from IT, or anyone else, for that matter.
However, this story of the isolated citizen developer is often a myth – and as IT shops reorganize themselves to deliver better value to customers, such deeply siloed organizations are becoming gradually less common.
In fact, while most citizen developers feel that a central motivation for citizen development is the lack of responsiveness of IT, they don’t generally experience the disconnect with the IT organization that we’ve come to call shadow IT.
In fact, citizen developers typically appreciate IT oversight, especially when it comes to challenges like security and mobile app development.
IT and business personnel may, however, have different levels of concern about important challenges like security and governance. IT managers in particular have a greater focus on the controls and safeguards that go along with application development than their colleagues on the business side.
As organizations progress with such challenges, citizen developers will continue to drive value for their organizations, and the ones that get the most support will predictably be the most successful.
Citizen developers see the technology around them as a way to boost the productivity of their jobs, which opens the door to innovation and new ways of accomplishing goals, which may have not been apparent to IT managers.
IT Must Rise to the Challenge
Organizations are well on their way to achieving the collaboration benefits that relaxed organizational silos promise. This trend is evident in how the IT organization supports citizen developers in those organizations that actively promote citizen development.
IT retains three core responsibilities: security, governance, and maintaining access to systems of record. What’s changed, however, is how IT handles these responsibilities.
Instead of acting as an ‘ivory tower,’ dispensing limited capabilities while maintaining a tight fist of control, modern IT organizations are becoming ‘centers of empowerment,’ working to facilitate citizen development (as well as other technology-empowered efforts), without serving as the gatekeeper that slows everything down.
Organizations that actively support citizen development with low-code/no-code technology and the right kind of IT support are the ones that will be more agile, innovative, and better able to succeed with their digital transformation efforts.
Among other benefits of this modern model of cross-organizational collaboration, innovation itself hands in the balance.
Citizen Developers vs. Shadow IT
When IT organizations move to this center of empowerment mentality, shadow IT issues become less of a concern. After all, the fundamental causes of shadow IT are the communication and productivity disconnects that result from overly siloed organizations.
Regardless of improvements in technology, if organizations are unable to break down such silos, then shadow IT challenges will persist. For this reason, many organizations see low-code/no-code platforms as essential to mitigating shadow IT, rather than facilitating it.
Organizations that are digitally transforming soon find that separating fast-moving, innovative digital efforts from slow-moving IT falls short of delivering on the transformation necessary to meet changing customer demands.
Instead of spinning off an innovative digital team who can quickly crank out customer-facing code while allowing traditional IT to plod along, companies are finding that it’s better to build end-to-end digital apps – especially when IT is less of a gatekeeper and more of an empowerer.
The Intellyx Take: Digital Success Depends upon ‘End-to-End’ Applications
This reinvigorated cooperation between citizen developers and the IT organization is essential for the success of the digital initiative, given the nature of the applications that form the core of any such effort.
The crux of the matter: what it means to build end-to-end applications. For digital efforts to succeed, the focus cannot simply be on the front end. Today’s user experience depends on seamless, high-performance interactions between user touchpoints and back-office systems of record.
Building such end-to-end applications simply and rapidly is a challenge every digital initiative faces. For citizen developers, the challenge is building digital apps that connect to systems of record via a simple drag-and-drop interfaces – combining the power of no-code with the integration necessary to implement such end-to-end apps.
No one expects a citizen developer, however, to hand-code such integrations. Instead, the combination of powerful, modern no-code platforms with an IT organization that centers its effort on empowering such professionals is the recipe for digital success.
From the citizen developer perspective, the numerous roadblocks that traditionally impede progress are less and less of an issue. It’s possible to roll out new, fully functional applications without worrying about the technical minutiae of application deployment in an enterprise context.
Furthermore, because IT is properly supporting the citizen development effort, management can rest assured that proper security and compliance constraints are in place – thus dispelling the shadow IT pitfall once and for all.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Kony is an Intellyx client. At the time of writing, none of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx clients. Intellyx retains full editorial control over the content of this paper. Image credit: Bruce Tuten.
