Businesses around the world are beginning to wake up to a new movement. The status quo of how CRM and BPM were done for decades is no longer cutting it in this modern, tech-oriented world. For businesses to keep up, they need reform. Digital transformation, one of the most talked about trends, is the easiest way businesses can innovate, change, and grow.
With this realization comes even more questions, however. Companies need apps and automation to transform and they need it fast, but IT departments can only develop so many apps within a given timeframe. So if a company wants to digitally transform and revolutionize the way they do business, what’s the best way to do so?
The best way for companies to experience this revolution and transformation might not be so different from how other institutions do: For governments, it requires citizens to create a revolution. For businesses, it requires citizen developers.
What are Citizen Developers?
Citizen developers are non-IT professionals who create business applications. Essentially, they develop without any formal coding knowledge. Regular employees from sales representatives to HR managers can become citizen developers and create the business applications they need to automate their work so long as their company gives them the right tools to do so. Unlike “shadow IT,” where non-professional development is done without the knowledge of IT, citizen developers collaborate with the IT department. Citizen developers need training from IT experts in order to take over the majority of the application development process, while the IT department continues to maintain the business’s overall IT infrastructure.
Businesses who enable citizen developers can close their IT delivery gap, innovate, and accelerate their transformation. McKinsey found that when employees are empowered by self-serve technology, digital transformation is twice as likely to be successful. By equipping citizen developers with the tools they need to create solutions themselves, strained IT resources can be relieved of much of their development backlog and focus on other important obligations. By increasing the number of people capable of developing apps, solutions can be created at a much more rapid pace; a pace that is more in-tune with the fast pace of modern business. Citizen developers can therefore create the applications they need to address a business’s needs. This rapid automation and innovation within a company is the fire that fuels its digital transformation.
Enabling Citizen Developers with Low-Code Technology
Gartner states that citizen development is fundamental to digital transformation. Knowing all this, it’s safe to say that most businesses would want to encourage citizen developers within their organization and allow anyone to become a developer. However, citizen developers cannot rise up and innovate with traditional software development methods: the coding required to do so makes it extremely difficult for a non-professional to tackle. Instead, companies that want a citizen developer revolution implement low-code platforms.
Low-code platforms are development platforms that rely on a visual, user-friendly interface with pre-configured modules and drag-and-drop features for app creation. These features require little to no coding throughout the development processes and don’t have a steep learning curve, allowing non-professional developers to be able to make the business solutions they need without involving IT. Low-code platforms are not only much easier than traditional app development, but they’re also faster. Even IT professionals can benefit from low-code’s preconfigured, reusable modules and use them to put an app together in a fraction of the time it takes to code one from scratch.
Low-code is becoming increasingly popular for business application development. It’s been a buzzword since 2014. Businesses need more apps than ever before, and their IT department is already spending 60% of their time maintaining the tech that already exists. Though larger and more complex projects will require some IT assistance, naturally, it makes sense that it is better to bypass IT entirely for most app development in this case and opt for citizen developers to take over. It’s not hard to see why low-code app development in particular is more favorable for businesses compared to traditional app development – if citizen developers are the fuel to the digital transformation fire, low-code is the wood that hosts them both. Low-code and citizen developers come hand-in-hand, and it is arguably impossible to have a proper citizen developer revolution without low-code empowering them.
Democratize Your Development
The modern world has spoken, and companies are becoming more aware of the fact that they need to break away from their established technology and transform. Liberating app development from the confines of the IT department and democratizing development throughout the entire company fuels digital transformation, and low-code has proven to be the best way to do so. Armed with low-code technology, citizen developers can rise up to transform the businesses they work for by creating the solutions they need to automate their work. Integrating low-code technology into CRM and BPM strategies revolutionizes how companies create, compete, and change. If you want your business to be a part of this digital transformation revolution, overthrow your outdated technology, implement low-code, empower your citizen developers, democratize your development, and disrupt the app gap.
