Make Everyone a Developer

Harness the power of citizen development by enabling business users to solve their own challenges with no-code development. Learn to accelerate your application development by creating powerful apps without writing a single line of code.

Thanks to no-code platforms, citizen developers are now an integral part of the modern workplace ecosystem.

In 2021, Gartner estimated that, in two years, citizen developers were expected to outnumber professional developers 4 to 1. More recently, Gartner predicts that, by 2025, organizations will use low-code or no-code technologies to develop 70% of new applications, up from less than 25% in 2020.

The reason? Low-code and no-code app development can save critical time, maximize business resources and unleash the creative potential of just about any workforce.

No-code development is easy to implement, cost-effective and definitely here to stay. Rewind to a few years ago: Gartner began using the term “citizen developer” in 2009 to describe business users who build software applications to automate processes for themselves and their teams. Since then, the citizen developer movement has seen exponential growth across industries and borders.

Pursuing the goal of 100% employee buy-in is a forward-looking strategy that strengthens your organization’s commitment to digital transformation and leverages the value of your true human resources to the fullest. Prioritizing the citizen developer workforce helps you keep pace with app development and maintain a competitive edge.

Why are citizen developers essential to business?

With customers and employees eager for new applications, features and digital interactions across multiple touchpoints, IT departments simply cannot keep up with the demand. As a result, operations and administrative departments increasingly rely on citizen developers from their teams to build web and mobile apps that perform essential workplace tasks, such as customer quote calculators, gated offers, approval tracking and other workflow optimizations.

Citizen developers are empowered to create solutions that improve workflow and productivity as well as helping to gain actionable business insights, all without any specialized training. Passing off the creation of simple apps to citizen developers can free up your application engineers and data scientists to deal with higher-level challenges and tasks. It can also eliminate the need to hire additional experts.

Along with these improvements, there is great value in the quality work citizen developers can produce via a rapid app development platform like HCL Domino Leap.

As talented as IT employees might be, they will never be able to bring the same industry expertise or nuanced understanding of the subject matter as those who work in that specific department every day.

What’s more, if IT departments are reluctant to embrace citizen developers, then business owners will inevitably procure apps outside the purview of IT to get this necessary work accomplished. While these applications help support essential business activities and are readily available through the cloud, these so-called “shadow IT” apps bypass established governance processes and can significantly increase an organization’s security risks.

HCL Domino Leap, on the other hand, empowers your business users to bring their own creative spark and front-line knowledge to the fore, building apps that gain valuable insights from stored data and help businesses respond directly to challenges and opportunities as they arise.

Enabling business users to harness the power of analytics also has an extremely beneficial effect on the work environment, facilitating interdepartmental collaboration in an atmosphere of cooperation. Employees can work across departments, generating workflow-related and customer-facing apps that lead to real solutions.

Last but not least, with HCL Domino Leap, your organization can eliminate shadow IT. The Leap platform provides IT administrative controls, meaning your IT team can establish “guardrails” to manage and control citizen developers’ capabilities and adherence to security protocols.

How to develop your own citizen developers

Building apps through a platform like HCL Domino Leap doesn’t require a background in data analytics or engineering. Still, to reach the goal of making everyone a developer, companies must take deliberate steps to ensure success.

For instance, there must be a clear demarcation of responsibilities between professionals and citizen developer teams. Training in security measures, compliance procedures and workflow processes is also essential.

HCL Domino Leap is a trusted and secure rapid application development platform designed to let businesses leverage the power of their citizen developer initiatives, specifically in the creation of workflow-based apps. Thanks to no-code tools, businesses can streamline operations, increase development resources, save time and improve compliance, among other key advantages.

How to encourage innovation

The ability to create market-ready apps, sometimes in just minutes, is a true game-changer. Instead of inefficient paper-based processes and time-consuming email chains that squander valuable hours, your workforce has the freedom to dream up the kind of innovative user-facing apps your business needs.

HCL Domino Leap’s simple, intuitive no-code platform features a new visual designer equipped with drop-and-drag capabilities. Starting with a blank canvas or spreadsheet, employees can quickly test iterations, optimize as necessary and create finished, market-ready apps in a shortened time frame with minimal training.

HCL Domino Leap enables easy app creation that allows any industry to meet its own specific challenges, whether it’s in healthcare, finance, manufacturing or retail. It empowers business employees to create the apps they want, without the need to wait for an IT department to create them.

The platform’s no-code capabilities aren’t its only selling points—it also features rock-solid security and easy integrations. Take HCL Domino Leap out for a free spin!

Making everyone a citizen developer is a nimble approach to solving business challenges. Smaller-scale initiatives generated by this constituency can be tested quickly, receive rapid feedback and be put into place. This means that your business can innovate by prioritizing numerous risk-free smaller successes instead of wasting resources on potentially risky and costly large-scale projects.

Learn more about HCL Domino Leap and discover the benefits it can bring to your organization.