#076 - Citizen Development for Engineers: Bridging the Gap Between Domain Expertise and Digital Tools

A Discussion on Implementing Engineer-Led Development Within Professional Engineering Firms

A few months ago at the BST Global AI in AEC conference, citizen development emerged as one of the most compelling topics of discussion. The concept, originally coined by Gartner, an IT research and advisory firm, centers on organizations giving their employees controlled freedom to develop their own solutions and applications for specific use cases. The goal is discovering new efficiencies and streamlined processes by leveraging a fundamental truth: nobody understands the depth and complexity of engineering problems better than the engineers solving them.

The conference presentations focused heavily on large organizations with dedicated IT and development teams leading these initiatives. What struck me was how this missed the reality for the majority of engineering companies. Most firms operate with fewer than 2,000 employees, and many have fewer than 100 or even 50 people. These organizations simply lack the bandwidth to dedicate specialized resources to citizen development programs.

Yet these smaller companies represent the bulk of our industry, and they face the same productivity challenges as their larger counterparts. They need the same efficiency gains, the same ability to automate repetitive tasks, and the same competitive advantages that come from empowering engineers to build focused solutions.

The solution requires embracing citizen development as a foundational approach that establishes baseline digital literacy across entire teams rather than focusing only on the technical outliers who are already pulling ahead.

When Expertise and Tools Don't Align

Traditional software development follows a waterfall model: engineers identify a need, buy a product/service or submit a request to IT, wait for resources, explain their requirements to developers who lack domain expertise, receive a solution that may miss key nuances, and iterate through multiple rounds of corrections. By the time the tool is delivered, the original need has often evolved or disappeared entirely.

This system made sense when software development required specialized hardware and esoteric programming languages. Today, with cloud computing, intuitive programming environments, and AI-assisted coding, the barriers to entry have collapsed. Yet many organizations still operate as if we're in the mainframe era.

The result is a growing disconnect between the pace of engineering challenges and the pace of digital solutions. Engineers are forced to work around inadequate tools, maintain complex spreadsheets as mission-critical systems, and manually perform tasks that could be automated in hours rather than months.

The sheer amount of heavy lifting done by Microsoft Excel in engineering and construction is a testament to its versatility. However, our reliance on it is also a vulnerability. We're using a generalist tool for specialist work, when more rigorous, transparent, and efficient frameworks are readily available. I’ll stop there, this is a topic for another day!

Engineering by Engineers, for Engineers

Citizen development represents a fundamental shift in how we think about problem-solving tools. Instead of treating software as something that happens to engineers, it positions engineers as active creators of their own digital environment.