All Hands on Tech

1Why Citizen Development Is Inevitable

This is an unprecedented time in the 70-year history of business information technology. Amateurs, or citizens, are riding a new digital horse, and enterprise IT organizations can no longer fully control the reins. The repercussions will be profound.

Throughout the history of modern enterprise, IT organizations, automation groups, analytics and data science functions, or other professionals have been the sole or primary developers of enterprise capabilities in data and technology. This has led to great frustration in organizations due to greater demand than supply because IT professionals couldn’t meet demand in a timely fashion. It has also led to frequent communication breakdowns between technical experts and business leaders and users.

Today, however, new technologies as well as more digitally oriented employees are making possible the development of technology solutions by amateurs outside of IT or other specialized groups—known as citizen developers, citizen data scientists, or citizen automators, depending upon what types of technology they are trying to create. Given the rapid developments in AI that cross these boundaries—generative AI systems can already create application programs, automation workflows, or data science analyses—the best future term might be technology-enabled citizens or something similar. These citizens no longer need professional intermediaries to obtain the information and digital capabilities required to ...