Intro:  Citizen Development and why it matters

I’ve been working with Citizen Developers for almost 5 years, and I’m still amazed how the vast majority of people I talk to are unfamiliar with the term. So although I have read several introductory articles, the lack of awareness makes me feel there is space for one more.  So here’s my take on Citizen Development and why it’s important.

Citizen Development: Definition 

Lets begin with a commonly used definition from Gartner:  

“A citizen developer is an employee who creates application capabilities for consumption by themselves or others, using tools that are not actively forbidden by IT or business units. A citizen developer is a persona, not a title or targeted role. They report to a business unit or function other than IT.”

Gartner.com Definition of Citizen Development 

Or perhaps more simply put, Citizen Development is when your corporate citizens (your employees) are taught how to be developers.   

The Gartner definition is dense, so let me call out a few key points.   

First, this is “not actively forbidden by IT.”  Personally, I don’t think that goes far enough; Citizen Development works best with IT’s active support. IT provides the deep expertise that keeps our data and system safe. In other words, IT  provides protective guardrails. With Citizen Development that is critical for long term success and is not something the average citizen developer will easily acquire.   

The second critical part is that Citizen Developers do not report to IT. Citizen Developers are trained to use technology to solve your business problems, but they remain embedded in your operational business unit. They still report to the same manager and they still take direction on what tasks they should be working on by that manager. 

Why Citizen Development Matters

Most companies I have worked with struggle with two realities that combine to be a major problem.

First, technology has become so embedded into business processes, any business process changes require corresponding technology changes. 

Second, getting your needs prioritized by IT is often a challenge due to the high volume of requests IT receives. 

These two realities lead to gaps where technology no longer supports the business process resulting in a slew of inefficiencies and workarounds.

Citizen development is a way to break the ”submit to IT and wait” cycle.  When you help an employee become a citizen developer, they still report to you. If you need them to automate a process, you choose the task they should work upon. If you need a report built, you choose the task they work upon.  If you need an application built, you guessed it, you choose what tasks they work on.  

If your most impactful inefficiencies were fully in your control to fix, what else could you get done? That’s the power in this approach.  

Citizen Developers Support IT

I don’t want to sell citizen development as a silver bullet that solves all your problems. Instead, think of it is a way to split the overflowing bucket of IT requests between what is appropriate for your Citizen Developers and what is best left for IT specialists  

Early on, by splitting the bucket, Citizen Developers can best be focused on the smaller (death by a thousand cuts type) problems that create significant drag on an operational unit, but are never big enough to get IT’s attention. Later, with additional support in the form of training and mentorship, your Citizen Developers will be able to reclaim control over a significant portion of your requests. 

Problems with large scope, complexity, and/or risk are best left to the experts in IT. A few of these are: larger enterprise problems, working with sensitive data, or areas where regulatory compliance is critical. 

Knowing which problems fall into which bucket isn’t always clear. There are techniques and approaches that a company considering Citizen Development should take to ensure the most appropriate resources are being used efficiently. That will be the topic of a future article. 

One Size Does Not Fit All

To wrap up, citizen development allows an operational leader to have dedicated IT professionals embedded in their department. This effectively splits the IT request queue into two parts:  requests the business unit is free to solve themselves and requests that remain in the domain of IT.  

Please reach out to me if you’re interested in learning how Citizen Development can help you reclaim control over your process improvement changes.