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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Supercharge your organization's capacity for innovation
The greatest untapped asset in an enterprise today is the ingenuity of its people. Dive into a future of work where technology empowers everyone to be a creator and builder with All Hands on Tech: The Citizen Revolution in Business Technology. This pivotal book offers a comprehensive look into the role of citizen developers—business domain experts who are driving IT-enabled innovation using technology previously reserved for professional technologists. Through case studies of citizens and citizen-enabled enterprises, the authors demonstrate how emerging technology bestows unprecedented power on these individuals and unprecedented value on the organizations that channel their efforts. They outline a transformative approach to citizen development that not only enhances companies' innovative capacity via the empowerment of domain experts, but also minimizes risk and liberates IT departments to pursue more strategic initiatives.
All Hands on Tech describes a revolution in work—powered by technology becoming more human and humans becoming more comfortable with technology. This convergence provides a clear pathway for enterprises to leverage the on-the-ground experience and insight of all employees. The authors provide diverse examples of companies that have aligned the work of their citizen developers with wider organizational goals across citizen data science, automation, and development projects. These examples demonstrate why and how to commit to the citizen revolution in your organization.
In the book, you'll:
- Discover the untapped potential of citizen developers to revolutionize business operations with technology democratization
- Find a practical framework for integrating citizen development into a broader corporate digital and data strategy, while controlling risk
- Explore a forward-thinking approach to redefining the roles of all hands in an enterprise, empowering them to turn ideas into applications, automations, and analytical/AI models
For business leaders, executives, managers, and IT professionals looking to harness the full potential of their front-line employees and redefine the landscape of IT work, All Hands on Tech is a must-have resource. For business domain specialists and those eager to turn ideas into action, the citizen revolution democratizes information technology and empowers you to lead your organization towards a more innovative and efficient future. For subject matter experts, domain specialists, and those eager to put their ideas to work while also future-proofing their careers with invaluable skills, the citizen revolution ushers in an entirely new way of working.
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Seitenzahl: 456
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Preface
Jay Crotts: Bringing “Shadow IT” Into the Light
Benjamin Berkowitz: A Finance Professional Turned Citizen Automator
“Mr. Citizen”—The Citizen Development Pioneer with the Arrows to Show for It
The Future of Work
Notes
Introduction
Our Experience
For Whom Is This Book Intended?
Why Is Citizen Development a Good Thing?
What You’ll Learn In This Book
PART 1: Background, History, and Context
1 Why Citizen Development Is Inevitable
What Are Citizens?
Why Is Citizen Development Growing?
The Front Lines of Digitalization
Monarchy, Federalism, or Anarchy?
Like Seemingly Everything Else, Citizen Development Is Social
Making Citizen Development Safe and Effective
Generative AI and the Future of Citizen Development
Notes
2 A History of Citizen-Led Innovation
Outsiders and Insiders in Business Improvement
The Open Innovation/Crowdsourcing Movement
Open Source in Software
The Maker Movement
The Growth of Citizen Science—Starting with Ornithology
A Slow but Pronounced Shift
Notes
3 The Citizen Journey
Diverse Journeys
Initial Capabilities
Automation Comes Next
The Journey to More Sophisticated Analytics
The Citizen’s Career in a Large Organization—for a While
Citizen Data Science in an Organization That Welcomes Them
A More Dramatic Career Transformation
PART 2: Calling All Hands
4 Citizen Development Using Low-Code/No-Code Tools
1
How Did We Get Here?
It’s Not Just Citizens
What Can an Organization Do with Low-Code/No-Code?
Citizen/Professional Collaboration and Fusion Teams
Generative AI as a No-Code Solution
How to Succeed with Low-Code/No-Code
Management Challenges with Low-Code/No-Code
Notes
5 Citizen Automation
Citizen Automator
Types of Work Well-Suited to Automation
The Offices Where Automation Plays
The Origin Story of Broad Automation Adoption
Who Is a Citizen Automator?
Where Does Citizen Automation Belong?
What Is the Upside of Citizen Automation?
What Can Go Wrong?
The Future of Citizen Automation
Notes
6 Citizen Data Science
Citizen Data Analysis
True Citizen Data Science
What Is the Upside of True Citizen Data Science?
What Kinds of People Become Citizen Data Scientists?
What Kinds of Problems Should Citizen Data Scientists Take On?
Citizen Data Science and Data Flow Automation
How Can Citizen Data Scientists Work in Data Science Teams?
How Will the Citizen Data Scientist Role Evolve Over Time?
Notes
7 The Skills and Personality of Citizens
Workers of the Future, in the Future of Work
Personality Traits of a Citizen Developer
Mindset
Skills of the Future
Skills of Citizen Developers
The Final Tally
Notes
8 The Citizen Champion: With and Without Air Cover
Shell: High Air Cover
Dentsu and Tinuiti: Air Cover, but Citizen Focus When Ready
Arcadis: Growing Air Cover Over Time
Quiet Growth in Citizen Development at Amtrak
Lessons from Citizen Development Champions
The Long-Term Fate of Citizen Development Champions
Notes
PART 3: Getting to Work
9 The Citizen Tech Landscape
Information Technology Is Important—Duh!
What Makes a Tool Citizen-Ready?
