As organisations increasingly leverage technology to gain a decisive competitive edge, the majority (62%) now believe citizen development programs will greatly accelerate their digital transformation journeys. This is according to the latest Citizen Development Trends report by Kissflow, which found that an impressive 86% of businesses now have active citizen development programs in place, with nearly half (45%) having operated these for over a year.
Citizen development is a new paradigm to application development in which non-IT employees are empowered to design, build, and deploy departmental applications, processes and tasks using low-code/no-code platforms. These “citizen developers” can create solutions tailored to their specific needs without relying on IT departments. Citizen development is a progressive step towards democratising technology use and integrating non-IT developers into the technology development process.
This approach to digital acceleration is especially relevant in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) where earlier Kissflow research showed that a whole third (33%) of organisations face resource constraints in custom app development, and the cost of outsourcing this function to skilled third-party developers can be prohibitively high. As a result, 80% of tech leaders in the region see a pressing need to refine the app development process for effective digital transformation.
“With an increasing engineering talent entering the workforce across industries, the culture of business teams building ever more complex apps is becoming common. Organisations that have been early adopters of this paradigm are seeing transformative results, across the enterprise. Our latest research shows that by empowering non-IT professionals to contribute to application development, businesses can innovate faster, reduce backlogs, and stay ahead in an increasingly competitive market,” said Suresh Sambandam, CEO of Kissflow.
Kissflow’s research shed light on the benefits that citizen development brings to organisations with the reduction in IT backlog, reduction in process completion time, and increase in the number of new solutions deployed merging as the top three. Through intuitive drag and drop interfaces, and large libraries of pre-made templates, low-code/no-code platforms enable business users in departments with high-degrees of specialised, labour-intensive, and repeatable processes to rapidly and effectively automate these workflows. It’s unsurprising therefore that the research found that Operations (30%), Human Resources (28%), Marketing (20%), and Finance (12%) departments are expected to lead the adoption of citizen development.
While the report highlights the immense potential of citizen development, it also identifies key challenges. Data security remains the top concern for 44% of CIOs, followed by the need for seamless integration with existing IT infrastructures. Governance and the lack of training for citizen developers are also noted as significant challenges that organisations must address to unlock the full potential of this paradigm.
“For the full potential of citizen development to be realised, organisations must ensure it is adopted within IT’s control. Governance is critical, but at the same time, this doesn’t have to be complicated and add more workload for IT teams,” said Sambandam. “A robust governance layer serves as a guardrail for safe app creation by citizen developers, reducing the burden on IT departments for approving every application created. It helps mitigate the risk of data leaks and compliance violations and paves the way for a truly empowered citizen development workforce.”
