Weekly Business Insights from Top Ten Business Magazines | Week 315 | Strategy & Business Model Section | 1

Extractive summaries and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Since September 2017 | Week 315 | September 22-28, 2023

We’re All Programmers Now

By Thomas H. Davenport et al., | Harvard Business Review Magazine | September–October 2023 Issue

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Information technology has historically involved builders (IT professionals) and users (all other employees), with users being relatively powerless operators of the technology. Citizen development has sparked a new era in which employees not only improve or streamline their own processes and tasks but automate them entirely.  Citizen development, if executed aggressively and carefully, could change the relationship between employees and organizations.

With no need for an IT professional to design and build new applications, systems developed using generative AI will be more likely to fit the specific needs of their users, increasing the probable effectiveness of the applications. IT professionals will be freed up to focus on complex systems and technologies that truly require their expertise. Nonetheless, many IT staffers with whom the authors spoken are opposed to citizen development. They fear that it will result in poor-quality systems that the IT team will have to repair—or that generative AI tools will replace IT entirely.  Despite those valid concerns, the need for citizen developers is obvious. 

Organizations need to complete several tasks if they want to be as successful at citizen development. All the tasks must be undertaken, but they needn’t be done in the following order, and changes or improvements in one task can often be made without dramatically altering others.

1. Recruit and Classify Your Citizen Developers.  Some companies look for certain traits in the employees they recruit for these initiatives. Johnson & Johnson, for example, says that it seeks people with a logical mindset, technical competence, and an aptitude for learning, plus experience with rules-based work.  The types of citizen developers vary according to the roles they play. They include scouts, who identify opportunities for improvement and change; designers/architects, who develop new and better ways of doing things; developers/automators, who build the applications that deliver those process improvements; and data scientists/analysts, who study, analyze, and report on the status of the old and new processes.
2. Train and Certify Your Developers.  Citizen development does require some training, though not a lot. On average, the companies where the reserach was conducted offer from 40 to 80 hours of instruction in the technologies and techniques needed to succeed. The degree to which certification is necessary may depend on how critical the given business area is or how much external regulation it is subject to.
3. Build a Citizen-Development Infrastructure.  To help citizen developers succeed, companies should give them standard tools and build infrastructure to make development easier. Whether the tool is a generative-AI system, an RPA tool, a low-code/no-code offering, or an automated machine-learning system, companies should provide training on it and encourage the sharing of partial or complete solutions.
4. Empower Community Learning.  Citizen developers need to learn from one another about how best to solve business problems with technology. One way to foster such peer learning is to offer regular classes, solution showcases, and presentations by external speakers. 
5. Prepare to Manage Value Created by Automation.  It’s likely that some observers will question an investment in citizen development if the value it creates goes unmeasured. Citizen development typically generates insights whose monetary value can be difficult to assess (although some central analytics teams do calculate the value of their use-case portfolios). The easiest measurement is of the time saved through citizen-developer automation of previously human-performed tasks. At some point it is fair to ask what employees are doing with the time saved. As one skeptical CFO put it, “We can’t eat hours.”

3 key takeaways from the article

1. Information technology has historically involved builders (IT professionals) and users (all other employees), with users being relatively powerless operators of the technology. Citizen development has sparked a new era in which employees not only improve or streamline their own processes and tasks but automate them entirely.  Citizen development, if executed aggressively and carefully, could change the relationship between employees and organizations.
2. With no need for an IT professional to design and build new applications, systems developed using generative AI will be more likely to fit the specific needs of their users, increasing the probable effectiveness of the applications.
3. Organizations need to complete the following tasks if they want to be as successful at citizen development: Recruit and Classify Your Citizen Developers, Train and Certify Your Developers, Build a Citizen-Development Infrastructure, Empower Community Learning, and Prepare to Manage Value Created by Automation.

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Topics:  Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Corporate Employees, Skills, Coding