Organizations are rethinking how they operate as they recognize there are far more employees customizing or building digital solutions outside IT than inside IT. This podcast discusses the role of these non-IT personas, known as business technologists, who are contributing citizens to IT creation.
Gartner defines business technologists as employees who report outside of IT departments (centralized or business unit IT) that create technology or analytics capabilities for internal or external business use. In the 2021 Gartner Reimagining Technology Work Survey, respondents indicated that, on average, business technologists make up 41% of their organization’s workforce. About 80% of these users are citizen technologists who create technology output as part of (or in addition to) their full-time roles.
Business technologists and other citizen personas play a key role in automation, application development, data science and many other roles. These personas are often referred to as citizen developers, citizen designers, citizen integrators, citizen data scientists and many other roles with the prefix “citizen.” When these non-IT users have access to intuitive, self-service tools, they are empowered to independently build solutions for their business unit.
As low-code development technologies proliferate, more organizations are recognizing the value of empowering citizen technologists. These non-IT personas can independently use low-code and no-code technologies to improve business efficiency, efficacy and agility. Citizen technologists use a wide range of tools, and they need intuitive, flexible platforms to develop, automate and integrate their data, forms and workflows. In fact, citizen automation and development platforms (CADPs) have emerged as a new class of solutions that specifically target the needs of citizen technologists with an emphasis toward no-code builder experiences.
Our host Dixie John is joined by our expert analyst, Jason Wong. Wong is a distinguished VP analyst on the Software Design and Development team helping CIOs, and IT, application and software engineering leaders. Wong’s research focuses on enterprise strategies for “total experience,” low-code platforms, citizen development, mobile apps, progressive web apps and multiexperience development.