Meet Ray. He’s the director of loan operations at a bank — and he’s running out of patience. It takes ages to process customer requests, find customer info, and decide on loans. His team is doing the best it can but is demoralized by poor customer reviews and lost deals. After asking central IT for help, Ray was horrified to hear that his request was at the bottom of the year-long backlog. What should Ray do?

  1. Wait for central IT.
  2. Fill automation gaps with ad hoc solutions.
  3. Invest in a low-code development platform to empower business people to automate processes themselves.

We’ve heard Ray’s story many times. Organizations too often find themselves somewhere between options A — waiting — and B — half-automating processes. There’s a better way: option C.

The Rays of the world — underserved by central IT and desperate for automation to win, serve, and retain customers — are driving big growth in low-code. The citizen developer movement has arrived.

Here’s why you need to care:

  • Manual operations derail customer journeys, and IT doesn’t have time for you. Organizational processes are bogged down with hundreds — even thousands — of manual touchpoints. These small app gaps — the long tail of apps — are the glue that hold together important business processes, and they have a ripple effect throughout your organization.
  • Businesspeople can fill the operations-automation gap without going rogue. Businesspeople know their processes intimately and are motivated to fix them. But without the right governance and support, a businessperson building software is dangerous. This type of rogue IT results in half-baked software that can hinder long-term progress. Low-code development platforms provide guardrails to help rogue IT go legit and turn it into established citizen developers.

Citizen Development Combines Business Knowledge And Software Delivery

A spectrum of citizen developer roles is emerging. These new roles could never replace traditional software developers, but they can enhance your software delivery strategy by giving your businesspeople the tools they need to innovate on their own.

If your situation sounds a lot like Ray’s, you need to think about low-code development platforms for business developers. Check out this report to learn more about which platform is right for you. Your businesspeople, and their bottom line, will thank you.

We are eager to hear your citizen developer stories and learn more about this growing community. Please share your experiences below.

 

(Allison Vizgaitis contributed to this blog post.)