Citizen Developers Poised to Unleash the Next Renaissance

Up until the 15th century, books were painstakingly copied by hand. It could take a year to copy a single book and once a copy was ready, it was made available to just a select few monks and scholars. With the introduction of the printing press in 1440, Gutenberg completely disrupted the knowledge lifecycle. A Renaissance printing press produced books at 3,600 pages/day vs. 5 pages copied by hand. Within 60 years of its invention, 8 million books were printed and available in every major city. By changing the way that knowledge could be captured and shared, the printing press radically accelerated the knowledge cycle, setting the stage for transformational cultural advances in art, architecture, politics, science and literature.

Today, our society is going through a similar change. You have seen statistics that reflect the scale at which data is generated. According to SINTEF, a Norway- based research organization, 90% of world’s data was generated in the last 12-24 months. While data has been growing exponentially, the ability to access it and turn it into something of value has not. Data in itself is of limited value. Its more valuable when it’s manipulated in a way to drive a decision or guide a behavior. In the business world, it could be driving a new revenue stream. For health, it could be driving precision medicine. For customer service, it could allow you to correlate with other sources and predict customer actions.

Making use of this data has traditionally been in the realm of the professional developer population, as defined by those that have grounding in a programming language and some knowledge of software development. Their numbers have - at best - doubled in the last 10 years. With a small cadre of developers and the large volume of data being produced, the model simply doesn’t scale.

The answer is to build and empower a new category of developers, i.e. citizen developers. These are the business users in an organization that don’t need to be trained in the art of computer science or software development. They are able to develop engaging apps through ‘clicks, not code’, delivered in a form factor that users like. They deliver security from the get go and provide the contemporary philosophy (social, mobile) that its users are accustomed to. Citizen developers don’t have to be artists worrying over UI, security specialists focused on identity management, or professional programmers that understand metadata. Nor do they need to be experts on the end-user’s rendering technology (desktop, tablet, phone, watch) or worry about the certification matrix from the OS on up to make sure all releases of the products are certified and work. It just works. Just as the authors and readers in the 15th century didn’t need to (and still don’t) know the inner workings of the printing press, citizen developers need not worry about the technical details either. The printing press still just works.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, some empires shunned the adoption of the printing press for as many as two hundred years because they weren’t ready to embrace it. Unable to benefit from scientific innovation, these demoded empires sat out the entire industrial revolution, causing them to weaken and subsequently lose way to those that originally embraced the press. This is the scale of opportunity that lies in front of us with the citizen developer: to build engaging apps that utilize our data, to identify opportunities for connecting with our customers; to find ways of better delivering a product or service; and to predict what the customer will do next.

The efficiency and innovation of the citizen developer model creates an accelerated knowledge capture cycle. Not taking advantage of this model can be the equivalent of denying the power of the press. Look for opportunities to identify potential citizen developers and give them the tools to be successful and supplement your professional developers. In doing so, you’ll leapfrog not just your competition, but your own expectations. The new Renaissance is now in full swing.