The Evolution of Programming Languages
Current Citizen Tools and Platform Landscape
New Developments for Citizens in Business Intelligence
The Generative AI Era of Citizen Development
10 Benefits of Citizen Development
Targeting and Scaling Improvement Benefits
Innovation and Experimentation Benefits
Notes
11 The Organizational Response to Citizen Technology
The Two Stereotypical Positions
Beyond the IT Resistance Stereotype
An Emerging Third Party
“Governance” of Citizen Technologies
Citizen Technology in Highly Regulated Businesses
Putting It All Together: Balancing Risk and Reward
Notes
PART 4: Setting Sail
12 Preparing to Set Sail
Maturity Models
Cast of Characters
13 Genesis
Genesis Fork 1: Submit or Just Commit
Fork 2: Create or Orchestrate
Fork 3: Revolution or Evolution
Starting Strong with the Fundamentals
Notes
14 Governance
Fork 4: Tolerate Risk or Avoid Risk
Fork 5: Bottom Up vs. Top Down
Fork 6: Centralize or Federate
Enabling a Successful Voyage
Notes
15 Guidance
Fork 7: Solo or in Teams
Fork 8: Direct or Explore
Nurturing the Crew
Community Building
Ideation and Creativity
Notes
16 Guardrails
Fork 9: Stewards or Shields
Facilitating Best Behaviors
Note
17 The Future of Citizen Development
Citizen Development: Too Pervasive to Have a Name?
The Future of the IT Function and IT People
Coaching and Assessing, Not Developing
Ultimate Fusion
Broader Tech and Data Leadership
The Role of AI
A Citizen-Ready Checklist
Preparing to Set Sail
Genesis
Governance
Guidance
Guardrails
B Citizen Development Challenges Organizations Are Likely to Face
C Additional Resources
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Index
Copyright
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 13
Table 13.1 Stakeholders and Their Benefits
Table 13.2 Key Performance Indicators
Chapter 14
Table 14.1 Risks of Citizen Development
Table 14.2 Common Organizational Structures for Citizen Development
Chapter 15
Table 15.1 Levels of Citizen Capability
Table 15.2 Popular Types of Citizen Development Communities
Chapter 16
Table 16.1 Policy Guardrail Domains
Table 16.2 Automated Guardrails
Table 16.3 Financial Guardrails
List of Illustrations
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1 The intelligent automation toolkit
Figure 9.2 The generative enterprise
Chapter 12
Figure 12.1 A citizen development maturity model
Figure 12.2 Primary and secondary citizen development roles
Figure 12.3 The 4Gs model for enabling citizen development
Chapter 14
Figure 14.1 The three-zone model for citizen development
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Introduction
Begin Reading
A Citizen-Ready Checklist
B Citizen Development Challenges Organizations Are Likely to Face
C Additional Resources
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Index
End User License Agreement
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All Hands on Tech
The AI-Powered Citizen Revolution
Thomas H. Davenport and
Ian Barkin
with Chase Davenport
Preface
Jay Crotts: Bringing “Shadow IT” Into the Light
It’s fitting to begin this book with the story of an unlikely hero of citizen development. Jay Crotts is a semi-retired former chief information officer of Shell PLC, the energy giant. Jay Crotts was executive vice president and group CIO of Shell from 2015 to 2023, and about halfway through his tenure he had a bit of a revelation. Shell was in a race to digitalize its business, and Crotts just didn’t feel like it was happening fast enough. His global IT function had a multibillion-dollar annual budget and more than 8,000 staff and contractors, but they still couldn’t satisfy the demand for applications, automations, and analytical models around the company.
Crotts kept telling his people that they needed to get closer to the business in order to create value, but he realized that there were plenty of people in the business who could create value with IT as well. People were getting citizen-oriented tools in their hands, but he was a bit worried about what they were doing with them.
Crotts was based in the Netherlands, and the European Union had passed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016. He was afraid that citizen development would get out of control and that employees would violate the law by inadvertently making available critical personal data—the medical records of sailors on Shell tankers, for example. He felt that there were lots of smart engineers and other employees at Shell doing innovative things, but there was no safe place to access and store the data they needed to use. Crotts knew those people were thinking, “I want to be productive, but there is no place to do it. Crotts’ group says no, because there is a risk of GDPR violations or cybersecurity issues.” He looked around the energy industry and elsewhere to see if anyone else had solved the problem, and they hadn’t. Many CIOs were still viewing citizen development as undesirable “shadow IT,” but Crotts saw it as a way to bring it out of the shadows and into the light.
So Crotts put Nils Kappeyne, one of his trusted business unit CIOs, in charge of the do-it-yourself (DIY) initiative. They didn’t want to call it citizen development because they were afraid engineers might think they were being taught how to vote. Crotts thought the initiative would work out well, but he wasn’t sure. The critical thing, he believed, was finding a safe place to access and store data for citizen use. He told Kappeyne to find a place to put the data, and then data owners—which already existed—throughout the business would determine access to it. He said to Kappeyne at the time, “What will bring people to your platform is where the data is.”
As the DIY program was rolling out, Shell was deepening its partnership with Microsoft, and that vendor was making big bets on both cloud and citizen development. The data at Shell for citizen use ended up being stored in Microsoft’s Azure cloud. And the vendor had also just introduced its Power Platform—a collection of citizen-oriented tools for application development, business intelligence, web portal development, and later workflow automation. Crotts and Kappeyne placed their DIY bets on these Microsoft tools and a few others from vendors like Salesforce.com.
