Citizen Development Insights

Citizen development is a life skill and mindset. It means a cultural change to embrace technology as an extension of human capabilities. Unfortunately, there is resistance and fear because people see citizen development through the lens of scarcity.

Instead of asking, "how can I leverage citizen development to create even more personal and organizational competitive advantage?" people think, "what will I do when my job disappears?".

The Digital Transformation Fallacy

Digital transformation is a buzzword since the 2010s. Around 2008, the "cloud" became popular, although, in 2020, most organizations and people still do not use the full potential of cloud-native applications. Why?

The Technology Fallacy book, published in 2020, is based on insights from a multi-year collaborative study between MIT Sloan Management Review and Delloite. The research says that digital maturity is about people and organizational change.

Technology is here for a while: machine learning, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, and more. It is not used on a large scale because the majority of people do not understand it. The agile and digital-savvy mindset needed to allow organizations to embrace technology and pivot as required is scarce.

Organizational transformation enables the organization to become more customer-centric, data-driven, and adaptable.

Citizen Development is More than Low-Code

Citizen development maturity is your company's process of learning how to respond appropriately to the emerging competitive environment from a broader perspective that includes technology, but it is not limited to that.

Every professional must develop a working knowledge of digital and technology trends to lead their organizations to adapt in the right ways. In other words, citizen development becomes a life skill required at every level.

You don't have to learn how to code and build applications. You have to understand how new technologies make it possible to create different organizational structures, disruptive business models, and innovative work methods and processes.

What's Next

To conclude this article, I wanted to emphasize that technology is already available. You are connected to digital assistants on your mobile phone; artificial intelligence helps me write this article with Word Online, and there is much more. These and other technologies won't replace you. But they will make your current job obsolete. To stay relevant, you have to understand the new game of citizen development.

Join the conversation about Citizen Development! Please leave your comments below.

Administrations

Citizen development is an emerging trend that enables every person to create applications by using low-code / no code platforms. This new capability will change the way organisations and individuals work- for the better. Citizen development has the ability to reduce costs, increase productivity levels and reduce time to market.

There is a huge opportunity for Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and Public Administrators to leverage Citizen Development.

The Nature of NGOs

NGOs operate under tight budgets. Generally speaking, they are dependent on donations to achieve their desired objectives.

Another characteristic of NGOs is their need to adapt and be flexible in critical situations such as social emergencies or even pandemics.

Opportunities to Leverage Citizen Development

There are many ways in which citizen development can be leveraged in order to improve NGO’s organizational landscape:

1.       Using citizen development, NGOs can support new organizational processes or substitute existing systems without spending a fortune.  

2.       It can enable NGOs to react to market dynamics in an agile manner by creating ad-hoc solutions which are grounded in citizen development apps.

3.       Citizen development can enable NGO’s to innovate in the way they reach to people in need much faster and at a fraction of the cost.

How Citizen Developers Can Help NGOs

There are a lot of ways in which citizen developers can help NGOs. Why not donate low code/no code applications to NGOs? Why not use your citizen developer skillset and donate your time to create solutions for these organisations?

The increase in use of citizen development opens up a new way of carrying out pro-bono projects for software developers. They can use their knowledge and skills to help NGOs. This it can be done at any level: local, regional or global.

If citizen development is used to leverage the social media reach of NGOs, it has the potential to become a greater enabler for impact. NGOs will then be able to adjust, iterate, learn and improve their in-house applications. 

Government

Having read about how citizen development can help NGOs, imagine how it could transform public administrations and governments. The typical political lifecycle lasts 4 years. The first year of every government is spent on getting to know the administration’s landscape. The next 2 years are spent implementing policy and executing projects and the last year is reserved to prepare for the re-election.

Citizen Development Opportunities for Government

In an environment where IT systems are frequently obsolete and development cycles usually last longer than the two year term politicians have to implement and execute, citizen development is a great opportunity.

