Citizen Developers Have Always Existed

When IT leaders push back on “citizen development” they are just displaying their closed mindedness and incompetence. Every successful organization is – right now, today – full of citizen developers, people using whatever technology tools they have available (and often finding ways to get around IT limitations to get additional tools) to get their job done.

If you don’t enable your workforce to create solutions for themselves they will still find a way to create them. No organization has the budget to solve every use case with centralized IT. Workers don’t have a choice, they have a job to get done and they’ll get it done – with or without IT’s support or blessing.

Those quasi-apps – created using unapproved cloud services, email, Excel files, Word macros, SharePoint lists, etc. – proliferate in enterprises. These essentially unregulated solutions create enormous risks around reliability and security, and the blame will fall on CIOs and CISOs when things go bad – whether they knew about the risk or not.

It’s critical that an organization enable every worker with a need and the motivation to have the ability to self-create the tools they need in a secure, reliable, discoverable, and governed manner. Only Microsoft Power Platform provides an enterprise grade solution covering the full gamut of solution requirements, from individual productivity apps to work group solutions to full enterprise applications. Other than Microsoft Power Platform there is simply NO other platform that can support the full spectrum of requirements.

If you fail to provide your workforce with what they need they will find what they need, and it’ll still be your problem when it goes bad. A commitment to Microsoft Power Platform solves that problem and allows every worker who wants to build something to build something in a secure well-regulated manner.