What is Citizen Development and Why It Matters?

The world of technology is evolving every single day. All the major businesses and industries are moving towards a sustainable online business model with the help of technological evolution. Technology has penetrated nearly every industry that we know of, which means that it is impossible to avoid upskilling and learning and still grow your career in today’s competitive job market.

Thankfully, you don’t have to get several years of education and training to become a professional or work as an IT employee. One of the most important by-products of technological evolution is called citizen development. In this article, we are going to talk about it and understand the basic concepts which make it an important aspect for every business and industry nowadays.

What is Citizen Development?

Citizen development refers to providing non-IT employees the tools and resources to understand the technology and use it to optimize their work, thus making it more efficient. The thing to remember is that in this term, ‘citizen’ refers to the end-user or worker. Citizen development is a wonderful strategy that facilitates employees and provides them with expertise to build applications with the use of low-code tools. 

Low-code tools are getting more popular with time. Their short learning curve and speedy service make them more appealing to non-skilled employees. A big plus point is that they secure your data and storage efficiently, and you don’t have to worry about data security. They are highly efficient and possess the ability to empower non-developers and make them ‘citizen developers’. This is one of the major perks of a low-code platform. 

Every industry and business through their online portals, websites, or applications are interacting with their customers and clients to increase their market growth and elevate their business performance. This is where citizen development comes into play. 

Citizen development doesn’t require a specialist that has intensive knowledge about IT-related operations to amend the interacting channels of any business such as a website or application. The main focus of the individuals responsible for citizen development is to come up with revolutionary and creative ideas for the application that can improve the quality and experience of the end-user.

Citizen development also provides solutions for the problems that an end-user might face when using or interacting with the business portal or application. For this, they don’t require coding or technical knowledge, as they just have to derive the solution for the problem, while the IT department takes care of the implementation of the solution.

So why is citizen development so popular nowadays and what makes it matter?

Why Does Citizen Development Matter?

The main reason why citizen development is important is that it provides the business with a competitive advantage of having a portal or application that is easy to understand for the end-user. The more the end-user, i.e. the client or customer is satisfied, the more it will benefit the organization with increased customer loyalty, attention, and increased revenue.

It Allows for Better Relationships with Customers

For every business, it is important that their customer relationship is exceptionally well structured and is executed with sheer precision to get the best possible results. With the technological evolution that has taken place in the past few decades, the need for citizen development has drastically increased, thus making it one of the most important factors for any industry or business.

Due to this the significance of Citizen Development can’t be neglected as it plays a vital role in structuring the online business model and customer relationship. The goal of citizen development is to analyze and evaluate the online operations of the organization and resolve the issues that may arise with concrete solutions.

It Enhances Quality Assurance

This functionality of citizen development also helps enhance quality assurance matters, but the main difference between them is that QA only focuses on the structure and errors that arise in the design. However, citizen development doesn’t need to have IT-related information for them to evaluate the design changes required or even to change the whole structure of the organization to come up with a better solution for resolving end-user problems.

All of these features of Citizen Development make it incredibly valuable and allow it to be one of the most significant factors for any industry or business in today’s world.

Why Citizen Development is Important in Today’s Era

There are tons of businesses that are interested in application development. Citizen Development can help them achieve their desired goals. To achieve their goals and fulfill their requirements, they don’t need to acquire as much knowledge but can carry on with application development with low-code tools. Platforms such as these provide a great piece of help and easily allow you to build applications. So this is one of the major advantages of citizen development. Low-code tools have made application building very simple for citizen developers.

This concludes our guide on citizen development. In a nutshell, citizen development has become much more significant during the last decade, thanks to technological advancement taking over major industries and businesses. The main functionality of citizen development is to come up with concrete solutions for the problems that end-users face during their experience with the online portal or application of the organization. 

The value that citizen development provides is not just restricted to the end-user i.e. customer or client but also the organization itself as it allows any business to gain a competitive advantage of being the best platform for any sort of industry and increasing the revenue of the organization by building customer loyalty and attention by providing with an exceptional user experience.