Alexandra Levits Water Cooler Wisdom Do You Encourage Citizen Development

Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom Do You Encourage Citizen Development Many leaders today are missing an opportunity. Their teams spend all day catering to business needs when in fact the business managers can and should be empowered to solve problems themselves. There is an old saying that goes: “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, but teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.” IT leaders who facilitatelow code rapid application developmentknowledge in employees outside IT greatly improve IT’s efficiency and productivity. Unfortunately, they don’t do it nearly enough and spend a great deal of their time rushing around putting out fires with the few resources they have leaving little time for more strategic initiatives. According toGartner’s IT Glossary,acitizen developeris a user who creates new business applications using development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT. Citizen developmentis possible because end users now have the ability to build a variety of enterprise applications through model-driven platforms and cloud computing services. As long as users understand the principles behind application design and development, they do not have to learn the programming languages that were necessary in the past. Here are five reasons IT leaders may want to re-consider sanctioning and evenencouraging citizen development. IT Demands Have Gotten Out of Hand Most enterprise IT departments do not have enough resources to handle every request that comes in and must therefore prioritize by value to the overall business. This means that often, individual groups like accounting and marketing will have important requests put on the back burner while a short-staffed andoverwhelmed IT groupstruggles to keep up. In fact, though, IT might not even be essential in developing solutions for these requests and is simply acting as a bottleneck. IT Might Not “Get It” Anyway Even if IT was to take on the request, who’s to say that the IT professional who accepts the project fully understands the requirements necessary to develop the most appropriate technology solution? A citizen developer who has deep subject matter expertise could use alow code platformfor rapid application developmentto more quickly arrive at a solution that meets the department’s needs. For more where this came from, check out Intuits Fast Track blog.