OGV Energy interview Steve Higgon, CEO and Founder of TAAP.

Do you have a strategy to on-board Citizen developers?

Gartner predict in 2023 that there will be 4x the number of Citizen Developers as Professional Developers.

What is a Citizen Developer?

A 2020 Gartner survey shows that 41% of employees outside of an IT role fit a description called business technologists — those who customize or build applications, automations and technology solutions for work. Citizen development is the practice of enabling a community of like-minded business technologists using shared No Code and Low Code tools to create automations and apps in a safe and scalable way.

Historically if you required applications or software built you needed to rely upon Professional Developers. This is all changing as modern software platforms permit Citizen Developers to build advanced software systems and applications without the reliance on Professional Developers. These new software platforms are delivering a 10x improvement over the traditional software development approach.

Citizen Development is a Key Enabler of Digital Transformation

Business units increasingly control their own application development efforts, of which Citizen Developers are playing a crucial role. Application and software engineering leaders must help define and guide citizen development to maximize mutual benefits for business and IT.

The Citizen Developer is often a domain expert and understands the data they want to capture, process, transform and report against. By allowing Citizen Developers to create the apps they need with advanced software platforms, it dramatically reduces the cost and timescales required to have Professional Developers support these end users, creating the applications that they need.

Professional Developers normally work within a team of people that exist to create the apps that are required for the end users to utilise. There is usually some formal specification created that requires a detailed description of the process required, cross training the Professional Developer, helping them to understand the needs of the end user, the domain expert. This is often where projects fail, the clarity around the requirements, the miscommunication between the end user, the Project Manager, Business Analysts, Database Designers, BI Analysts, Front End and Back End developers, the testers and the DevOps teams standing up the final application prior to production.

Traditional software development using Professional Developers has a significant cost and time impact compared to the latest Superapps and No Code Low Code Platforms.

This however isn’t the end of the Professional Developer. Citizen Developers are able to be self-sufficient whilst supported by Professional Developers and IT teams.

Professional Developers can focus on the more complex challenges and processes, further enabling the Citizen Developers to be able to do more faster, and together providing a better overall service to the business operations of the organisation.

TAAP provides a No Code Platform to help Professional and Citizen Developers to work together more effectively, working as Fusion Teams. These are small targeted focused and efficient groups of individuals with complementary skills that together are helping organisations of every size become agile enterprises.

Citizen Developers are a new resource you need to plan to embrace into your organisation for 2023.

If you don’t have a digital transformation platform then you don’t have a digital transformation strategy. Contact TAAP to bring to life your next digital transformation project.

Learn more at www.ontaap.com

Read the latest issue of the OGV Energy magazine HERE