Democratising innovation: Zoho on the perks and pitfalls of citizen developers

The Singapore government is among one of the most advanced and creative in terms of technological innovation, so much so that the public sector is expected to “out-innovate” even the private sector.

Stating this, Zoho APAC’s VP and GM, Gibu Mathew adds that for public agencies to stay ahead of the curve, they should look at the unique experiences and placements of each and every public officer in devising new innovations.

“We are moving into a situation where everyday citizens are well informed. They have good exposure and opinions on how technology should be used. These are the people who comprise the workforce today.

“In that context, how can you make use of that trend in the country and allow these individuals to be citizen developers that can bring more innovation and digitalisation within the government?”

As opposed to traditional models of innovation that tend to be driven from the top-down, citizen developers initiatives have pioneered a new wave of public sector innovations ranging from customer-facing services to back-end dashboards, he says.

Low code/no-code platforms are software development tools that allow users to build apps with minimal or no coding experience.

“The beauty of low-code platforms is that they bridge the gaps between IT teams and business users. It takes away a lot of the tedious tasks involved in rolling out an application,” Mathew notes.

Bridging the gap between citizens and developers

While citizen developer programmes empower public officers with keen insights of the pain points in a given task to develop a suitable technical solution, Mathew highlights key gaps public agencies need to address to roll out successful programmes.

He points out a mindset gap between citizen developers and IT practices that must be established and adhered to from “day zero” to ensure that proper guardrails are in place.

He cites the example of shadow IT within data management practices. This refers to the use of IT resources within an organisation without the explicit knowledge or approval of the central IT department.

Shadow IT can lead to violations of data privacy regulations, data security or other company policies, as these unsanctioned systems are not subject to oversight.

Mathew also stresses that citizen developer programmes should be treated as any other upscaling initiative. This is because of the perceived skills mismatch among upcoming citizen developers.

Similar to how adoption can be driven for other skills like data or AI literacy, he adds that confidence and structured learning formats drive adoption.

This suggests that building confidence in both the security of low code platforms and the skills of the user through small scale workshops and pilot projects will display the tangible advantages of citizen developers that users can buy into.

“When more and more employees start thinking with their ‘app building hat’, they will think of new things to automate. This helps build a more creative environment where citizen developers can overcome challenges faced,” says Mathew.

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Navigating the citizen developer wave

From sandboxing to testing to production, Mathew stresses that the rise of citizen developers doesn’t mean that traditional IT processes go out the window.

This is where Mathew sees the role of IT functions shifting from those of “execution” to that of “enabling and oversight.”

“IT functions will have to define and maintain standards while allowing creativity for citizen developers within the boundaries that are set,” he says.

Moreover, he highlights the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace that is like a “rollercoaster that has yet to land”, underlining the importance for Zoho to integrate AI features into its platform.

The recent addition of CoCreator in Zoho Creator introduces an AI assistant that further lowers the barrier to building applications. It enables intelligent app building with the use of voice or written prompts and even helps adding process flows and adding components using generative AI (GenAI).

Zoho Creator was first launched in 2006 as a web application and has since evolved into a low-code application development platform.

He highlights the new “AI skills” framework for Agentic Automation that allows a citizen developer to embed AI-driven decision logic and actions into the tool, without having to build it from the ground up.

The tools created can further learn based on the data that has been inserted into Zoho Creator to make automated recommendations.

Mathew shares the example of a loan processing form that collects a user’s data, where after a human user can input data, a prediction field can include a model to predict fraudulent entries based on historic data.

The updated platform incorporates AI-powered data cleansing and modeling capabilities. These features eliminate data inconsistencies and establish logical data structures automatically.

Innovation at scale

Looking ahead, he sees that innovative solutions will proliferate across departments, thereby encouraging a more integrated approach to problem-solving.

“Integrations will become a lot simpler because it's on the same backend data. You then may want to start pulling information from external systems and tying it together with your low code platform and other national infrastructure like GovStack or MyInfo,” he adds.

With Zoho Creator’s new range of AI features, Mathew highlights that each application tested and used serves as the “building blocks” for future advancements.

“Many of our applications have the best practices from our 20 years of experience in professional application building. We have brought these into our low-code platform to empower citizen developers to create robust applications.

“Public sector transformation doesn't need huge budgets; with low code platforms you could democratise organisation-wide digitalisation by building real-world applications,” he concludes.