Content uploaded by Noel Carroll
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Noel Carroll on Aug 27, 2021
Content may be subject to copyright.
Get The Cutter Edge free www.cutter.com Vol. 34, No. 3 CUTTER BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY JOURNAL 5
Digital transformation has become a core priority
for CEOs in recent years. But just as the pandemic
accelerated the need for change though digital trans-
formation, it laid bare the massive global shortage of
skilled software developers needed to deliver and
operationalize this transformation.
Against this backdrop, we are witnessing a new method
of delivering low-code development to accelerate and
expand digital transformation called “citizen develop-
ment” (CD). This method hides the sophistication and
complexity of coding but empowers subject maer
experts to design, develop, and deploy applications
into production as though they were full-on, exper-
ienced coders.
Also known as low-code/no-code (LC/NC), this
approach leverages recent advances in technologies
such as articial intelligence and machine learning to
hide code complexity while delivering on code func-
tionality. It empowers individuals within organizations
to create and deliver on opportunities for change and
eliminate inecient processes. This article presents
key recommendations for organizations on ways to
take action to educate their sta to become citizen
developers.
Digital Transformation Challenges
Digital transformation research and practice eorts
have received signicant aention in recent years.
Unfortunately, the process of digital transformation
is not necessarily well understood even by those in
charge. With such a void, it may not be surprising that
approximately 70% of digital transformation initiatives
do not reach their goals, with billions of dollars going
to waste.1 Of the digital transformations deemed
successful, it’s estimated there is a 45% chance of
delivering less prot than expected.2
The demand for talented software developers has
outpaced supply, as organizations across the industry
have focused their eorts on digitally transforming
their businesses. IT departments are commonly
understaed, are dealing with growing demands and
expectations, and have insucient access to resources
(e.g., human, revenue, and infrastructure) to meet the
workload demand.
Nevertheless, organizations continuously demand
innovative digital solutions to reach customers, reduce
costs, transform operations, and remove process
ineciencies. To date, software development and the
creation and delivery of software-enabled solutions are
considered exclusively an IT remit. The net result is that
IT is always in reactive mode, working to address its
backlog rather becoming a valued partner capable of
solving problems and delivering innovative solutions.
At the same time, the organization is going to consid-
erable eorts to translate business innovation into IT
requirements, often over a long period of time and
typically using various Agile methods.
With growing demand for shorter development cycles,
increased demand for software development, and IT
worker shortages, this approach is no longer sustain-
able. The widening gap between IT skill supply and
applications to help sustain digital transformation
means application development outside IT’s control
will become more commonplace.
Software initiatives outside IT organizations are often
called “shadow IT.” More precisely, shadow IT refers
to the use and management of any IT technologies,
solutions, services, and infrastructure without formal
approval and support of internal IT departments.
The Importance of Citizen Development
for Digital Transformation
A NEW PATH FORWARD
by Noel Carroll, Liam Ó Móráin, Dave Garrett, and Arjun Jamnadass
The demand for talented software developers
has outpaced supply, as organizations across
the industry have focused their efforts on
digitally transforming their businesses.
6 ©2021 Cutter Consortium CUTTER BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY JOURNAL
Company executives’ (not just IT’s) concerns about
shadow IT include security, safety, scalability, leakage,
and things “going rogue.”
Organizations are creating new operating models
that enable non-IT developers to create applications
in response to business opportunities and issues
without dependency on core IT developers. In turn,
these models are creating a more dynamic, results-
oriented relationship between IT departments and
business functions.
Citizen Developers
Citizen developers are now core to large technology
companies such as Microsoft through its Power
Platform. This group of workers can be characterized
as empowered problem-solvers that engage in rapid
application development using innovative and intuitive
software to create applications that are accessible
though LC/NC platforms.
Rapid design, development, and deployment of
applications in a hyper-agile manner is to an overall
organization the equivalent of agility for project man-
agement. Hyper-agility across organizations will be
inevitable as technology easily abstracts functional
complexity from systems, and change can be delivered
faster by nontechnical people.3
Vendors like Microsoft, Salesforce, Google, Appian,
OutSystems, Bey Blocks, Retool, and Unqork are
driving the awareness and adoption of LC/NC in the
marketplace. The main impetus behind this dynamic is
the ability to design and deploy innovative applications
without deep software expertise at a much faster rate
and signicantly lower cost.
