All Hands on Tech

17The Future of Citizen Development

We’ve already seen a dramatic degree of change over the past decade or so in how information technologies are created in organizations, and this is likely to continue and even accelerate. One thing that will not change is the need for digital capabilities within organizations, and you would be hard-pressed to find a futurist who would say that the future of business will be less digital. If we care about digital skills and understanding across organizations, citizen development is the best way to go about it.

Many companies have already developed digital and data literacy programs. These are great, but they don’t match actually developing and implementing IT applications. The best learning is always hands-on. In addition, of course, you can’t compare the amount of IT and digital capability that will be developed by any IT organization to the volume and variety of applications that thousands of citizens (within a large organization) can create.

And those citizen-developed systems will have some highly desirable traits. They will fit the business need closely because citizens understand what those needs are. They will be innovative, because citizens will try to meet their IT and data needs in ways that IT veterans would never have thought of. As we’ve mentioned, citizen development will be a laboratory for innovations in processes, strategies, and business models that are supported by various forms of information technology.

In other words, ...