How Citizen Developers Stop Development Lifecycle Traffic Jams

Discovering the benefits of a hybrid development model for efficient resource use and innovation.

When the airline Lufthansa undertook its digital transformation, it hit a speed bump that other companies on a similar journey know well: IT backlogs. Lufthansa’s IT teams, their time split between innovation and day-to-day operations, were buried under mountains of requests for workflow automation from employees in every department. From technical maintenance services to catering and flight operations, everyone was looking for ways to eliminate repetitive tasks.

Now, as every developer team knows, you can’t prioritize everything. Striking the right balance between deployment-critical tasks critical and, well, everything else — business operations, communications, network issues, you name it — can seem impossible. As a result of this sort of gridlock, companies lose valuable time and often find themselves at a disadvantage against quickly scaling competitors.

For Lufthansa, the solution was to implement a low-code application development strategy to empower employees, transforming them from business users to citizen developers. By inserting themselves into the software development lifecycle, these citizen developers were able to create and manage their own process automation.

Lufthansa is one example among many. As the tech landscape becomes increasingly complex and demand for IT professionals grows, companies can benefit from integrating citizen development practices into their development lifecycles. An empowered workforce, a more agile deployment cycle, and accelerated delivery are the potential benefits of citizen development — but to reach these highly desirable outcomes, a few things are needed with respect to employees, technology and leadership. 

Citizen Developers: The What and the How

Citizen developers are non-IT-trained employees — regular business users — who can create or modify business applications independently. They’re able to do this thanks to IT-sanctioned low-code or no-code platforms — about which we’ll have more to say very shortly.

The software development life cycle (also known as the SDLC) is the process of planning, designing, implementing, testing, deploying and maintaining a tech product. Irrespective of the development model a team follows — be it waterfall or agile, iterative or spiral — IT resources are often stretched thin and focused on specific product deliveries. Introducing citizen development into the SDLC means adding a parallel process without necessarily having to add more human resources. In other words, it opens another lane for traffic.

In such a hybrid development model, citizen developers are able to collaborate within a unified development experience, creating powerful applications with engaging user experiences that align more closely with business requirements. Innovation thrives on diversity, and the best ideas for the digitalization or streamlining of business processes often come from those with expertise in a specific business domain. In this way, relying on employees who may not have technical development expertise but do have specific business expertise can offer organizations a great advantage.

However, bottlenecks can still occur: if the tools used to empower employees have a steep learning curve or if citizen developers are allowed to operate unchecked, the strategy to improve efficiency and agility can backfire, creating technical debt and exposing a company to security, data privacy and compliance risks. So how can organizations make the most of a hybrid development model? It starts with the right tools.

How To Pick the Right Low-Code Platform

Low-code platforms are, as the name suggests, software and application development platforms that require little coding or IT expertise to leverage. They’re visual integrated development environments (IDEs) with built-in data connectors and/or APIs and code templates that require minimal “hand-coding.” Low-code platforms empower both IT professionals and citizen developers to deliver applications faster.

The right low-code platform offers multiple advantages at once:

• Collaboration between professional and citizen developers. A successful hybrid development model relies on a unified platform that both citizen and professional developers can use — breaking down silos between teams while supporting compliant, secure development practices.
• An intuitive building experience. An intuitive building experience is crucial to softening the learning curve for citizen developers — and it starts with a user-friendly interface. A visual integrated development environment is key to this experience, democratizing access to development capabilities and enabling rapid, agile deployment.
• Multiple development environments. A multi-experience platform contributes to streamlining development by accommodating any level of technical expertise. Professional developers enjoy an environment suited to their technical expertise, while citizen developers can operate in an environment that works with their skill sets to enable delivery of web, mobile, tablet, desktop, and even kiosk and wearable apps — often in a matter of weeks.
• IT governance. A primary hesitation in considering the hybrid development model is the challenge of governance: how can organizations ensure that their citizen developers are building within the necessary compliance standards? The right low-code platform must enable IT teams to establish guardrails, including access controls, data use guidelines and service, and integration permissions

Ultimately, the right platform should include features that simplify the development process: a well-designed, web-based interface (no downloads required); easy access to data, sources and services; straightforward workflows; and an intuitive product management interface.

Though easy-to-use once adopted, the low-code platform, along with the hybrid development model, require an implementation strategy — and, for reasons that will vary from one organization to another, that part isn’t always straightforward.

Adopting a Culture of Innovation Paves the Way Forward

If constant innovation is the king-maker of companies, then innovation as a practiced core value within organizations is indispensable.

That starts at the top. When sanctioned and encouraged by leadership, the citizen development culture is more likely to thrive — and a thriving citizen development culture delivers better outcomes for the entire organization. Diverse ideas lead to greater innovation, which in turn leads to better business outcomes.

For Lufthansa, adopting a citizen development culture ultimately meant creating more than 2,000 new software applications — some of them business-critical — up to 70% faster.

In an increasingly competitive and complex tech landscape that demands continuous improvement, IT backlogs can be detrimental to business success. By harnessing the resources available to organizations from outside their IT departments, companies are empowering themselves and their employees to problem-solve, create, innovate and claim ownership of their success.