Empowering Your Team: The Power of Citizen Development

Imagine this: Your company has been relying on Excel spreadsheets for years to track data and make decisions. It’s been functional, but you know there’s a better way to visualise and analyse your data. So, you make the leap and migrate to Tableau, a powerful data visualisation tool. Suddenly, insights that were once buried in rows and columns come to life with interactive dashboards and intuitive visuals. Your team can now make faster, data-driven decisions that propel your business forward. This transformation is just the beginning of what’s possible with citizen development.

Benefits of Citizen Development

Citizen development is a game-changer for organisations looking to harness the full potential of their workforce and technology. But what exactly is citizen development, and why should your company embrace it? At its core, citizen development empowers non-technical employees, or “citizen developers,” to create applications and solutions to address business needs, without requiring extensive coding knowledge. Here are some key benefits of incorporating citizen development into your company:

Rapid Innovation: With citizen development, the traditional bottleneck of IT resources is removed. Instead of waiting in line for developers to implement solutions, business users can take matters into their own hands, rapidly prototyping and deploying applications to meet evolving business needs.

Increased Efficiency: By enabling employees closest to the business challenges to create their own solutions, citizen development streamlines processes and reduces reliance on external resources. This leads to quicker turnaround times and improved operational efficiency.

Cost Savings: Traditional software development projects can be costly and time-consuming. Citizen development minimizes the need for expensive external development resources, resulting in significant cost savings for the organization.

Enhanced Agility: In today’s fast-paced business environment, agility is key to staying ahead of the competition. Citizen development empowers organizations to adapt quickly to changing market dynamics by enabling rapid experimentation and iteration.

Empowerment and Engagement: Giving employees the tools and autonomy to solve their own problems fosters a culture of empowerment and engagement. Citizen developers feel a sense of ownership over their solutions, leading to increased job satisfaction and morale.

Why Citizen Development Matters:

By tapping into the collective creativity and problem-solving skills of their workforce, organisations can innovate faster, adapt to change more effectively and drive sustainable growth. It enables companies to leverage their most valuable asset — their people — to drive meaningful change and create value for both customers and stakeholders. 

Data Scientist Sean Bayly introduced this concept to one of our leading clients: a giant in the automotive sector looking to streamline their reporting processes with one universal solution.

“This particular project was well received across the teams we introduced it to. As with any introduction of new work, some downtime was necessary to learn the vast cross-section of data being used across these various teams.

A lot of work lay in keeping up momentum through the learning process, and we quickly found that documenting work being done and taking action from meetups was going to be the most efficient way to work. Thanks to this method, I was able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each individual – which led to a more productive way of mentoring. I found that many felt more confident in building out reports knowing that they had Infotel UK’s support available at all times.

It was rewarding being able to see client employees being able to use the technology independently, and turning the ‘Is this what I should do?’ questions into more confident ones like ‘I’ve been able to do this, could I get your feedback?’ 

I think other companies could definitely benefit from these knowledge transfer partnerships as our data science team has skills in popular areas such as Data Visualisation, Analysis, and Machine Learning. In particular, Natural Language Processing (AI/Machine Learning) is often misunderstood,  despite its recent increase in popularity. Many organisations believe that such software is heavyweight, but this has recently changed. It’s now much more easier to access regardless of individual technical capability.” 

Citizen development represents a paradigm shift in how organisations approach technology and innovation – which is at the heart of everything we do at Infotel UK Consulting. By empowering employees at all levels to become active contributors to the digital transformation journey, companies can unlock new opportunities, drive competitive advantage, and chart a course toward a more agile and resilient future.