If public administrators adopt citizen development, policy implementation and project execution can be carried out on time and within budget. Citizen development can also facilitate the maintenance of systems upgrades when funding is difficult to find or the capabilities are not in house and cannot be outsourced.

Citizen development also presents an opportunity for politicians to strengthen their engagement with local communities. Utilising much shorter development cycles, well within their political terms, it allows them to connect with citizens and consult, gather feedback and ultimately make an improved impact during their term.

Particularly at a local level. Imagine citizens of local communities getting involved in the development of new policies and how those come to life in the form of applications. Citizen development indeed!

Use Cases

There are plenty of examples where citizen development has been leveraged by governmental bodies during the Covid-19 pandemic.

One good example is the book-your-spot in the beach app which was deployed in Spain. Another example is the Covid tracing solution in Ireland. Both applications were created during the summer of 2020. The former is a basic booking management system while the latter is a database with personal information (replacing spreadsheets, word documents and even paper).

These are not complex systems. However, they have had a significant impact on the control and evolution of the pandemic. If this doesn’t show how citizen development can be used by governmental bodies for the greater good of all citizens, what does?

Replicability

Governmental bodies in Spain and Ireland have leveraged citizen development in order to satisfy the needs of their people. Both use cases are shareable among local, regional or national administrations.

They could even be made as an open source and replicated in the antipodes days, weeks or months later if the need arose. The good news is, such apps and solutions are already developed and available!

I expect that some countries will adopt several low code/no code platforms and use them to quickly develop niche solutions that might be scaled, changeable or re-used. These platforms can be used as a building block for more complex solutions.

Conclusion

It is evident that citizen development can be used to improve how organisations operate and react. A lot of articles have been created around the benefits that citizen development can bring to the business world in general.

This article sheds some insight into how citizen development can be used to increase the operational effectiveness of NGOs and public administrations. It shows how citizen development can leveraged to make a difference. There is a huge opportunity for NGOs and governmental bodies to adopt, innovate and scale citizen development in order to improve the wellbeing of many people and communities.

The Agile Manifesto has been around since 2001 and has benefitted millions of multi-disciplinary professionals across the globe. We believe a Manifesto would be of great use for the Citizen Developer community!

Background

The Agile Manifesto was published in 2001 with the objective to provide an alternative to existing software development processes. It identifies 4 values and 12 principles. Ever since its publication, Agile has expanded to become more of a mind-set that now applies across a broad range of activities and work methods. Over the coming weeks we will release a series of articles, discussions and community polls with the intention to explore benefits with having a Manifesto (and associated principles, values and beliefs) for Citizen Developer.

The original 12 Principles of the Agile Manifesto reads:

1.       Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

2.       Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.

3.       Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

4.       Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

5.       Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

6.       The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

7.       Working software is the primary measure of progress.

8.       Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

9.       Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.

10.   Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.

11.   The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

12.   At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

How to get involved:

We would love to get your views and hear from you as we go through the process. To get you started we have published a poll and a discussion thread.

 Poll: Are the principles in the 2001 Agile Manifesto still relevant in 2020? 

Discussion: How can the Citizen Developer movement benefit from a Manifesto similar to the 2001 Agile Manifesto? 

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Martin Kalliomaki

A citizen developer is someone who can build applications without coding knowledge, but usually with the support of IT. They tend to be domain experts who have a deep understanding of a business process or a series of tasks performed in the organization. They are therefore very well placed to identify new opportunities that improve operational efficiency or allow the business to better serve its customers.

As PMI embarks on an exciting new journey to help you harness the power of citizen development, we here at ProjectManagement.com are launching new content on our Citizen Developer topic page and through this brand new blog!

I wanted to share the following information from the the PMI Citizen Development Body of Knowledge (CDBOK™) to help introduce you to this exciting new revolution

Who Can Be a Citizen Developer?
Citizen developers come from all walks of life. They could be sales executives who feel they can spend much more time with their customers if the administrative tools were easier to use. Or they could be payroll administrators who want to reduce the number of manual steps and interactions with the employees when approving expenses.