There are three distinct and growing markets where CD
should garner signicant adoption and deliver value:
1. Faster traditional development — facilitating IT to
signicantly speed up traditional software delivery.
2. Business innovation — enabling business teams
to eectively and safely build their own solutions,
addressing the IT capacity gap.
3. Shadow IT — helping CIOs regain control over
software created outside of, or unsanctioned by,
the IT department.
CD for Digital Transformation
Citizen development oers signicant potential for
digital transformation initiatives by empowering
employees to bridge the gap in meeting growing
demands for new applications to meet client needs.
However, developing an application from concept to
launch is a complex process that requires specic
guidelines to really take advantage of LC/NC app-
building solutions.
LC/NC development accelerates and expands digital
transformation and enables nontechnical users to
deliver automation solutions for their organization.
In doing so, CD can drive digital transformation by
enhancing the organization’s IT capabilities and
reducing the length of the software development cycle.
For example, Microsoft PowerApps drives business
transformation by helping businesses reduce develop-
ment costs and increase overall eciency. A recent
study found that the business of waiting for IT
departments to deliver solutions is no longer viable
and that benets from Microsoft PowerApps include:4
• 188% ROI over three years
• 74% reduction in app development costs
• 3.2 hours per week average improvement in
line-of-business employee productivity
Microsoft’s PowerApps platform supports citizen
developers as they work to increase the speed of
application development, reduce development costs,
and increase worker eciency. These improvements
contribute to overall business benets like reduced
time to market, beer customer service, and increased
revenues.
So it’s perhaps not surprising that 41% of business
leaders report having active CD initiatives under way,
with 20% either evaluating or planning to start one.5
However, to derive maximum benet from CD, these
projects must scale across the enterprise, creating an
organizational operating system. That will require
CD offers significant potential for digital
transformation initiatives by empowering
employees to bridge the gap in meeting
growing demands for new applications to
meet client needs.
Get The Cutter Edge free www.cutter.com Vol. 34, No. 3 CUTTER BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY JOURNAL 7
organizations to conduct training based on digital
transformation guidelines.
CD Training Resources
The Project Management Institute (PMI) has created
the industry’s rst platform-agnostic educational
resources for organizations seeking to implement
and scale CD practices. PMI’s vision is to enable
individuals and enterprises to successfully deliver
digital transformations by providing “vendor-agnostic
methodology, frameworks, learning programs, and
certications” as well as thought-leadership that will
help turn ideas to reality in a hyper-agile world.6
To achieve this vision, PMI has developed two key
initiatives:
1. The PMI Citizen Development Body of
Knowledge (CDBOK™) — a centralized resource
that will help individuals and enterprises under-
stand best practices for implementing CD within an
organization at scale.
2. Training courses — via an e-learning training
program that provides an introduction to CD and
outlines best practices in CD methodologies.
Adopting leading governance and training resources
is key to citizen developers becoming trusted decision
makers with the expertise to drive digital transfor-
mation. Some analysts estimate that the number of
active citizen developers will be four times that of
professional developers by 2023.7
7 Key Recommendations
The emergence of citizen development promises to
improve enterprise productivity and accelerate value
delivery, enabling organizations to achieve outcomes
more quickly. Seven key recommendations for
organizations undergoing or planning to pursue a
digital transformation and adopt a CD initiative are:
1. Automate at the departmental and individual
level. Regardless of the scale of digital transform-
ation, employees are at the frontline of embracing
or rejecting change. No one understands these
processes beer than those involved with them on
a daily basis. Citizen developers are ideally suited
to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks
to increase productivity and job satisfaction, which,
in turn, drive and sustain digital transformation
eorts. Therefore, organizations need to consider
how to automate at the departmental and individ-
ual level in a safe, secure, scalable manner.
2. Understand that small changes can lead to large-
scale, impactful digital transformations. This
understanding is critical to ensure that stakeholders
are provided with actionable insights based on
accurate data across dierent departments and
geographies to drive beer decision making.
