All Hands on Tech

10Benefits of Citizen Development

For many organizations, the development of technology by citizens is of tactical benefit. It allows applications, automations, models, web pages, and the like to be developed faster and with a better fit to the business need. When citizens focus on these smaller technology outputs, IT professionals can reshape the company—at least ideally.

Citizen-developed technologies may also involve less expense or more value for money, although most organizations don’t measure the time and cost that citizens take in developing technologies or the value that they achieve. On the cost side of the equation, it may be that costs are simply being shifted from the IT organization—where they are somewhat more measurable—to other people in the company (note that this would not be unique; we’ve already shifted costs from the travel department and the secretarial pool to other employees). However, development with low-code/no-code tools tends to be relatively efficient, so the cost may be lower than with full-code solutions by professional developers.

On the value side, companies don’t measure the right things from citizen development, in part because it is difficult and invasive to do so. In citizen automation initiatives, for example, some companies aggregate the number of minutes or hours saved by automations across the company, but it’s quite rare to measure or account for what the employees do with all that saved time. Maybe they’re selling more or innovating ...