Kappeyne thought that he could keep his day job as a business unit CIO while getting DIY going, but Crotts felt otherwise. “It needs to be big,” he said. Kappeyne, already a Shell VP, suggested that the program wasn’t worthy of a VP title, and he could take a demotion. “It needs to be big,” Crotts said, “and you should keep your VP title.” Kappeyne also thought that he could establish the DIY program within a couple of months. Crotts doubted it but didn’t say so. Kappeyne stayed in the job for a couple of years and then reluctantly handed it off to somebody else.
Crotts also supported a collaboration with Shell’s research function on citizen data science. Dan Jeavons, the head of that initiative, reported into the research organization but was formally included in the IT leadership. Shell collaborated with Microsoft Azure to be able to run models at scale in the cloud. As with the application development DIY program, data was provided to the data scientists, “and they could go to town,” Crotts remarked. The DIY approach, accompanied by effective cloud security, enabled data science to thrive. It was a good fit for a culture where, as Crotts put it, “engineers—many of them come out of school knowing Python these days—question a model if someone else develops it.”
Some IT people worried about losing their jobs, but Crotts thought that they—or some, at least—would move from being developers to coaches and enablers. And that is what has happened. Shell still has plenty of professional developers, and in many cases the DIY program has brought the business and the IT people into closer collaboration.
One influential aspect of the Shell DIY approach to citizen development is the “zone” program, in which different zones (green, amber, red) get treated differently in terms of governance. We’ll describe the approach later in the book, but suffice it to say here that it has been adopted by a variety of organizations. Microsoft has endorsed it for Power Platform customers, for example, and the Project Management Institute has adopted it for its teachings on citizen development. Several companies we spoke to said they had adopted the Shell zone approach.
But perhaps even more influential for the worldwide spread of citizen development has been the idea that a corporate IT organization can get behind citizen technology activity and give it the support it needs to thrive. Crotts is pretty modest about this achievement:
People really liked it, and it’s one of the fastest things going. A significant number of engineers adopted DIY, and we’ve given them credit for the work. The tools are easy to use, and the data is there. Once other CIOs understood it they thought it made sense.
Crotts mentioned several DIY projects that have enabled energy transition activities or substantially reduced fuel consumption in Shell operations. He doesn’t say that citizen development has transformed the huge company, but as he put it, “We’ve hit singles all across the globe.”
Benjamin Berkowitz: A Finance Professional Turned Citizen Automator
One shining example of citizen automation turning a domain expert into a digital transformation leader is Benjamin Berkowitz. A self-professed “finance guy,” he was motivated to solve operational and budgetary challenges in the hospitals where he worked. He studied history and psychology in college and earned an MBA. He’s now pursuing a PhD in management and organizational behavior. He wanted to know what made enterprises tick.
Berkowitz began his career in the healthcare field, working first as a financial analyst at Boston Children’s Hospital before moving to Mass General Brigham (MGB). Based in Boston, MGB is the largest hospital-based research enterprise in the United States, with revenues of nearly $19 billion and more than $2 billion in annual research funding. It is, in short, a hospital with a lot of work for its finance department. Berkowitz’s 11-year career at MGB afforded him the chance to experience and impact almost every part of it. Starting as a team lead for payer strategy and contracting, he then moved to lead revenue calculation and revenue finance systems, finally becoming director of financial analysis and strategy, and chief of staff of revenue cycle operations—the lifeblood of any healthcare business, since it’s how the organization gets paid for its work. But on this journey he found himself doing more than simply overseeing financial functions.
Berkowitz had always been interested in making work processes more efficient and effective. Early in his career that meant using Microsoft Access to automate reporting. He then graduated to using SQL to process large data sets in order to process revenue models. This trend then accelerated in his revenue cycle job at MGB. In his own words, Berkowitz was “bouncing around from department to department, automating as he was going.” He didn’t know he was a citizen automator; he hadn’t even heard the term. He was just applying his penchant to problem-solve to challenges as they presented themselves and using the automation tools at his disposal.
Berkowitz’s pivot to becoming a full-time champion of automation began while looking at budgets, as finance people are wont to do. The growth of MGB’s operations over the previous decade had been strong. Staff levels grew accordingly. But Berkowitz was now facing a challenge. He had 800 people in the RevCycle and Shared Services Center and no end in sight to growth in hiring. The challenge was compounded by talent shortages and rapid wage inflation. Clearly the status quo wasn’t sustainable. As part of a budget planning conversation, he said to his VP, “There must be a better way for us to manage all of this work.”
His next steps (highlighted in an article1 Berkowitz coauthored) addressed the growing scale of work to track and catalog an increasing number of healthcare providers. The current system was slow and inefficient. It took three different hospital administrators to collect, aggregate, and export data, all of which was performed manually.
In response, Berkowitz and his colleagues recruited external developers and partnered them with a process specialist from the finance department to redesign workflows to better facilitate automating the tasks sequence involved. They developed automations to collect provider data, format it, and present it to members of the finance team. Their solution also highlighted the next actions, so as to assist the team in efficiently moving each process forward. The results were frontline finance employees being free to focus on higher-value work and the ability to handle provider growth without having to hire more staff.
