Citizen Development at Scale
Can Business Users Really Build Enterprise Workflows?
Many IT leaders are wary of letting business users build their own workflows, and it is easy to see why. If someone builds a workflow that nobody is checking, with no record of who approved what, that is a real risk to the business.
The pressure to work this way keeps growing anyway. IT backlogs are long. A change that would take two hours to configure can sit in a queue for months, while the person who understands the process waits for someone else to make the change happen.
Whether citizen development will work in your organisation comes down to two things: what the platform controls for you, and being honest about what business users can and cannot build on their own.
What is a citizen developer?
A citizen developer is a business user who builds and manages digital workflows using low-code tools, without a background in software development. They typically work in Finance, Human Resources, or Operations, and they build the processes they run themselves rather than raising a request with the IT department.
These people aren’t retraining to become developers. The tools have become simple enough that someone who understands a process can set it up it directly, using drag-and-drop rather than code.
The move to citizen developers is well under way. Gartner has forecast that developers outside formal IT departments will account for at least 80% of the user base for low-code tools, up from 60% in 2021. Most of that growth is coming from operational teams solving their own problems.
Why the term matters now
Three things have changed at the same time.
IT backlogs. In most large organisations, requests from operational teams sit in a queue behind larger technical projects. A change that takes two hours to configure can wait in a support queue for months.
The cost of change. When every update needs specialised IT dev time, improving a workflow can cost more than the benefit delivered. Teams stop asking, and inefficient processes stay inefficient.
The pace businesses now move at. Governments update their rules. Companies reorganise their departments and business units. If every one of those changes needs a development project, the business is always in catch up.
Can non-developers really be trusted with enterprise workflows?
Yes, when the platform enforces governance centrally. The risk in citizen development is not that business users make poor design decisions. It is that workflows get built outside any central control, with no audit trail and no consistent permissions. A platform that sets those rules at the system level removes that risk.
This worry makes sense when people build workflows using tools that were never meant for the job. For example, a spreadsheet full of hidden formulas, a small database one department set up years ago, or a form builder someone bought without telling IT. These are exactly what IT teams are afraid of, because nobody is checking them and nobody else knows how they work.
A proper BPA platform works differently. The rules about who can do what, who approves what, and what gets recorded are set once, centrally, for the whole system. Every workflow built on the platform then follows those rules automatically. The business user chooses how the process should work. The platform decides what they are allowed to do, and records everything they do.
What is needed for citizen development to work at scale
Governance and permissions set centrally
Access rights, approval hierarchies, and country-specific rules should be set once, at platform level. They should not be left to the person who builds each workflow. This means a business user cannot accidentally create a process that misses a financial control, because the control is set by the system rather than by the design of an individual workflow.
A full audit trail on every action
Every submission, approval, rejection, and data change should automatically be logged and time-stamped. This serves two purposes. Compliance teams get the evidence they need without additional work, and any workflow built by a business user is as trackable as one built by IT.
Templates and guardrails, not a blank canvas
Citizen development works best when common workflow patterns are already built and available to adapt. Starting from a template removes most of the chance that something will be designed with issues, and it makes the first build much faster.
Vendor support for the framework and complex integrations
The initial setup, and any complicated connections to other systems, should be handled by the vendor before business users take over the day-to-day work. Organisations often skip this step, and it usually shows later. Programmes that skip it tend to stall after the first few workflows.
What citizen developers can and cannot do on KUBE 365
On KUBE 365, business users can build and modify workflows, forms, and approval routing through drag-and-drop configuration, with no coding knowledge. Highly unusual requirements may need basic code or vendor input, and the initial framework and complex integrations are set up by KUBE 365 before internal teams take over.
What business users build themselves. Forms, approval routing, conditional logic, notifications, and the day-to-day modification of live workflows. Common templates are included, so most processes start from an existing pattern rather than a blank screen. Users can begin building basic workflows within around two hours, and comprehensive training usually takes less than a week.
Where help is needed. KUBE 365’s experts handle the initial set-up and Unique or technically unusual requirements may need basic code, input from an internal IT team or support from KUBE 365 directly. Any platform that claims business users can do absolutely everything is describing something that’s not built for an enterprise environment.
For example, an automotive group operating across 10 markets up-skilled its internal team to digitalise processes up-skilled its internal team to digitalise processes on KUBE 365 without vendor support, rolling out to more than 2,000 users and digitalising over 100 manual processes in 12 months.
How to start: choosing your first citizen developers and their first workflow
Choose people who own a process, not people who like technology. The best citizen developers are the ones who already know where a workflow gets stuck, because they deal with it every week. Technical interest helps, but process knowledge is more important.
Choose a first workflow that is small and annoying. Leave applications, expense claims, or asset requests work well. They are well understood and are frequent enough to show clear results quickly. If they sit inside one department the first build does not depend on agreement across teams.
Set the rules before the first build, not after. Decide who can create workflows, who approves them before they go live, and what needs to be recorded. Setting this up while you have one workflow takes an afternoon. Doing it later across forty is a much bigger job.
Measure the result and share it internally. Record how long the process took before, and how long it takes afterwards. That number is what proves you are doing the right thing and unlocks the next set of workflows.
Citizen development does not remove IT from the picture. Instead, it frees technical teams from routine process building so they can spend their time on more technical or complex projects. To talk through how this could work in your organisation, speak to our team today.
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