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Citizen Development: The Wrong Strategy for the Right ProblemCitizen Development: The Wrong Strategy for the Right Problem
GenAI is replacing citizen development. Here's why that's a good thing.
Industry Perspectives
March 20, 2025
6 Min Read
Alamy
By Barry Goffe, Crowdbotics
Anyone who has worked in IT over the past 30 years can identify with a common and seemingly endless challenge: keeping up with business demands. No matter how quickly tech teams move, it always feels like we're a step (or 10) behind. We seem inevitably stuck in a cycle of growing backlogs and missed opportunities.
This constant challenge has led to several generations of citizen development-focused tech, which, in theory, arms non-technical employees with tools to build apps and software with little or no IT involvement. The intent is to help businesses innovate faster, but the reality is that disintermediating an overwhelmed IT department doesn't address the root cause of the issue and creates new, worse problems.
Let's put it bluntly: Tech or business leaders promoting citizen development aren't solving a problem; they're succumbing to it. Luckily, the rise of generative AI (GenAI) is helping IT teams make significant strides in seamless and efficient software development, turning the ability to keep up with quickly evolving business demands from a pipe dream into a reality. Ultimately, GenAI dramatically shifts the calculus against citizen development.
The Evolution of Citizen Development
Here's a quick primer on the history of citizen development. The concept goes all the way back to the 1980s and '90s when teams began using fourth-generation languages (4GLs) like dBase, R:BASE, PowerBuilder, Magic, and FoxPro. These were development environments designed to be accessible to non-developers. The era of 4GLs was followed quickly by Lotus Notes, which allowed business users to create basic workflow applications. Soon after Notes, Microsoft introduced SharePoint, a prominent platform for helping business users easily create internal collaboration portals.
All of these solutions shared some common threads:
With care, useful solutions could be built — though, ironically, these ended up being mostly done by professionals in IT.
Much of what was built by true "citizen developers" using these tools ended up being wasted effort.
The worst of these apps led to costly security breaches or crashed LOB systems.
A few of these solutions turned out to be useful. However, these would then run into constraints of the underlying platforms — most often because of limited scalability.
To move past the constraints, IT would be forced to take ownership (often reluctantly). Either IT ended up rewriting the apps using more robust languages and platforms, or these apps would limp along, often hampering the business's productivity.
The latest generation of citizen development offenders are the low-code and no-code platforms that promise to democratize software development by enabling those without formal programming education to build applications. These platforms fueled enthusiasm around speedy app development — especially among business users — but their limitations are similar to the generations of platforms that came before. The most common challenges these tools create include:
Data privacy and security: Apps built by non-technical users often lack full security functionality, leading to data privacy and compliance disasters.
Not right for mission-critical applications: Low-code tools can work passably for simple applications or use cases, but they're not equipped to create fully mission-critical systems. Even moderate scalability can be a stretch.
Wasteful investment cycles: Teams that have invested in citizen development often find that many applications go unused, become quickly outdated, or require costly rewrites by professional developers.
Lock-in: In trying to simplify the coding process, low-code and no-code platforms almost always take a "walled garden" approach, which locks users into their platform ad infinitum. If a low-code/no-code app becomes business-critical but also needs to scale or be secure, IT will likely have to start over from scratch using traditional tools, languages, and frameworks. When a low-code/no-code app inevitably hits the platform's wall or ceiling, there's nowhere to go other than to start over.
Don't get me wrong — the intentions behind citizen development come from a legitimate place. More often than not, IT needs to deliver faster to keep up with the business. But these tools promise more than they can deliver and, worse, usually result in negative unintended consequences. Think of it as a digital house of cards, where disparate apps combine to create unscalable systems that can take years and/or millions of dollars to fix. While low-code and no-code platforms have had their place, the long-term costs and headaches they create aren't worth it.
Bridging Business and Tech with GenAI
In the short time since GenAI has become widely accessible, it has already demonstrated advantages that help development teams bridge the gap between business needs and technical execution. Rather than replacing developers with non-technical users, AI-driven tools empower developers by boosting their productivity and expanding their capabilities. GenAI development tools will turn good engineers into great ones, and great ones into world-class innovators. It's all about accelerating development speed, reducing risk, and improving quality to create lower-cost, scalable, and secure applications.
One of the key advantages of AI-driven development is its ability to help IT teams move faster while maintaining quality. For example, AI-powered requirements engineering (using GenAI to produce the requirements needed to build an app) can improve the code suggestion acceptance rates of tools like GitHub Copilot by 50%, ultimately boosting developer task success rate by 25%.
Rushing software out the door leads to security vulnerabilities and scalability issues, but GenAI mitigates these challenges with automation and smart code suggestions to build robust apps in significantly shorter timeframes.
Embracing AI comes with its own challenges, however. Organizations must address concerns such as the need for standardized methodologies and compliance (both internal and external). Before fully committing, businesses should establish clear AI implementation policies and strategies aimed at improving efficiency without creating new risks.
As AI and its capabilities continue to evolve, businesses that leverage it smartly will gain a competitive edge and deliver high-quality software faster and more efficiently.
Empowering IT with the GenAI Advantage
Struggling to keep up with business demands is a common refrain for IT teams. Citizen development has attempted to bridge the gap, but it typically creates more problems than solutions. Rather than relying on workarounds and quick fixes that potentially introduce security risks and inefficiency — and certainly rather than disintermediating IT — businesses should embrace the power of GenAI to support their developers and ultimately to make IT more responsive and capable.
The benefits of GenAI-augmented development are clear, but fully maximizing the benefits requires working together as an industry to identify the best tools, frameworks, and processes that will drive results. GenAI today doesn't completely obviate the need for a low-code platform, but the writing is on the wall — in the next few years, low-code/no-code platforms will be entirely irrelevant as AI-driven solutions from companies like Microsoft and others continue to bridge the gap between business needs and product requirements.
Ultimately, the path forward isn't about bypassing IT; it's about empowering it. With the right approach, GenAI can make software development a seamless, intelligent, and ultra-efficient process, eliminating the need for stopgaps. GenAI will not only allow IT teams to finally stay ahead of business demands, but it will ultimately help IT deliver the innovation, competitive advantage, and value we've known has been there all along.
About the author:
Barry Goffe is senior director of product marketing at Crowdbotics.
About the Author
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