Berkowitz was hooked. But his organization needed more convincing before jumping headlong into automation. Berkowitz then pursued lots of research, conferences, discussions with experts, and proofs of concepts to help settle on robotic process automation (RPA) as the tool of choice. His tenacity paid off, and he was able to convince his leadership to set up a new department. In 2019, with strong support from his CFO, he established the intelligent automation department with himself as director, reporting to the VP of finance and administration. Always budget conscious, Benjamin then faced the choice of how to staff the initiative. He decided rather than bringing on a large team of developers, he would recruit internally for citizens like himself. What’s more, he would focus his efforts on the five to six departments where operational improvements from automation would have the biggest impact. He didn’t want to leave out other, smaller departments like legal and contracts, so he set up a small central team of developers to support their needs.
He opened up internal recruiting to anyone who wanted to be an “embedded developer”—a name chosen to emphasize that the team was made up of subject-matter experts (SMEs) working closely with and serving their colleagues. These citizen automators could have the business-level discussions that IT would struggle to have, and they knew who to go to for answers to their questions.
Next, he needed to generate buzz, recruit talent, and put in place a series of best practices. In addition, since he was reporting up to finance leadership, he was conscious that he needed to nurture a strong working relationship with IT if this was to be a success, The embedded citizen developers and centralized developers would all report to him, and they would surely encounter issues involving integration with multiple systems.
To attract talent, he provided a clear and rewarding career path, with a new job code, a different pay scale, and three levels of qualification—junior, normal, and senior automation developer. He also created an intake lead role in which a person could play part champion, part ambassador, working with departments to look for opportunities to leverage the tools and capabilities of the team. Berkowitz described this role as similar to a primary-care physician: helping a department diagnose a workflow situation and working with the right specialists to develop automation solutions that fit their needs.
The success of Berkowitz’s department was no secret; one day in the spring of 2021, he got a call asking if he wanted to come to work at the pharmaceutical company Vertex, a pioneer in the development of treatments for serious diseases like cystic fibrosis and sickle cell. Ready to try out a different industry and a different set of potential challenges, he said, “Let’s give it a go.”
Berkowitz now serves as the director of digital automation at Vertex. Unlike at MGB, he works for IT and has a centralized team. As stated on his LinkedIn profile, he is “creating pathways for citizen developers throughout the organization, further democratizing automation tools and accelerating the return on investment of the program.” Vertex is rolling out a different tool set than he used at MGB, which is more focused on cloud-based citizen development.
Of note, Vertex’s leaders have set a bold top-down mandate of discovering five new drugs in five years.2 Berkowitz hopes that leveraging his team’s automation capabilities will contribute to making this bold goal a reality.
As for the MGB program, its success gained the attention of the IT organization. Upon his departure, the IT department laid claim to the team.
“Mr. Citizen”—The Citizen Development Pioneer with the Arrows to Show for It
Although in our research we found many examples of organizations embracing citizen development, that doesn’t always happen. One prominent proponent of the idea—we’ll call him “Mr. Citizen” because he works for a consumer products company, which didn’t want us to identify the company or him—advocates strongly for the idea internally and externally in social media (from which we take this description), but hasn’t always received support from his organization.
Mr. Citizen wasn’t always a citizen developer. For many years he spent most of his workday entering data into Excel. The area in which he works is a data-rich activity, but the data typically comes from all over the place: ERP systems, supply chain management systems, marketing projections, sales databases, and lots of spreadsheets. He became very good at moving data in and out of Excel spreadsheets, but he knew that he—like every other human—occasionally made mistakes in this process. He crammed so much data into Excel that the program often broke. And it wasn’t much fun. It also didn’t allow much time for thinking about big-picture improvements in his business process.
Despite the tedium of the Excel work, Mr. Citizen did it for years because he knew of no alternative. He wanted to spend less time on data entry and manual reporting, and more on statistical analysis of the data. He and his colleagues had asked his company’s IT department for systems that would make this process much easier, but they never got much encouragement—the IT backlog was too long, and they wouldn’t take on any project that wasn’t an enterprise process.
So Mr. Citizen began looking for alternatives to Excel. He tried a popular business intelligence tool, but it didn’t really help much. So then he explored a tool known for its analytics and “data pipeline automation” capabilities called Alteryx, and a system called Tableau for the visual analytics of the data and statistical analyses. Later he experimented with a tool for automation of data integrations and APIs called Parabola. These tools saved him lots of time, and he became an advocate for their use both inside and outside his organization. These tools weren’t supported by the IT department, but Mr. Citizen found them easy to download and use. He wasn’t banned from using them, but IT told him that he didn’t need Alteryx because all it did was write SQL queries. Why didn’t he just write them himself, they asked. Of course, it was because he is not a SQL programmer. Still, he struggled to get his IT organization to put Alteryx and the other tools on the list of approved software. He continued to build tools to save himself and his colleagues time and drudgery, reducing the need for IT professional help, but getting no respect for it.
Mr. Citizen could probably spend all of his time as a citizen developer, but he believes that a key aspect of his value—and that of any citizen developer—is his combination of citizen technology skills and business function expertise. Because he possesses both types of skills, he can now not only build many technology solutions for his part of the business, but also communicate effectively with IT professionals about requirements for enterprise-level systems they might build. He commented on social media that he believes entry-level workers should spend their time learning some aspect of the business (supply chain management, for example) and not learning professional IT skills.
On social media, Mr. Citizen wrote a sort of “open letter to IT teams” blog post (it’s long, so we won’t reproduce it all here) that expresses his relationship to them, as well as listing some of the accomplishments he and his team made with citizen technologies:
…And if I’m being honest, you weren’t always the best to work with. You had a real command-and-control approach to technology: We’d ask you for something and you’d gather a bunch of requirements just to disappear for 6 months and come back with something that usually missed the mark.