3. Assess all aspects of CD. As organizations adopt
these practices, it’s important to assess their
reusability, scalability, total cost of ownership,
potential risks, and impact on enterprise-level
norms such as security.
4. Examine the ROI. Companies on this journey need
to aain the right balance of resources to drive and
sustain maximum agility, speed, and operational
eciencies throughout a digital transformation.
Organizations are increasingly interested in driving
a higher ROI from application development and
delivery to enable lean IT. Today’s traditional
programming methods and application devel-
opment platforms are often ill-suited to address
issues that would be beer xed at the point of
pain/friction (akin to using a sledgehammer to x
a problem when a light tap with a small hammer
would suce).
5. Promote the concept of return on experience for
digital transformations. Return on experience
means executing the correct user-experience
management strategy. The idea is to orchestrate,
personalize, and monitor the entire user experience,
at scale, across any channel. The goal is to empower
those in the business closest to the problem to build
the “last mile” of the app to t their unique require-
ments. IT concentrates on application governance,
controls, and administration while the citizen
developer focuses on understanding nuanced
processes and solving specic challenges.
6. Build CD delivery capability. Citizen developers
are having a profound eect on their organizations
by taking a leadership role in the development
process; creating improved workows; and solving
business, functional, and operational challenges
faster because they are much more auned to the
problems and understand how to x them.
8 ©2021 Cutter Consortium CUTTER BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY JOURNAL
7. Establish a CD control and governance frame-
work. Assess the current control and governance
framework to ensure CD programs are well
structured, well governed, and will deliver the
anticipated value. The success of CD initiatives
within organizations depends on having clearly
dened governance standards. A lack of rules
results in ineciencies and integration challenges.
Prior to adopting LC/NC as a method of adopting
this technique to transform a business, stakeholders
should consider:
Who are the citizen developers, and how will
they be trained?
What toolsets should developers use to solve
what problems? For instance, it makes sense to
choose an LC/NC platform that allows users to
openly collaborate across the entire organization
and solve problems.
How can we eliminate shadow IT without
smothering innovation? One way is to choose
tools and applications that meet central
organization requirements but foster and
encourage problem-solving at the point where
the problems exist.
How can we create and maintain healthy tension
between central IT and citizen developers?
Central IT should select enterprise-wide
platforms such as security, and its core
developers should build and maintain those core
applications. Citizen developers should leverage
the functionality and capability of LC/NC
platforms to rapidly test, deploy, tweak, or
abandon point solutions that may then scale.
Organizations pursuing a CD strategy must acknowl-
edge the operational challenges both business and IT
will face. For example, managing product backlog can
be challenging even for the most experienced product
owners and product managers. In addition, processes
and workows may appear suitable on paper but
can present signicant challenges for users to
operationalize. LC/NC platforms empower citizen
developers to create new workows, entities, and
relationships.
Empowering citizen developers to create and deliver
applications that eliminate lengthy, costly bolenecks
and inecient workows through new and improved
processes is a win for all and will make work practices
more ecient and eective. Investing in a CD platform
with appropriate executive enthusiasm and support
will enable problem-solvers and non-techies to create
their own applications that scale across the organization
without depleting scarce IT resources.
Summary
Digital transformation has become a global priority
for leadership, and that push grew even more urgent
during the pandemic.8 Digital transformations are key
to business survival and success, but we must consider
hyper-agile approaches to keep up with the pace of
change.9 With CD, business leaders have a way to drive
change without relying on scarce and expensive core
technology and engineering talent. CD is here to stay,
and current trends indicate it will play a critical role in
driving future digital, operational, and business needs.
CD initiatives, though nascent, will gain momentum
and play an increasingly important role in driving
digital transformation eorts to create new ways of
working and engaging with customers and colleagues.
Citizen development is also an important way to reduce
current digital transformation frustration around IT
backlogs. It oers a way to free up IT departments
to do what they are supposed to do while creating more
agile, responsive, economically healthy, and eective
environments. CD is the pathway for organizations that
want to become hyper-agile.
Training and governance resources are key to enabling
organizations as they work to become truly digital and
hyper-agile. PMI is supporting this movement with
vendor-agnostic training and governance guidelines
accessible to employees and senior executives alike,
such as its Citizen Development: The Handbook for Creators
and Change Makers.10
References
1Tabrizi, Behnam, et al. “Digital Transformation Is Not About
Technology.” Harvard Business Review, 13 March 2019.
