Types of Developers

Business technologists are employees who sit outside of IT and create technology capabilities for their organization to use both internally and externally. Some are hired by business teams specifically to build technology and solutions, while others are focused on other aspects of the business and only create solutions on the side. Business technologists have varying degrees of technical training, but all of them sit outside the IT organization.

Business technologists are on the rise due to a larger emphasis by many enterprises on technology and data to drive innovation. For many employees, work largely revolves around technology, whether or not creating solutions and digital capabilities is a primary responsibility. These business technologists will be most successful partnering with IT, and working within IT-established governance frameworks and guardrails. This ensures they are enabled, onboarded and trained correctly, and data and system access is controlled to promote safe, secure innovation.

Citizen developers are a subset of business technologists, and specifically describe those developers without extensive technical training that do not develop applications or solutions as their primary job focus. They are motived to use technology to solve business problems, and typically develop applications and solutions to better execute their own daily tasks. Citizen developers typically gravitate towards process-oriented thinking and problem solving.

Professional developers have formal software development training and sit in centralized or business unit IT departments. Professional developers may benefit from the Quickbase’s low-code platform as they are able to use less resources and develop solutions in a fraction of the time of traditional development. IT organizations play a large role in the success of a platform like Quickbase, especially when it comes to governing the platform and properly enabling business technologists. IT developers working collaboratively with business teams to instill controls and guardrails will promote company-wide innovation while protecting important data and keeping systems secure.