Remember that huge business intelligence initiative we did? We were going to modernize our whole reporting infrastructure into a one-stop shop for all our supply chain analytical needs. You came to me with big promises.
But when it came time to gather requirements, I was vague. I had no idea how to tell you what I needed, and you didn’t know the business well enough to understand me. In the end (18 months late and way over budget), you left me with the same stuff I had before, in a slightly prettier package.
This doesn’t have to happen anymore. Your approach is changing, it’s less about command-and-control and more about enablement—empowering operators with a flexible stack and all the tools we need to solve our problems on our own.
I’m changing, too. I’m using low-code/no-code tools—as a citizen developer—with loads of benefits:
I’ve saved a ton of time and money
(without having to bug you much). Literally thousands of hours, millions of dollars.
I’m more data literate.
I’ve been building my own data pipelines, working with relational databases and creating my own data models.
Because I’m more data literate,
my communication with you is becoming more effective.
I don’t give you vague requirements anymore—I talk in terms of selection criteria, filter criteria and modeling steps.
And that huge backlog of yours – I can help
alleviate
it.
There aren’t enough of you to go around, so you rightfully prioritize the big stuff – and there are lots of smaller things that I know you’ll never get to. We can take care of that stuff ourselves now.
Here are some examples of what my team and I have been able to do with little to no help from you:
We automated our product allocation process,
a highly manual process that in my 11+ years here you never wanted to touch. We were able to save over 40 hours
per week
(not to mention the huge morale boost for our allocation team).
We built out a data model and a suite of analytics to support our promotional planning process.
It routinely identifies millions of dollars worth of planning errors. But the need for this was specific to our market, so it was never going to make it to the top of your backlog.
We built functional prototypes of data models
that supported our demand planning and claims teams. In fact, they’re serving as inspiration for your product teams to build global solutions.
You might be skeptical. You’re worried about governance and best practices. I get it. But that’s no reason to tell us not to use low-code/no-code tools – it’s a reason for you to help us learn these practices. You’ve developed them over decades – we won’t get it overnight, but with your support, we’ll get there.3
Mr. Citizen, as his remarks suggest, is conscious of governance in citizen development himself, and writes social media posts to people in other companies counseling them to follow responsible citizen practices like building only small solutions, producing documentation, and testing for data quality. The IT group in his company, as he also acknowledges, has finally admitted that citizen development might be useful in some circumstances, but the group still appears to be more interested in controlling it than encouraging it.
Like some other citizen developers we’ve observed whose work is not appreciated by IT or their broader organization, we’d guess that Mr. Citizen is likely to eventually leave the company. However, we have no doubt that he’ll find another company or entrepreneurial venture in which he can create value from the combination of skills he now possesses. We also suspect that his employer—even its IT teams—will miss him.
The Future of Work
Stories like Jay Crotts’s, Benjamin Berkowitz’s, and “Mr. Citizen’s” are becoming more common in enterprises across the globe. This sort of change is taking place at companies of every size, in every industry, across every function, department, and team.
Challenged by staffing shortages and inflation, facing heightened competition, and coming to grips with the reality that every element of a business is now inextricably attached to data and software, leaders and individual contributors in companies of all sizes are stepping up and stepping in to drive the changes they know are needed. They are beginning to succeed, empowered by an enormous shift in the power dynamics that have long defined enterprise operations.
Technology is no longer owned by any one department or function. Data and its analysis are no longer the property of only the PhDs and the hard-core number crunchers. And these genies cannot be put back in their bottles. From now on, all employees have the ability to be system designers, data analysts, coders, and creators. Every one of them is empowered to act on their unique set of experiences and their specific levels of expertise with process, product, customer, partner, or whatever other component of the elephant they touch every day. No one knows it better. And, until now, no one was able to contribute such well-informed insight toward making things better. The value of this grassroots, bottom-up, SME-first approach to transformation cannot be overstated. Creation of technology at the front lines will fundamentally change the way change happens. And there is no going back.
However, there is certainly more to be done to ensure that we can all move forward successfully. Because, while employees are more empowered than ever before, the question is, are they ready? Are their enterprises ready? Are the policies, procedures, and controls ready to safely enable this new reality?
We think the answer is no—or at least not yet in most organizations. But there are significant efforts being made to prepare. Some of these efforts will prove successful; others will not. Our discussions with leading global organizations, midsize national organizations, and small local firms has revealed a wide range of awareness, preparedness, and maturity of mechanisms in place to make the most of what can only be described as a revolutionary new way of imagining, enacting, and driving change. This book is our attempt to distill what we’ve seen and what we believe enterprises need to consider in order to jump onboard a train that has already left the station. Failing to do so will likely result in entire enterprises finding themselves in the way of that very train.
Notes
1
Ben Armstrong and Benjamin Berkowitz, “Scaling Automation: Two Proven Paths to Success,”
MIT Sloan Management Review
, February 28, 2024,
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/scaling-automation-two-proven-paths-to-success
.
2
https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2024/02/05/vertex-2023-earnings.html
.
3
“IT Teams—Can We Talk?”
Parabola.io
blog post, Feb. 2024,
https://parabola.io/blog/it-teams-can-we-talk
.
Introduction
When we began discussing the idea for this book, the COVID pandemic was just receding, leaving behind it a tumultuous set of realities about how work was to be conducted going forward. Bosses and their employees were trying to determine where work should occur (return to offices or continue to work virtually) and who would be doing the work (talent shortages were only just starting to become the new reality of enterprise growth and resource management).
