Build Your Next Great Innovation Now: No Coding Required

How companies are using citizen development throughout their organization to revolutionize IT departments.

IT professionals with deep coding skills have long been the lifeline of many corporations, providing technical solutions to everyday problems. But as companies push for digital transformation, IT departments are at maximum capacity, and projects have piled up.

Now, companies are tasking employees without traditional coding backgrounds to lead innovation in their own departments. These citizen developers can be anyone outside of IT who builds business applications and digital solutions. This new role is helping companies increase efficiency, reduce costs and improve processes.

Take Zimmer Biomet. The Warsaw, Ind.-based medical device maker struggled with how to simultaneously adopt new digital technology while also dealing with daily workflow issues. Then, Zimmer Biomet began working with Quickbase, a no-code operational agility platform that enables citizen developers to improve operations through real-time insights and automation across complex processes and disparate systems.

Today, Zimmer Biomet has more than 300 citizen developers — non-IT employees in departments that range from marketing to engineering to shipping — who use Quickbase to come up with solutions to many problems that would’ve previously been handled by IT.

“Citizen developers are the first line of defense now because they know the problem they want to solve,” says Greg Bedenis, a Zimmer Biomet IT manager. “Someone who’s not in IT can develop really strong applications and tools.”

Empowering the workforce

More companies are integrating citizen developers, also known as business technologists, into various teams throughout their organizations because of the proliferation of low- or no-code application platforms like industry-leader Quickbase. The platform enables companies to be more flexible and agile.

Whereas software developers and other professionals in IT departments often use complex coding tools, “low-or no-code” refers to an application platform that supports quick, one-step deployment with simple management. This application development method eliminates much of the tediousness associated with developing, deploying, maintaining and updating applications built with traditional software development frameworks and techniques. It enables employees outside of IT to come up with technical solutions to business problems.

To use cooking as an analogy, low-code is like having the complicated marinades and spices already provided rather than preparing a gourmet meal from scratch. Trained chefs now can allow more people in the company’s kitchen to safely fix their own meals, while still being on standby if needed.

In a no-code platform, workers without coding skills are typically able to implement text for formulas or simple expressions only — essentially tasty, pre-packaged side dishes that only need to be heated at 350 degrees.

“For a long time now, there's been more great project ideas than there have been IT people to execute them,” says Deb Gildersleeve, Chief Information Officer at Quickbase. “When you implement a low- or no-code platform, you can use other people in your organization to solve some of those problems.”

This business strategy is spreading quickly. Gartner Inc., an IT research firm, forecasts that by 2024, 75% of large enterprises will be using at least four low-code development tools for both IT application development and citizen development.

Gartner also forecasts that by 2024, low-code application development will be responsible for more than 65% of application development activity.

In Gartner’s most recent report on low-code applications, analysts heaped praise on Quickbase’s ability to enable non-IT workers to create applications. Quickbase has a large feature set of tools for citizen developers to accommodate multiple data reporting styles. And business logic is simplified through triggers or actions.

Based on Gartner’s rankings, Quickbase scored better than competitors for enabling citizen developers. “Quickbase focuses on ease of use for citizen developers, and has developed a large customer base,” the Gartner report says.

Encouraging team innovation and skill development

One of the big advantages to building out a practice of citizen development is to ensure that business units — and their employees — are able to not only have their problems addressed, but also are able to innovate quickly.

Indeed, there’s a danger in tabling business process innovations while the IT department focuses its time and attention on tackling larger corporate goals related to transforming the organization's digital systems. That can send the wrong message to employees: If their ideas, even small iterations, are constantly being deprioritized, employees can feel disengaged.

Data shows this is already happening in some organizations. According to a July 2020 study published in Fast Company, 41% of employees surveyed said their company leadership doesn’t value innovation. And 50% of the employees surveyed believe that if they shared an idea, it wouldn’t be taken seriously.

With Quickbase, the permission to be innovative is not only granted, but encouraged and guided, Quickbase’s CIO Gildersleeve says. As a result, employees are able to build their skillset as well. “Citizen developers are taking on problems that they’re seeing in their day-to-day work,” which makes sense, she says, since they’re “closest to the problem.”

Quickbase also helps organizations be more nimble by increasing problem-solving resources, Gildersleeve says, enabling IT to focus on larger corporate initiatives.

“When you add in citizen developers, it allows for rapid-cycle innovation. IT should see citizen developers as partners,” she says. Where citizen developers will be focused on problems unique to their business units, Gildersleeve says, IT departments will be used for “large-scale systems and large-scale transformations where specialized IT programming skills are needed. That is what we call dual-track transformation.”

To the extent that workflow problems will continue to exist, workforce agility will be even more important going forward. Bedenis, the IT manager at Zimmer Biomet, sees the role of citizen developers growing within many organizations.

“Once we saw the success, usability and capabilities of Quickbase, citizen development spread throughout the organization,” Bedenis says. “Success breeds success.”

The key, Bedenis says, is for companies to provide tools like Quickbase to empower others outside of IT departments to help. “Organizations are going to proliferate out more and more away from centralized IT. I’d say organizations already have citizen developers — people who have a desire or interest to solve technical business problems — but there’s a question of what tools are you putting in their hands to help them solve problems?”