The term Citizen Developer was coined by Gartner, a leading Information Technology analyst firm, to describe the accelerating trend for individuals who are not trained in typical IT disciplines taking the lead in creating and evolving new business applications.

These individuals are typically knowledge workers who are closest to understanding the problem that they are trying to solve and the information that is needed or available.  In the past these ambitious people may have been able to help create some limited, departmental applications using local productivity software such as Microsoft’s Office suite or others. But this movement has exploded over the last few years as the tools available have made it far easier to embrace critical, enterprise-wide application as well. As Kim sees it, this is a movement that is all about speed and responsiveness to a business world that moves too fast for traditional command-and-control structures of implementing information technology. And the Kim Platform is at the leading edge of those trends.

Kim is a unique product platform that has been designed from the ground up to be implemented and controlled by the Citizen Developer/Knowledge Workers in your organization. If you know how to use standard desktop productivity tools such as Microsoft Word or Excel, you will quickly learn how to configure and adjust the Kim platform, or one of the specific applications that have been built using its capabilities, even when you are using it for comprehensive, enterprise-wide projects. Therefore, the typical goal of a Kim client is to be self-sufficient, so they can just “get on” with using Kim to solve their business problems.

However, we recognize that the needs of our clients vary significantly, and even for those wishing to be self-sufficient, many projects start with a need for a well-defined set of capabilities that need to be achieved in the minimum amount of time and with the maximum business value. Kim has therefore established tailored implementation approaches to meet the diverse needs of our clients.

In the cases where your implementation may just focus on a specific function or departmental set of requirements, or if you have a relatively small team, then an end-to-end enterprise implementation methodology may just be overkill.

Our approach in this situation is to help you identify the highest value use cases for what you are trying to achieve and implement them for you in parallel with your key administrator(s) being trained on the system. The end result is a fully functioning application/configuration that meets your needs in a few weeks, with your team having the expertise to carry forward and continue to expand and evolve how you use the system over time. Of course, the Kim team never goes away. We will always be available after you’re live and operational to provide expert assistance through our Support program, described below.

The Kim Platform and the pre-configured solutions that have been created using its capabilities are all available on a global basis through our Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) delivery model.

All that you need is a web browser and access to the internet in order to harness the power of Kim for your business.

We partner with Microsoft Azure to provide a global, scalable and highly secure software delivery environment. Each of Kim’s primary data center locations is paired with a secondary data center within the same legal geography in order to support the latest and most stringent data protection laws that may inhibit cross border transfers of information for processing. By structuring our delivery network with data center pairs, we are also able to provide automated and on-line data back-ups and disaster recovery capabilities as an inherent part of our delivery model. We currently serve our global client base from data center pairs located in the United States, United Kingdom, Hong Kong/Singapore and later in 2018 will be adding a pair on the mainland of the European Union.

Kim takes security very seriously. All of the data entrusted to our systems is encrypted both in motion and at rest, and we manage an ongoing and robust security assessment program which includes evaluations and audits by internationally recognized third-party firms for ongoing vulnerability scanning and penetration testing and assessment. A critical factor in our selection of Microsoft Azure as our data center provider is its alignment with the high priority Kim places on the security of our client’s information. The Microsoft Azure security and privacy certifications can be found at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/trusted-cloud/