We knew that automation and intelligent machines were already a significant force in enterprise operations. Tom had recently published his 22nd, 23rd, and 24th books—all about artificial intelligence (AI) and the role that it was playing in transforming business operations, analytics, and skills needed for the future. Ian had just co-authored his first book on intelligent automation. He had recently sold his robotic process automation (RPA) consulting firm, which had helped large enterprises grasp, adopt, and manage process automation in their front- and back-office operations. There was no doubt in our minds that AI-powered automation was a hot topic. But, the question remained, who was going to be doing the automating? Similarly, there was also no doubt that data was taking a center-stage role in almost every transformation discussion. But who was going to be doing the collecting, cleaning, and analyzing of it?
The labor shortage left companies with big plans and small teams to achieve those plans. The one bright light in that reality was that technology was clearly getting “easier.” Amateurs were building applications that could previously only be created by professional technologists. Data science teams were able to do more with the teams they had—harnessing capabilities like automated machine learning (autoML) that allowed data scientists to leverage more sophisticated models in less time, sometimes taking advantage of people with quantitative—but not PhD level—skills. IT teams were able to develop testing scripts more quickly and integrate systems with easier tools than application programming interfaces (APIs), once the only digital glue that could hold a company’s plethora of systems together. A little later, generative AI came along and transformed everyone’s notions of how best to communicate with smart machines for citizen development and many other purposes.
Amid the reality of talent shortages and technology advancements there would emerge two major forces that we believe will forever alter the landscape of work—and we’re confident that’s not hyperbole. Those developments are the converging trends of technology becoming more human and humans becoming more technical. This book is our exploration of that reality, in which everyone (if they so choose) can play a significant role in shaping the type of work they do and how they do it.
We see this as a good-news story. It’s an aspirational tale of the unleashing of human ingenuity at scales never before seen or, until now, possible. This is a reality in which anyone with the gumption and a get-up-and-go spirit can design, build, and use complex information creations of their own imagination.
That said, this is also an environment in which much could go wrong if those same creators are not guided, supported, and overseen by those with greater knowledge of data security, compliance, and general best practices. The last section of the book is devoted to these risk-reduction approaches.
Our Experience
This book is the culmination of many years of discussion and sharing of our respective points of view on the trends and changes occurring in the world of work.
Tom’s points of view came from his extensive research, consulting, and writings on AI, data science, and the application of analytics in enterprises. His publications in both journals and in book form have covered a wide range of topics including automation (Only Humans Need Apply), analytics (Competing on Analytics, Analytics at Work), and AI (The AI Advantage, Working with AI, All In on AI), and low-code/no-code development (“When Low-Code/No-Code Development Works—and When It Doesn’t” in Harvard Business Review). Ian’s experience was a bit more hands-on, having come from the outsourcing industry and cofounding an automation consulting firm that was an early pioneer in applying RPA and other intelligent automation tools to digitize routine work tasks and processes. He also developed a series of courses hosted on LinkedIn Learning that helped enterprises upskill their teams on topics such as RPA, intelligent automation, process mining, process discovery, and conversational AI—the tools that were helping to empower employees.
We met a few years ago and continued to talk over time about automation, AI, and digital transformation. We shared our disappointment about the slow pace of digitalization in organizations and the excessive marketing claims of some AI and automation vendors. While conversing about these topics, we realized we also shared an interest in citizen development. We started by researching and coauthoring a couple of articles (“We’re All Programmers Now” in Harvard Business Review, and “Harnessing Grassroots Automation” in MIT Sloan Management Review) and then decided we’d keep things moving with a book. Since then we’ve interviewed more than 50 executives and companies involved in citizen development and had many, many Zoom conversations, a few podcasts and webinars, and a couple of face-to-face meetings to digest all the learnings from early adopters.
We’re convinced that citizen enablement with technology is here to stay and will have major implications. So in this book we will examine the elements and frameworks that we believe will shape the next decade or more of enterprise operations. We will examine the technologies that are in play today and appear inevitable on the near horizon. We will discuss the skills that are needed, and are in high demand, in enterprises of every size across the globe. We’ll describe the individual roles necessary to make citizen initiatives effective, including the frontline worker, the IT manager, the executive leader, and the customer. Each of these roles is being altered, empowered, and compelled to adapt in order to survive and thrive in an environment where technology is as pervasive as process.
For Whom Is This Book Intended?
We’re confident that reading this book and moving into citizen development is of benefit to a variety of audiences. For different types of readers, however, the ideas and lessons we hope to transmit are somewhat different. If you’re an enterprise leader, we hope to persuade you that citizen development is both inevitable and beneficial. Your actions and support can accelerate the movement and make it more successful, however. One option is to simply get out of the way, but we believe that a better one is to get on board, encourage the productivity and innovation it can engender, and try to align it with your organization’s strategies and objectives. In addition, there are likely to be some cultural changes necessary for citizen development to thrive. One key example is to adequately motivate and reward citizen development and the benefits accruing from it so that productive citizens stay in your employ. Those types of changes can happen only with senior management support.
