Every industry and area of business you care to mention is in a state of flux right now. Born in the cloud businesses that capitalised on digital technologies to disrupt established models and markets are thriving, while the rest of the business world runs to catch up and makes tactical IT “quick fixes” to adapt to the changing world.
The modern workplace was already seeing Artificial Intelligence (AI) and business process automation making its way into production lines, supply chains and weaving through the very fabric of businesses; and it is set to exponentially increase.
The machines really are learning, and the possibilities are nothing short of astonishing. Workforces are changing in terms of skill sets, expectations and demographics. And then there’s the customer; the need to differentiate on something other than price is now more than ever, critical to success. Hardly surprising then, that the talk is all about transformation – to disrupt or avoid being disrupted.
Demand for anytime, anywhere connectivity is accelerating as workforces become increasingly mobile and virtual. As productivity becomes ever more important as a point of competitive differentiation and a catalyst for change, enabling real-time sharing between customers, partners and employees is critical. And digital, decentralised and collaborative workplaces that harness the very ethos of always-on, anytime, anywhere working have given rise to citizen developers.
So, what exactly is a citizen developer?
A citizen developer is a user who creates new business applications for consumption by others using development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT. They build applications to facilitate the processes of business operations while following the standards and guidelines of the IT department. Unlike IT professionals and developers, they may not have formal training in programming and might not even be part of the IT function. Citizen developers are not typically professional developers; they may have some technical or development skills, but it isn’t their main job and they don’t necessarily work in IT.
In the past, end-user application development has typically been limited to single-user or workgroup solutions built with tools like Microsoft Excel and Access. However, today, end users can build departmental, enterprise and even public applications using shared services, fourth-generation language-style development platforms and cloud computing services. Citizen developers can now leverage low code and no code solutions and platforms to develop tools for their organisation. And if we look at the Microsoft 365 space, it’s the Power Platform that citizen developers use to create these tools.
Microsoft recognises that citizen developers can deliver value for their organisations and is empowering them with tools and templates that can speed up the creation process. Power Platform offers a mix of different tools to this end, but the ones used by citizen developers are Power Automate, Power Apps and Power BI.
Power Automate is a platform which allows users to create automated workflows within Office 365, and it comes with templates that can be leveraged to quickly deploy solutions. There is a whole category dedicated just to productivity. It allows users to perform such tasks as sending notifications when important events occur, saving Outlook attachments to shared repositories in SharePoint or Teams, ask your line manager for approval and getting notified when a document is signed. These are just a few examples of some of the processes that can be deployed in a business at the click of a button.
As a further example, imagine you work in communications and want to publish to Teams whenever a Tweet goes out that uses your unique campaign hashtag or mentions your organisation. You can even use cognitive services and AI to detect the sentiment of those tweets and automatically flag messages with negative/positive opinions. Using a template in Power Automate lets you build this workflow easily and quickly. Or, perhaps you work in risk and compliance and deal regularly with risk registers. You can set one up in SharePoint and create a workflow so that when someone adds a risk to the register, you are notified or assigned a task to review it. These are just a couple of scenarios in which Power Automate makes processes easier and effortless within an organisation.
Power Apps lets citizen developers create apps that can be useful for a variety of reasons and across departments. Someone who works in communications and manages a SharePoint intranet as part of their job might want to create a simple feedback form. Power Apps is the go-to tool for projects like this. Even if you’re not a programmer (which, by their very nature, citizen developers are not), Power Apps is simple enough for most people to develop something that meets their requirements.
You can also use Power Apps for tracking areas across the business. For example, a person working in facilities who wants to manage building access cards or an equipment inventory, can create a mobile app that allows employees to log what equipment they are using.
