Do we really need citizen developers?

Citizen developers are new born resources, some sort of hybrid between a developer and a business analyst, leveraging a big part of the latter and a considerably smaller part of the first. Being a technician and having a strong development and IT pro background it’s easy to think that my personal answer to the title of this post should ben “not at all”, but to be honest it’s not exactly the truth.

Citizen developer is a fairly new label, and it’s pretty uncommon to find someone searching for a job description like this; actually, most companies don’t even know they exists. The birth of these new figures has been promoted by two factors that has happened over the last two years:

• Business owners began to better integrate with technology, mostly thanks to the wider adoption of mobile applications, becoming more and more demanding about the tools they want to use to solve their business needs (let’s face it: they start dropping Excel and want to find a better way to show these charts)
• Lot of studies have shown how tech departments have suffered forthe increased requests from business owners, as well as for the lack of resources caused by the incredible tournover era we are living into, mostly thanks to the new smart working approach.

The first point drastically decrease the possibility to have new shiny and fancy tools available for the business, regadless of the operating budget, and there is where no code / low code platforms began to grow. Basically, citizen developers may be defined like no code / low code platform users, willing to leverage their business knowled and ease of use of these platforms to create rich and shiny applications in a timely manner.

So the standard citizen developer has a strong business knowledge, but little or no technical skills: even if it seems like a perfect recipe for disaster, they learnt incredibly fast how to deal with these new technologies, starting from first versions of Microsoft’s Power Apps and going on to more refined ones. New no code / low code platforms provide a great amount of power and customization options, allowing this brand new breed of workers to provide great value applications, with a fraction of the effort and a strong adhesion to business needs, mostly because they themself are the owners of those needs. Readers may be surprised but I feel like citizen developers will be a strong, growing presence in medium big companies in the future, for a lot of good reasons:

• Best possible match between business needs and implementation, mostly because the employee “developing” the solution are the same people that will actually use those eapplications;
• Faster time to market, avoiding pitfalls and delays because of misundestanding between developers and business owners and shortage of skilled developers available;
• Better use of comany resources, because IT department can focus on what really matters in terms of performance and security, without wasting a lot of time in humongous software selections for finding the better and safest chart application, while business owners can stop wasting their time in fixing broken Excel formulas while focusing on truly reusable applications.
• Resolve shadow IT problems: giving power employee a certified platform to work on, IT managers and CTOs can be safe that IT infrastructure is well in hand of the IT department, avoiding the spread of unsupported tools of technologies downloaded from who know what kind of website;

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think at all standard development is dead, both because I’m an hopeless romantic geek and because I feel like a large amount of development sill need strong technical skills such as those like an experienced developer can provide. Still I’m ready to bet that business driven application will have an increasingly important role in companies in the coming years, if correctly used in their field of application like standard productivity tools you can find in any corporate intranet, Excel pivot’s replacements, fast and easy transformation tools for low volume data sources.

Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash