What is a Citizen Developer and How Can We Best Support Them

Teaching my father how to use his first smartphone back in 2016 was certainly a challenge. He was not an early adopter of technology, in fact, quite late to the game at that point. But as we recognize here at SAP, the world is moving too fast and you don’t want to be swept up on your feet.

“I’m not a technology-whiz like you,” he would say at that time.

Now a mere six years later, and he has just upgraded to his second smartphone, and is quite comfortable with the functionalities that he has taken it upon himself to teach his less-inclined friends how to use their phones as well, such adjusting the text size to avoid changing eyewear prescriptions.

Here at SAP, we understand that there are people in your organization that are not professional developers. Between the ranks, there is range of managers, employees, and contractors that possess a wide array of skills in technology that need to work within your systems to get their tasks to run a more intelligent, sustainable way.

In order to best maintain the professional development resources you possess, we want to enable your business users

On the SAP Business Technology Platform, citizen developers can work with processes automation tools and begin building applications with no code at all. Once they feel more comfortable, they can advance to work with our low-code tools, which use very simple codebases while more complex code gets generated by the tool itself.

In short, you can have the members of your team who know your processes best be able to create the applications – without any prior knowledge. This is best enabled with SAP Build, our new product offering that allows you to build apps visually, integrate seamlessly within your systems, and collaborate effectively with other team members and professional developers.

SAP Learning provides a learning journey completely for free that can introduce you to low-code and no code development through SAP Build. Through this learning journey, you can learn on how to become a citizen developer in just a few hours, and explore SAP Build Apps, SAP Build Process Automation, and SAP Build Work Zone in-depth. In this training, you will have first contact with the product and gain hands-on experience, and show off your new skills with a free badge afterwards.

Like my father, anyone can become a citizen developer on SAP Build. If only he could develop a process that would turn off his snoring.