We’re also targeting this book at the millions of technically savvy people in organizations who are or can be citizen developers. Throughout it we try to describe both organizations and specific individuals (as in the preface) who are enabling this revolution. If you’re in the individual contributor category, read on to find out the benefits to you and your career of jumping on this bandwagon. You’ll also learn about what technologies you could be using; what types of applications, automations, and models you might develop; and how you can get support from the rest of your organization. Overall we believe that your jobs will be more fulfilling and productive if you use these powerful tools to improve work.
There may also be some generational differences in how individuals approach citizen development. If you’re in Gen X or Y or are a Boomer who’s still in the workforce (as Tom is), you’ve accumulated a lot of domain expertise about the businesses in which you’ve worked. Unless you have made an effort to master each new technology that comes along, you may feel that you are a bit less tech-savvy than those digital natives who live on their smartphones. We will argue that citizen development will change your job too, however, and you will want to embrace the change. Your domain expertise makes you incredibly valuable as a citizen developer, and we hope you’ll either become one or work closely with some you encounter at work.
If you’re in Gen Z or Alpha (more power to you for an early start!), you are less likely to have a lot of business experience, but you are probably quite comfortable with the personal use of various technologies. If you adopt citizen tools as you learn about business, you’ll probably be much more productive and effective than most of your peers.
This book is also for information technology professionals (or professional automation or data analysis/science folks). You may not be terribly positive about citizen development, but we hope to persuade you otherwise. More and more IT organizations are embracing this trend, and we hope you will too. Citizens could certainly use your help, and their business expertise combined with your technical chops could make for some great outcomes.
Overall, the citizen revolution is a good news story for all the groups listed. But, it’s also a wake-up call and a call to action. Unlike any previous wave of technology, this generation of citizen-oriented tools is more accessible, enterprise environments are more porous and easily disrupted with citizen-class technologies, and the citizens are clamoring for the opportunity to apply their expertise and make things happen. We have structured the book to share what we’ve learned in our research, outline frameworks and approaches we believe will set you up for success, and leave you with a bit of inspiration that the future of work has a place for us all and that all hands will (in some way or another) be on tech.
Why Is Citizen Development a Good Thing?
There will be many places throughout the book where we explore the benefits of harnessing the ingenuity of domain experts, augmenting them with technical superpowers never before available. We dedicate Chapter 10, “Benefits of Citizen Development,” to exploring the benefits in depth and showcasing the numerous ways in which this wave of grassroots innovation will serve to transform both the future of work and the workers involved. But we felt it important to draw your attention to some highlights right up front.
In our research, we were able to speak to dozens of global organizations, most very large, several in the medium to small category. We surveyed several hundred firms thanks to LinkedIn polls and webinar surveys we were able to deploy during discussions of the two journal articles we mentioned earlier that served as the catalyst for this book. What we found was strong evidence that citizen development is both real and really valuable.
Enterprises that are able to launch and support citizen programs report higher degrees of process innovation, more rapid and agile experimentation and solution deployment, operational efficiencies, cost savings, and perhaps most encouraging, higher levels of employee satisfaction and retention. If done on a large scale, with senior executive support and substantial resources and with substantial attention to change in jobs, business process, and organizational culture, citizen development can be a transformative force—a game-winning home run—for organizations. Even at a minimum it’s a great way to score runs with walks, singles, and an occasional extra-base hit.
Empowering domain experts with the ability and the freedom to turn their ideas into applications, automations, and higher-order analysis, is good for all stakeholders involved. Furthermore, the citizen development movement is a blueprint for how the work of the future can incorporate breakthroughs in generative AI and other forms of AI, while ensuring that the focus is on a humans + AI equation for optimal outcomes.
What You’ll Learn In This Book
Here’s a breakdown of each chapter in the book.
Chapter 1: Why Citizen Development Is Inevitable
Citizen development refers to the process of employing easy-to-use tools to create and deploy custom applications, automations, or data analyses by nontechnical users. This approach empowers business users, citizen developers, or power users to create software solutions without having to rely on IT departments or professional developers, analysts, or data scientists. Citizen development has emerged as a solution to the growing demand for digital transformation and the need for speed, efficiency, and agility in software development. We assert that this trend is both impactful and unstoppable.
Chapter 2: A History of Citizen-Led Innovation
Harnessing the creativity of employees is not new. Throughout the history of enterprises, approaches have been used and improved in order to tap into the ingenuity, creativity, and subject-matter expertise of those closest to the tasks and processes that make up a modern operation. This chapter explores the history of citizen-led innovation, creation, and solutioning.
Chapter 3: The Citizen Journey
Citizen developers can play a number of different roles in organizations, have a variety of paths toward becoming citizens, and have a range of career progressions as a result of their technology orientations. In this chapter, we explore these variations in depth, along with some of the factors that drive different outcomes for citizen roles and careers.
Chapter 4: Citizen Development Using Low-Code/No-Code Tools
Low-code/no-code (LC/NC) application development tools are the original citizen development technologies. Leading software vendors have embraced the idea, and many companies are now encouraging citizens to develop applications for individual or departmental use. This chapter covers the types of applications to which LC/NC tools are put, the role of IT in collaborating with citizens, and the likely future of citizen development using generative AI for coding and broader application development.
Chapter 5: Citizen Automation
Citizen automation complements app development, introducing software as a means of handling the routine and transactional work common in every enterprise. Citizen automators use the intelligent automation tech stack, including RPA, intelligent document processing (IDP), and other cognitive tools to integrate between systems, digitize workflows, and automate rule-based decision-making. In this chapter, we explore the roles played by work optimization, outsourcing, and automation, and we speculate on the advancement of the citizen automation toolkit in light of generative AI and large action models.
