The benefits of the citizen development approach are driving its growth in popularity with a global study by Gartner discovering that citizen development is already a reality in many enterprises. Half of the respondents were aware of an active citizen development initiative at their organisation and for the group that did not have active initiatives, 13% are evaluating the idea with 4% of those planning to initiate citizen development within the next 12 months.
Further growth in the popularity of enterprise low-code software development will be driven by the ease with which no-technical citizen developers can learn to create mobile and web applications using drag-and-drop components without writing code in an environment and infrastructure supported by professional developers.
Low-code citizen development has become popular in organisations looking to take a more inclusive approach to building new functionalities that can reduce costs and drive efficiency improvements by bringing the business side into the development to create solutions that are precisely relevant to the unique business needs.
The integration of new processes using the traditional in-house, code-based approach requires a longer development time and new programmers to write code, who may typically have little in-depth knowledge of the industry or business needs.
Low-code software development presents an opportunity for businesses who have been searching for a middle ground – a software solution that can deliver better results faster. Low-code is a software platform that is faster and less expensive to customise than in-house development and doesn’t require rooms full of programmers.
Empowering citizen developers, leveraging no-code software and working collaboratively with IT resources can allow businesses to put the power in the hands of people that can make the difference and deliver enhanced, results-focused capabilities and a rapid return on investment.
Encouraging low-code citizen development initiatives can help reduce pressure on IT resources to create new web and mobile apps whole delivering a modernised technology infrastructure across the business that can democratise app development at scale and velocity.