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.

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