With more low-code and no-code (LCNC) tools and platforms being developed, building software, creating automations, and leveraging AI has become more accessible to non-technical people than ever before.
As more non-IT staff use these tools to optimize their work, more organizations are seriously talking about the importance of citizen development. At SimplyAsk, we believe it’s an essential practice: every organization should adopt citizen development to transform the potential of their employees and see regular and consistent boosts in operational efficiencies.
But what is citizen development? Why should your organization care about it? Here’s a primer to get started:
What Is Citizen Development? Citizen development is a business practice where organizations enable non-IT staff to develop business applications using low-code and no-code tools.
A citizen developer is a non-IT employee who uses low-code and no-code tools to create business applications that improve operations.
In the past, software development required knowledge of programming and other technologies. But as more LCNC tools were released to the public, suddenly non-technical employees could create basic applications without writing any code. The capabilities of these tools have significantly grown and are only getting better.
With LCNC tools lowering the barriers to entry for software development, citizen development has slowly become a more realistic practice that organizations can adopt.
But why should your organization help their non-IT staff become citizen developers? What is there to gain in adopting citizen development practices?
Why Should My Organization Care About Citizen Development? Adopting citizen development provides three massive benefits for your organization:
Improved Leverage of Ground-Up Insights The massive potential of citizen development stems from this fact: the employees who are closest to the work — actually doing it day in and day out — possess the deepest understanding of its intricacies and potential for optimization.
That may sound obvious, but think about it: how often do organizations commission their IT staff or an external agency to produce a technical solution to a business problem that they have no professional connection to? How much time is spent learning about the details of a problem and the systems involved when there are available staff who already have that understanding but simply lack the technical expertise to build a solution?
The people who can point out inefficient processes and come up with cohesive solutions for them aren’t your IT staff or C-suite. It’s your workers who are closely involved in those processes. With LCNC tools, their lack of technical expertise no longer becomes a barrier. Your organization can take full advantage of their ground-up insights and enable them to build automations and solutions that optimize for efficiency and cost.
Transform the Potential and Output of Both IT Staff and Non-IT Staff Democratizing automation is not a mere trend – it’s a fundamental shift in how organizations envision and execute their operations. It’s about unlocking the potential within each member of the organization and equipping them with the means to contribute meaningfully to its success.
Leveraging the ground-up insights of your employees isn’t just a one-time thing. If citizen development practices are properly adopted and the right tools are given to the employees, non-IT staff can make improvements to their workflows and processes right away without having to notify IT or management. This not only increases the throughput of non-IT staff but also reduces the workload of IT staff, who can now focus their gained time and mental bandwidth on other activities.
Furthermore, a large percentage of employees would benefit from these low-code, no-code tools. Gartner reports that on average, 41% of employees in an organization are business technologists: non-IT staff who have some technical knowledge and use it to build applications for their own use. Imagine how much your organization’s throughput could increase if roughly 40% of its workforce were given tools that made it easier for them to develop automations and optimizations.
By implementing LCNC tools, your organization can transform the capabilities of every employee, technically minded or otherwise.
Regular and Consistent Improvements to Business Operations As employees continue their work and find inefficiencies in processes, they can regularly optimize them using low-code and no-code tools, resulting in consistent improvements in business operations. Instead of having to make big adjustments for optimization, increased efficiency can be gained incrementally over the course of days and months.
By optimizing business operations through citizen development, an organization reaps the following benefits:
Enhanced Operational Efficiencies: Automation of repetitive tasks liberates valuable human resources, enabling them to focus on strategic initiatives. This shift not only boosts productivity but also fosters innovation within the organization.Reduced Turnaround Times: With tasks and processes streamlined through automation, organizations experience a significant reduction in operational lags, thereby improving overall service delivery and customer satisfaction.Error Minimization: Automating processes minimizes the likelihood of human error, ensuring higher accuracy and reliability in operations.Cost Reduction: By enabling non-technical users to create and manage automation solutions, organizations can reduce their reliance on specialized technical staff, leading to significant cost savings.Scalability and Adaptability: The citizen development approach empowers organizations to quickly adapt and scale their operations in response to market demands or internal requirements, ensuring they remain competitive in a dynamic environment.Citizen Development Is The Future Gartner reports that by 2025, 70% of new applications developed by organizations will use LCNC technologies – and this will likely be spearheaded by non-IT workers. The organizations who will benefit the most from automations and optimizations will be those that enable their staff with LCNC tools and lower the barriers to developing solutions to inefficient business processes.
If your organization is interested in citizen development and wants to learn more, stay tuned for the next articles in this series on citizen development. We’ll go over best practices, what to keep in mind when adopting LCNC tools, and how we’re thinking about citizen development at SimplyAsk.
If you’re ready to get started with citizen development by implementing LCNC tools but are unsure which tool to use, we recommend using Symphona, our no-code, self-serve, AI-assisted operational efficiency platform.
With Symphona, you can automate processes, implement intelligent AI chatbots across your business, manage service tickets in one dashboard, and optimize even more front-end and back-end processes. Whether you’re looking to optimize just one process or multiple departments, Symphona is the perfect tool to enable citizen development. Book a demo by clicking on the sidebar.
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