Chapter 6: Citizen Data Science
Citizen data science—and its less demanding cousin, citizen data analysis—involves developing not applications or automations but data outputs such as dashboards, displays, predictive models, and AI-based recommendations. Data analysis is well-accepted for citizens in most organizations, but “true” data science is more problematic. In this chapter, we discuss the state of citizen data science and analysis, provide some leading examples, and speculate on what tools like generative AI will do to change the situation.
Chapter 7: Skills and Personality of a Citizen
There is no one personality profile or skill set that makes for an ideal citizen. However, there are characteristics and traits that help to identify those likely to embrace the opportunity to apply domain expertise to the pursuit of technology-enabled problem-solving and solution development. In addition, just as people have traits, so too do companies and departments. In this chapter, we explore the telltale signs of productive and creative citizens and citizen-ready organizations. We’ll also break down some of the specific skills necessary for citizen application development, citizen automation, and citizen data analysis/science.
Chapter 8: The Citizen Champion: With and Without Air Cover
A critical aspect of making any citizen initiative successful is a savvy and energetic champion within organizations. This chapter describes some of the activities they perform and the value they provide. A key distinction among champions is how much “air cover” or executive support they have. We show how their strategies for making citizen development thrive differ with different levels of support and resources.
Chapter 9: The Citizen Tech Landscape
What are the popular citizen tools, applications, and platforms? Citizen development platforms typically offer drag-and-drop interfaces, visual builders, and prebuilt components that simplify and accelerate the development process. Some of the popular low-code or no-code platforms used by citizen developers include Appian, Microsoft Power Apps, Salesforce Lightning, OutSystems, and Mendix. These platforms offer a range of features and functionalities, such as data integration, workflow automation, and mobile app development. We also discuss citizen automation and data science/analysis tools and the directions they are all likely to take in the future.
Chapter 10: Benefits of Citizen Development
Citizen development offers several benefits to organizations, such as increased agility, faster time to market, reduced IT backlog, and cost savings. By enabling users to create applications, businesses can streamline processes, automate workflows, and improve decision-making. Citizen development also has strategic implications when done at scale. It also promotes strategic benefits like innovation and creativity by giving users the freedom to experiment and try new ideas without the need for technical expertise.
Chapter 11: The Organizational Response to Citizen Technology
Historically, there have been two key parties involved in battles over citizen development: citizens, who support it, and IT organizations, which oppose it. We describe these two camps and their positions in some detail. We also describe how third-party groups can help citizen development thrive. We provide several detailed examples of how organizations have responded to citizen development.
Chapter 12: Preparing to Set Sail
While citizen development offers many benefits, it also comes with some challenges and risks. To ensure successful citizen development, organizations should establish governance policies, provide training and support, prioritize security and compliance, and foster collaboration between citizen developers and IT professionals. Other best practices include identifying business needs and goals, selecting the right platform, and measuring the impact of such initiatives.
Chapter 13: Genesis
It is likely that your organization has citizen development activities underway and in every department, region, and function. That said, a formal program depends on a solid beginning. Even if the train has left the station, the importance of starting strong cannot be underestimated. This chapter outlines the features of a strong start and proposes best practices for setting the tone, clarifying the mission, and launching a sponsored and enterprise-grade citizen development program.
Chapter 14: Guidance
Once an initiative is announced and the mission is declared, the next steps are to select a leader, identify citizen candidates, and provide the necessary training and tools to get to work. This chapter showcases the elements that leading citizen development initiatives use to create strong behaviors, habits, and capabilities across the team. In addition, the chapter highlights levels of training and methods with which to incentivize performance.
Chapter 15: Governance
The success of a citizen development initiative is measured both in the outcomes created and in the safety and rigor with which the outcomes are delivered. Recognizing that citizen developers are not formally trained in security, compliance, or risk management, this chapter explores ways in which to adapt traditional governance measures to balance control with a level of freedom. This is done to encourage citizen-led creativity and development, while also safeguarding an enterprise’s systems and data.
Chapter 16: Guardrails
A close relative to an overall governance strategy, this chapter explores various guardrails that high-functioning citizen initiatives have put in place to ensure compliant development and automation development. This chapter also explores other forms of guardrails that include financial controls and security protocols—all catering to the level of awareness and authority that a citizen is granted within their enterprise’s development environment.
Chapter 17: The Future of Citizen Development
In this chapter, we try our hand at being futurists, forecasting the direction of travel for enterprise tech, organizational change, and the fate of domain experts. We explore the impact of natural language coding, which will truly allow all hands to be on tech. We also consider the role of IT in this new world of fusion teams, broadly embedded technical skills, and an empowered ecosystem of internal stakeholders. Finally, we leave you with our hopes for the future of work, the worker of the future, and the leadership in that future. We wish them all smooth sailing.
Appendix A: Citizen-Ready Checklist
This appendix provides a “citizen-ready” checklist to determine your organization’s readiness for extensive citizen development.
Appendix B: Citizen Development Challenges Organizations Are Likely to Face
This appendix lists a set of citizen development challenges that organizations are likely to face.
Appendix C: Additional Resources
This appendix provides additional resources for readers wanting to learn more about citizen development.
PART 1Background, History, and Context
1Why Citizen Development Is Inevitable
This is an unprecedented time in the 70-year history of business information technology. Amateurs, or citizens
