Nurturing Governance and Collaboration in Citizen Development

In the ever-evolving landscape of enterprise innovation, a paradigm shift is underway. Companies are increasingly leveraging the potential of their everyday business users, turning them into "citizen developers” through the use of low-code/no-code application development tool slow-code/no-code application development tools. This shift presents a multitude of opportunities for organizations to quickly respond to customer needs, adapt to changing business landscapes and drive cost efficiencies.

However, this transformative also presents challenges that require careful attention to governance, collaboration, and organizational culture. In a recent webinar with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, we dive into concerns about security, IT governance and shadow IT – and how it can deter IT teams from implementing the necessary tools. Here are the key takeaways.

Governance in the Citizen Development Landscape

Governance is crucial citizen development, ensuring that applications meet necessary standards of security, compliance, and scalability. Citizen development can be divided into two zones:

1. Self-service zone: Users create apps autonomously without IT involvement or friction.
2. Assisted zone: Citizen developers collaborate with professional developers.

In the self-service zone, it’s essential for IT to configure the platform effectively, ensuring it’s scalable, secure and available. Meanwhile, citizen developers need to own their apps. They must be accountable for the security settings of their apps and avoid creating apps that could cause performance issues (e.g. apps processing millions of records).

To achieve this, IT must track deployed apps, including their owners, support contacts, type, expected life, usage levels and data volume. App owners need to provide this information as well as comply with IT’s acceptable use policies for the platform. A periodic check-in process should be established for IT to engage with app owners, ideally a couple of weeks after deployment to avoid friction and low adoption. If the app is no longer needed or the owner is unresponsive, IT should remove the app from deployment.

This governance process helps prevent the sprawl of unwanted apps and ensures compliance.

In the assisted zone, IT handles security, compliance, scalability and maintainability, allowing citizen developers to focus on the business aspects of the app. IT’s expertise in these areas ensures robust and efficient application development.

“Citizen developers may not understand the concept of data models, the need to maintain data definitions so data can be easily accessed and reused, or how to properly structure data stores to minimize cost and maximize performance. One solution is to build frameworks and let citizen developers operate in that safe environment.”
— Alex Clemente, HBR-AS

Collaboration: The Heartbeat of Citizen Development

Synergy between IT and business users is vital for innovation and success in citizen development. Enterprises are increasingly adopting unified development platforms that facilitate this collaboration.

These platforms allow citizen developers to create apps that can be extended and enhanced by professional developers. This synergy ensures that apps can be scaled up or integrated into larger IT-led projects without needing to be rewritten, saving a wealth of time and effort.

By addressing governance challenges and fostering collaboration, enterprises can fully unlock the potential of citizen development.