Summarizing Key Points on Citizen Development

Organizations today are facing critical digitalization challenges and they struggle to innovate at the speed the business demands.

Rapidly evolving customer requirements are accelerating the demand for cloud solutions.

Limited development resources are inhibiting digitalization.

Complex IT landscapes with a growing number of applications are maintained by companies.

How can companies solve the business and IT challenges while meeting the growing need and scale development? By embracing new approaches like low-code / no-code and hyperautomation, and empowering more employees to build software.

Citizen development is a disruptive solution to address the gap in technical expertise, especially that of professional developers, that exists in the world today, and it offers a great way to foster a culture of innovation. Combined with new low-code / no-code enterprise technology, it gives power to those who don’t write code, but who have a good understanding of business needs and challenges.

It is these nontechnical people who can now build automations and applications that help address the requirements of their everyday work, while, at the same time, reducing the risks of human errors, and offering better customer experiences.

What can companies do to respond to market challenges, build resilience and agility into their organizations, and get more value out of their data? Low-code / no-code and hyperautomation are the solutions that business builders can use to digitalize the time-consuming processes that they currently perform manually, such as requesting parental-leave time off from work.

SAP Build is for business users and developers – here’s a quick snapshot of each user persona:

Professional developers

Code-first programmers with skills in various coding languages and technologies who designs, develops, tests and deploys cloud native apps and reusable services following a development lifecycle with testing and versioning.

Citizen developers (a.k.a. business builders)

No coding skills, but deep business expertise and technical acumen (not necessarily IT-skills). Builds and publishes LCNC apps and customizations. Uses IT-sanctioned tools and platform-supported processes. Is unaware of DevOps aspects but learns through citizen developer education.

IT administrators

The DevOps team has the IT skills to build, run, manage, and maintain the software systems, security and governance.

Governance is a decision-making process that ensures technical activities and applications add value, meaning they contribute (and don’t detract) from company success.

An IT Center of Excellence for low-code / no-code is usually established and run by your IT department to provide guardrails for the rollout of citizen development to business users in an organization.

Governance programs include more technical things like ensuring compatibility of tools and systems, meeting data security standards, identity and authorization management, monitoring and failure management, and other aspects of application lifecycle management.

Governance also includes activities like skills requirements setting, benchmarking and provision of training and education opportunities for business users, citizen developers and professional developers.

As part of the governance program, the introduction of low-code / no-code to your organization should be managed by a Center of Excellence (CoE) that is established and managed by your IT department. The CoE can begin with a pilot to gain some practical insight and then the strategy can be set and the rollout executied.

It is advisable to start small when working with business users who want to become citizen developers, a few dozen or so who are avid technology enthusiasts and business process experts. These can be your alpha users, collaborating with the IT department to test rollout plans and processes before expanding access to a large population of users in your company.