While enterprise-level/ department RPA (Robotic Process Automation) solutions are important, it is the individual and smaller group level solutions that have the power to unlock automation at scale and achieve higher business value. Given this background, digitally-enabled citizen developers have become critical today.

• Who are citizen developers?
• How Do Citizen Developers Help Address the Scaling Challenge in Enterprise Automation?
• How does digital enablement help?

Here’s your answer.

Who are Citizen Developers?

Citizen developers are non-technical users or non-developers who push forward an enterprise’s digital transformation efforts. Despite not having any coding or programming education or experience, citizen developers create and deploy their own automation programs for themselves or for a small group to address challenges facing them. They are not shadow IT departments or outsourced developers, but empowered problem-solvers from across the enterprise who are building workflows using pre-approved tools and runtime environments sanctioned by the IT department.

The core idea behind citizen development is that the nature of building automation must be so simple that anyone, with or without programming/coding/technical knowledge, can engage in building and deploying automated workflows. It should be possible for them to solve all kinds of work problems, howsoever small scale or individual-centric they may be. 

Citizen development, thus, is about empowering business users with digital fluency and hassle-free tools to create simple automations to free themselves from manual drudgery, data-intensive processes and low-value tasks.

How Do Citizen Developers Help Address the Scaling Challenge in Enterprise Automation?

The short answer…

The IT department and expert developers are constrained for time or resources.

The long answer…

The scalability of automation depends majorly on how you define your processes. Processes are typically of three types based on their complexity

• Low complexity
• Medium complexity, and
• High complexity

High complexity processes cannot be addressed by citizen developers, given their lack of programming skills. The automation and transformation of high complexity have to be taken up by expert developers – that is your IT department.

However, the high-complexity tasks comprise only a part of all the processes and can only take enterprises so far in their automation journey. A majority of processes with a great impact value within an enterprise are centered around low and moderate complexity processes/use cases that are typically out of the purview of IT departments. This is the case for any industry.

When enterprises engage in digital transformation initiatives, they start off with a scope and strategy. What makes it to their scope of automation are typically high-priority, high-value and complex business processes that affect the entire enterprise or department/ function. So, their strategy would involve deploying company-level RPA solutions with digital assistants and bots to address those challenges. The work of pro-code developers and IT experts, thus, focuses on larger strategic targets such as driving a competitive edge through a transformed process, reducing costs, addressing CX and EX and so on.

If enterprises want to unlock scale in their digital transformation journey, they must nurture citizen developers to automate low and moderate complexity tasks.

• Citizen developers help find multiple, diverse automation opportunities at the grassroot level that often go unnoticed by expert developers engaged in advanced automation.
• Citizen developers help reduce the burden of the IT team and pro-code developers: Pro-code developers do not have the time and resources to take on every automation request. So, a bottom-up approach helps in covering a lot more ground than the top-down approach of enterprise-led automation.
• Another key benefit of using citizen developers in terms of scalability is that they are closer to the processes they are automating. They engage in those activities, day in and day out. They have a clearer picture of how the process can be improved.
• The resistance to change will be lower as they experience the benefits most. If a pro-code developer had to do this, there would be a massive amount of back and forth to understand the process, develop the workflow and iterate it to prevent project failure.
• With the help of a no-code/ low-code digital enablement platform, citizen developers can drive greater efficiencies at a much-accelerated pace.

How does Digital Enablement Aid in Building Citizen Developers?

Digital enablement is the people-centric process of augmenting people across roles and functions to become super productive at work with personalized AI-powered digital assistants. The digital assistants act as interns who take on tasks that people do not want to do and experts who equip them with timely, contextual intelligence and real-time insights. The very foundation of digital enablement is to empower people with digital fluency necessary to go about their work more efficiently and generate greater value.

Digital enablement platform by Techforce.ai have low-code/ no-code capabilities that empower any business user to build their own automation solutions, addressing challenges at their level of work. The skills required to work with such a platform are extremely simple and thus, easily acquirable. It cuts across no-code, low-code and pro-code developers. Everyone has equal footing to develop workflows that will free them of busywork and guesswork, enabling them to focus on high-value core activities.

Let us look at an example.

The Bottomline

As we move deeper into the technology-driven industry era of business, automation has become an undeniable, indispensable need for enterprises to achieve massive gains in efficiency, effectiveness, accuracy, time saving and cost saving. Empowered with cutting-edge digital enablement platform like Techforce.ai, citizen developers help unlock scale in automation and accelerate value generation from enterprise-wide automation.