Empowering Business Analysts with Pega’s Citizen Development

Today, businesses are always looking for ways to work faster and involve more people in creating apps. They want to boost productivity and get products to market quickly.

Pega, a top-tier low-code platform, provides a solution that's gaining popularity: citizen development. This strategy enables business analysts and non-developers to develop applications and automate processes, lessening reliance on IT and hastening digital transformation. In this article, we'll delve into how Pega's citizen development features are revolutionizing the way business analysts operate.

The Role of Citizen Development in Pega

Citizen development refers to the practice of allowing non-developers, such as business analysts and subject matter experts, to create software applications using low-code or no-code platforms. In Pega, this approach has gained prominence as a way to bridge the gap between IT and business needs.

Pega's citizen development approach recognizes that business analysts possess valuable domain knowledge and can actively participate in application development. By enabling them to use low-code tools, Pega empowers them to solve business challenges more efficiently.

Pega's Low-Code Platform

Pega's low-code development environment is at the core of citizen development. It provides a visual interface that allows users to design applications and automate processes with minimal hand-coding. This is a game-changer for business analysts who may not have extensive coding skills but understand their organization's operational need.

Figure 1 Process view in Pega App Studio

The low-code platform simplifies the development process, making it accessible to a broader range of professionals. It eliminates many of the technical complexities, enabling business analysts to focus on solving business problems rather than writing extensive code.

Benefits of Citizen Development in Pega

The benefits of citizen development in Pega are numerous:

• Agility: Business analysts can quickly design and modify applications, responding to changing business needs with agility.
• Faster Development: Citizen developers reduce the time-to-market for new applications and features, accelerating digital initiatives.
• Cost-Effectiveness: Lower development costs result from reduced dependency on IT and shorter development cycles.
• Workflow Optimization: Citizen Developers can create and optimize workflows for specific business processes, enhancing efficiency and consistency.
• Customer Interaction Management: Business analysts can design applications that facilitate personalized customer interactions, enhancing the customer experience.
  
  

Collaboration between IT and Business Analysts

Pega's citizen development approach encourages collaboration between IT professionals and business analysts. This collaboration streamlines the development process and aligns IT with the organization's business goals.

Best Practices: A Success Story from the Financial Sector

A compelling example of the real-world impact of Pega's citizen development capabilities can be seen in the experience of a leading financial services company. The company faced challenges with their customer Feedback for Changing their personal data. To address this issue, they decided to empower their business analysts with Pega's low-code tools.

The Challenge

The company's process for handling customer feedback related to changing personal data was slow and inefficient, involving multiple manual steps, different applications, and frequent delays. This traditional process was heavily reliant on IT, leading to bottlenecks and frustration among customers and employees alike.

The Solution

Initial Workshop for Process Design

• Collaborative Design: IT and business analysts initiated the project with a workshop to map out the existing process for changing personal data. Using Pega's low-code platform, they collaboratively designed a new, streamlined workflow.
• Domain Expertise: Business analysts provided detailed insights into the customer feedback requirements, while IT ensured the workflow's technical feasibility and integration with existing systems.

Citizen Developers Take Charge

• Hands-On Development: After the workshop the business, now acting as citizen developers, took the lead in refining and adjusting the new workflow using Pega’s intuitive visual interface. They can make changes and restructured the process based on their operational knowledge and feedback.
• Empowerment: Business analysts can quickly implement changes, test different scenarios, and continuously improve the process without needing constant IT support. Pega provides a specific Toolset within their App Studio that is designed to be used by Citizen Developers.

Figure 2 Adding of a new email content with AI

IT Focuses on Technical Integration

• System Integration: While business analysts work on refining the workflow, IT focuses on ensuring that the new system integrated seamlessly with other company systems. This includes setting up necessary interfaces, managing data flows, and ensuring security and compliance.
• Support and Oversight: IT provided ongoing support and oversight, addressing any technical challenges that arise and ensure that the system remained robust and efficient.

Final Adjustments and Deployment

• Optimization: IT and business analysts work together to make final adjustments, optimizing the process for peak performance and reliability.
• Deployment: Once the system is fully refined and tested, it is deployed company-wide, providing a streamlined, efficient process for changing customers personal data.

Further Development and Enhancement

• Continuous Improvement: Pega's visual tools make it easy for non-technical users to make changes to processes. They can add email features or update the user interface without IT help. This allows for ongoing optimization. This allows for ongoing optimization.
• Agile Adaptation: Leveraging Pega's low-code platform, citizen developers swiftly respond to business needs by integrating new functionalities, such as data validation checks or communication channels like chatbots or SMS, ensuring agile adaptation without operational disruption.
• Streamlined Development: Pega helps citizen developers streamline development by integrating new features efficiently and reducing the need for traditional IT support. This allows for quicker responses to business needs and improves overall process efficiency.

Figure 3 Adding a new field

This approach demonstrates the tangible benefits of Pega's citizen development capabilities. It shows how working together can improve important business processes. It demonstrates the benefits of giving business analysts easy-to-use tools in a practical situation.

Conclusion

Pega's citizen development capabilities are transforming how business analysts and non-developers participate in application development. Pega offers a low-code platform with tools like App Studio, AI Features, and blueprint generation. This allows business analysts to use their expertise to improve agility, save money, and speed up digital transformation efforts. The collaboration between IT professionals and business analysts creates a dynamic environment that fosters innovation and efficiency.

Pega's citizen development helps organizations make the most of their employees in a rapidly changing business world. By empowering business analysts, Pega is driving a new era of application development and process automation.

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