From Modeler to Citizen Developer

Hi, I’m Sandy Kemsley of column2.com. I’m here today for the Trisotech blog with some thoughts on the role of modelers versus citizen developers.

In my last video, I talked about understanding what you’re modeling for. If you’re modeling business processes and decisions using BPMN and DMN, those models might be different depending on whether your intention is to automate your business operations or just document them. Since that time, I gave a keynote at a conference where i talked about citizen developers. If you take a look at modeling executable processes and decisions for the purposes of automation, how big of a step is it to go from those models to an actual running application? In other words are you a modeler or citizen developer? And what’s the difference?

Citizen developer is a fairly new term but not really a new concept. Basically a citizen developer is someone, usually within the business side of the organization, who creates applications that are used by their peers. They typically use some sort of low code tools in order to do this. Now in the past, this might have meant using spreadsheets and email, but now there are complete low code application development platforms that non-technical developers or what we’ve come to call citizen developers can use to quickly create applications. They graphically design user interfaces, processes, decisions, whatever else is needed to make the application work as it should, and then actually deploy it into production for people to use. Often, IT isn’t even involved.

Watch this short video for more…

Follow Sandy on her personal blog Column 2.