With an impending recession, today's organizations need future-ready employees and managers who can help and contribute to the digital transformation journey. Therefore, before you plan your next business manager hiring or internal promotion, you should reconsider which skills you seek to complement leadership, interpersonal, time-management, and problem-solving abilities. While most employees have an overwhelming number of soft skills—interpersonal and communication, creative thinking and negotiation, and practical managerial skills—when it comes to being future-ready, the most important skill might surprise you.

The Skill of the Future: Enterprise Citizen Development

As with soft skills, citizen development has proven to be critical skill organizations seek in their future managers. In today's fast-changing corporate environment, citizen development is one skill that every professional working in corporate America needs to possess. Business users must learn citizen development, which is the process of building applications using IT-approved tools, such as low-code or no-code platforms so that they can manage their data and create applications in-house.

It is worth stating upfront that soft skills are essential. "Soft skills like decision-making, adaptive, time-management, and managerial skills are important, but the key is to mix these with strategic citizen development skills that will ensure you can play a vital role in your company's growth," says Jesse Shiah, Founder & CEO of AgilePoint, Inc.

We couldn't agree more. Businesses face a talent shortage, especially in the information technology department and more so in the United States, which gets propelled by the high demand for IT professionals post-COVID and a rising focus on digital transformation objectives. While some businesses can find IT talent locally, albeit at an extremely high cost, it is only viable in the short run. Others can either outsource their requirements to countries like India and China, where there are abundant IT professionals or hire and move them to the US through the tedious process of sponsoring their visas.

Citizen Development vs. Enterprise Citizen Development

While citizen development focuses on automating processes and developing monolithic business applications that help business users improve or automate their individual or department tasks, enterprise citizen development looks at the bigger picture. Enterprise citizen development sets the ground for a sustainable digital transformation by enabling business users to develop cross-functional applications and processes across multiple departments and has an enterprise-wide impact while ensuring citizen-developed applications follow standards and compliance policies set by IT. 

The challenges to innovate and deliver sustainable digital transformation during a tough economy have made enterprise citizen development one of the most essential skills every business user and manager must possess. To minimize skills gaps and expand employees' abilities to become citizen developers, businesses of all sizes will upskill their current talent pools and seek enterprise citizen development skills in their future hires. 

AgilePoint: The Changing Landscape of IT

By collaborating with non-IT professionals, citizen development allows business applications to be conceived, designed, and developed using low-code or no-code development platforms, freeing IT to handle more critical projects. Citizen development has become the most significant component of a company's growth. It helps drive innovation, improve the customer experience, and boost efficiency, ultimately empowering organizations to maximize their technology investments.

AgilePoint understands that while citizen developers are busy innovating, IT is on its toes, ensuring citizen-developed applications meet all the compliance requirements. That's why AgilePoint provides IT with the tools to keep citizen-developed applications secured and up to standards. The platform’s layered architecture allows IT to implement governance and compliance measures quickly and comprehensively to ensure applications meet the strictest requirements of regulations or frameworks such as GDPR, HIPPA, SOX, ISO 27001 et al.

AgilePoint allows IT to manage platform-level permissions and control the visibility and confidentiality of data available in citizen-developed applications. By offering governance controls in the settings module, AgilePoint enables IT to customize the platform to their organization's specific needs without making adjustments in each citizen-developed application. The layered architecture ensures that organizations meet their requirements for data consent, security, and privacy, including encryption, data masking, role-based access control, and more.

Launched in 2009, Jesse Shiah and Sean Zhang created the AgilePoint platform from the ground up to be an enterprise low-code/no-code development platform. With governance and compliance features embedded into its core, AgilePoint is the top choice for CEOs and CIOs looking for a mature platform to kick start citizen development initiatives and those inclined to reduce the burden on their IT department.

While most LCNC platforms have challenges surrounding governance, risk, and compliance, the AgilePoint platform's governance and layered security features ensure that empowered business users and citizen developers create business applications easily while conforming to company and industry standards and policies. 

AgilePoint has enabled businesses to tap into the benefits offered by enterprise citizen development and upskill business users to quickly and easily develop applications without extensive coding experience or expertise using an intuitive low-code no-code platform while reducing the accumulation of technical debt. The AgilePoint platform allows more people to become involved in the development process, empowering non-technical people to create and manage customized applications while freeing IT to take care of more specialized tasks such as governance. It ensures a reduction in development costs and paves the way for a sustained digital transformation.

What Our Customer Says

We recently met with Brian Schimpf of GC-SDA to discuss his experience with citizen development using AgilePoint. Before he began his journey with SDA and was introduced to the AgilePoint platform in 2019, he had never heard of the term citizen developer. He was quickly impressed to see how, as a business user, he could help IT and his department create new and improve existing business applications using AgilePoint's workflows and forms. 

Brian states that he loves seeing the results and is proud of being a citizen developer who is making work more efficient, not only for himself but for his team members and all other IT administrators that his company has worldwide. "It's just been a great experience, not only for my professional development but again, to be able to support those around us that use our systems day-to-day," says Brian. 

Katherine Walton of GC-SDA says, "We have used AgilePoint [since 2011] as a translator to communicate between our business users and IT technical staff." She adds that through the [use of] workflows, [business users at] GC-SDA can communicate and collaborate with IT to clearly understand the objective and what they are trying to accomplish. AgilePoint has made it smooth to complete several projects [in a short time frame.] We are present in over 200 countries, and AgilePoint technology has enabled us to ensure we can support 80 languages.

You can watch a full interview with Katherine Walton, Brian Schimpf, and Johnson Ram of GC-SDA here.

Project Management Institute's Citizen Development Resources

AgilePoint is working closely with the Project Management Institute and has launched a set of educational resources that can help business users and managers learn citizen development skills and become citizen developers. Furthermore, the PMI Canvas platform developed by AgilePoint offers an eagle eye view and manage entire lifecycle for all citizen development projects in your organization using robust KPIs. To learn more about the different Citizen Developer learning paths, please get in touch with PMI or reach out to your AgilePoint Success Manager or Sales Representative.

Conclusion

Enterprise Citizen Development has become one of the most sought-after skills of our time. Organizations of all sizes and industries are upskilling their business users to leverage their domain knowledge to help shape the future of the enterprise. AgilePoint is uniquely positioned to help these organizations. Since 2009 we have pioneered low-code/no-code and enterprise citizen development domain. Many large and small enterprise customers have relied on our platform to kickstart citizen development initiatives. Today, the AgilePoint platform is synonymous with innovation in citizen development, and for numerous reasons, apart from being a pioneer considered the number 1 citizen development platform. The AgilePoint platform has proven to improve productivity and efficiency by facilitating enterprise-grade citizen development at businesses of all sizes, enabling citizen developers to build cross-functional business applications and improve operational efficiency quickly.

By using AgilePoint's low-code/no-code automation platform, organizations could take a completely revolutionary approach to automate their operations. Through a dynamic and collaborative partnership between IT, lines of business, and citizen developers, they were able to quickly create business-critical, end-to-end cross-functional automation to break down organizational silos by engaging the entire organization in the automation process (with guardrails) and through the engagement of every department in the process.

AgilePoint's approach offers an environment that allows your teams to collaborate and co-create automations and orchestrations. This is done exclusively within and in concert with your existing application stacks. Using AgilePoint's architecture, enterprises can provide flexible, future-proof solutions by decoupling critical cross-functional business processes from their core systems, so they can deliver better experiences and more efficient customer services.

Try AgilePoint free for 30 days to learn how it can benefit your Citizen Development needs, or request a demo to have someone from AgilePoint shorten your learning curve.