They could also be externally hired consultants who have been brought in to support the organization in its digital transformation. A key common aspect is that citizen developers are people who are willing to make the change, to create the solutions that they, their team, their department or their customers need.

The Emergence of Shadow IT
Citizen developers have been around for some time. In the past, they were the people who made a difference by building macros in spreadsheets using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) or who identified ways to improve their work and the work of others. Arguably, from an IT perspective, these people caused all sorts of problems. They introduced risky, unsupported, and often poorly designed applications that lacked any standard or control.

In doing so, they created operational risk, key-person dependency, and fueled the creation of what has come to be known as “shadow IT” (an unsupported and unsanctioned IT).

In our rapidly changing business and technology landscape, organizations must constantly evolve to maintain relevance. IT departments are tasked with the responsibility of delivering business change; however, with the increasing demand for software and training, IT departments have limited ability to cope with this ever-expanding backlog of wants and needs.

Approximately 79% of IT leaders and decision makers agree that they are under a constant source of pressure to manage this (Project Management Institute, 2020), while being able to “keep the lights on” and ensure the existing IT estate continues to function alongside the higher demand.

IT also has to deal with limited budgets in addition to increasingly scarce and in-demand skilled technical specialists. One consequence of this inability to deliver is the emergence and growing reliance of shadow IT, which is the result of business owners and stakeholders reaching for other options to address their challenges rather than waiting for IT to address them.

Many see shadow IT as a threat (95% of IT decision makers recognize the risks associated with shadow IT, 43% worry about the lack of data governance, and 37% agree that a major source of risk is the inherent lack of ownership and change control). Despite the risk, shadow IT does bring value to the organization. First and foremost, shadow IT is a solution for an unaddressed need. This need could be a more efficient way of working with technology, a better employee or customer experience, or even a new customer offering.

The New Breed of Citizen Development Platforms
Until recently, employees didn’t have the tools or the capacity, and IT may not have had the capacity to support or address their needs in a significant way. Today, that situation has changed. Citizen development platforms have matured to the point that they minimize the need for manual coding when building serious, enterprise-grade applications. They are much more accessible to those without formal or lifelong technical learning and training. As a result, their usage (both IT sanctioned and unsanctioned) is exploding.

According to Gartner, “By 2024 at least 65% of all new business applications will be created with high-productivity toolsets, such as low-code and no-code application development platforms.” (Vincent, Natis, Iijima, Wong, Ray, Jain, & Leow, 2020).

By 2023, the number of active citizen developers at large enterprises will be at least 4 times the number of professional developers (Wong, Driver, & Ray, 2019).

Enabling Digital Transformation
Organizations are beginning to see the citizen developer as a key enabler of digital transformations. Inside organizations, citizen developers can use these new platforms to solve problems they repeatedly run into. They are no longer limited by the lack of coding capability and no longer have to wait for IT to provide resources.

Many business problems can now be quickly ideated into solutions and put through a development process to create applications that bring immense value to organizations. Other problems that may require IT support for extensive changes, such as complex integrations, can still be rapidly built by the citizen developer into a minimum viable product (MVP) that can then be handed over to the technical team to be completed. Citizen developers can unleash innovation and productivity gains unlike any recent developments in application development.

In order to experience these productivity gains, however, citizen developers need to be given the authority and freedom to act. This requires new ways of working and new ways of thinking at an organizational level. IT departments are guardians of the organization and provide a vital service that protects the organization from harmful events, such as external hacking or service availability.

IT departments also have another important role to play in support of citizen development: They can guide and help citizen developers to design applications by giving guidance on technical requirements and supporting publish-worthy applications. This is a particularly important part of unleashing the value of citizen development applications as their usage scales in the organization.

In summary, IT departments will need to become accustomed to working with the business instead of for the business, becoming a key partner to the business on its citizen development journey. When working with IT as a partner, citizen developers can help reduce the technology backlog while executing digital transformations at speed.

To learn more about how to join the Citizen Revolution, read how PMI can help you!