2Bughin, Jacques, Jonathan Deakin, and Barbara O’Beirne.
“Digital Transformation: Improving the Odds of Success.”
McKinsey Quarterly, 22 October 2019.
3Cavarec, Yves, and Brandon Fargis. “From Agile to Hyperagile:
The Destination and the Journey.” Project Management
Institute (PMI), 13 May 2016.
Get The Cutter Edge free www.cutter.com Vol. 34, No. 3 CUTTER BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY JOURNAL 9
4Strauss, Julie. “Solve IT Governance and Admin Challenges
with New Features for Power Platform.” Microsoft Power
Platform Blog, 2 March 2021.
5Den Haan, Johan. “Bring Shadow IT into the Light and
Capitalize on Citizen Developers.” Forbes Technology Council,
2 December 2020.
6“Introducing Citizen Developer.” Project Management Institute
(PMI), accessed March 2021.
7Dilmegani, Cem. “Citizen Developers in 2021: Who Are They,
Benets & Frameworks.” AI Multiple, 20 March 2021.
8Carroll, Noel, and Kieran Conboy. “Normalising the ‘New
Normal’: Changing Tech-Driven Work Practices Under
Pandemic Time Pressure.” International Journal of Information
Management, December 2020.
9Carroll, Noel. “Theorizing on the Normalization of Digital
Transformations.” Proceedings from the 28th European
Conference on Information Systems, Marrakesh, Morocco,
June 2020.
10Citizen Development: The Handbook for Creators and Change
Makers. Project Management Institute (PMI), 2021.
Noel Carroll is Associate Head of Learning, Teaching, and Assessment
in the J.E. Cairnes School of Business & Economics at the National
University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG), where he is also a Lecturer in
business information systems and Program Director for the master’s
of science degree in information systems management. Dr. Carroll is
also a researcher with Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research
Centre for Software, and the Whitaker Institute at NUIG. His research
interests include seeking ways to support organizations in developing
transformation strategies in areas such as digital transforma-
tion, citizen development, and Agile transformation across various
sectors. Dr. Carroll earned a PhD in information systems from
the University of Limerick, Ireland. He can be reached at
noel.carroll@nuigalway.ie.
Liam Ó Móráin is an engineer by profession and innovator by
vocation. For the past 25 years, he has worked mainly in nancial
services in Europe and North America. Mr. Ó Móráin has accum-
ulated extensive experience working across a range of complex
business, compliance, and regulatory environments. He has also
worked at various startups, selling into global Tier-1 banks. Mr.
Ó Móráin‘s particular expertise in banking lies in delivering on the
potential of digital through simplication, thereby enabling sophis-
tication. He is a strategic advisor on citizen development for the
Project Management Institute (PMI) and FTI Consulting. Mr.
Ó Móráin earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering and a master’s
degree of science in engineering from the National University of
Ireland, Galway (NUIG), an MBA from University College Dublin,
Ireland, and is a Chartered Engineer (CEng). He can be reached at
liam.moran@akuroo.com.
Dave Garre is a Chief Strategy and Growth Ocer at Project
Management Institute (PMI). He works across the organization
to dene, test, and deliver "new products that maer" to support
dramatic increases in value to customers. Mr. Garre is charged
with assisting PMI to build teams that are aligned and integrated
seamlessly across the organization. He is responsible for M&As and
strategic sourcing partners for PMI to address the emerging new
work ecosystem. Mr. Garre earned a master’s of science degree in
management information systems from American University. He can
be reached at Dave.Garre@pmi.org.
Arjun Jamnadass is the Managing Director for FTI Consulting in the
UK. He is an expert in citizen development, Agile ways of working,
digital transformation, and business change. Mr. Jamnadass has
worked with business and technology leaders to establish new ways
of working, enabling scalable and safe mass adoption of low-code/
no-code (LC/NC) technologies. He earned a bachelor’s degree in
computer and business studies and a master’s degree in electronic
business management from the University of Warwick, UK. He can be
reached at arjun.jamnadass@fticonsulting.com.
