We are all programmers now
Ron Immink
I empower innovative, purpose driven companies by crafting compelling visions for the future. Make them more compelling for all stakeholders. Strategist, positive futurist, coach, advisor, mentor, author and speaker.
It was the title “All Hands on Tech: The AI-Powered Citizen Revolution”. An AI-powered citizen revolution. In short, the answer is “yes”.?
Technology abstraction
Ever since I had the pleasure of working with PMI on their citizen development proposition and having worked with some very bright people on this topic (Sunil, Arjun, Jesse, Alwin, Henri, and? Liam, to name a few), I have been interested in the impact of technology abstraction on future organisations. I think it will be profound. As technology (abstraction) will level the playing field, the only success factor remaining is culture. Citizen development should be part of that culture. The need to create a platform of shared values, mission, vision, and agency.? Some companies still resist significant citizen development, but it seems inevitable in the long run.
Shortage
The starting point of citizen development was simple. 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. The labour shortage left companies with big plans and small teams to achieve those plans. The one bright light in that reality was that technology was getting “easier.” Amateurs were building applications that could previously only be created by professional technologists. It was and is all par with the maker movement.
We are all technologists
To compete in the future, companies know they need more IT capabilities and makers, and the current supply chain has failed to provide the necessary resources. As a result, 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.
No going back
And now, these genies cannot be put back in their bottles. The creation of technology at the front lines will fundamentally change the way change happens. And there is no going back. Now, generative AI has come along and transformed everyone’s notions of how best to communicate with smart machines for citizen development and many other purposes. Those developments are the converging trends of technology becoming more human and humans becoming more technical.
It is good for business
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 organisational culture, citizen development can be a transformative force—a game-winning home run—for organisations.
Empowerment
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.?
The future of coding is no coding at all.
Citizen-oriented tools became more common and more powerful between 2015 and 2022, slowly shifting the balance of power away from IT departments and toward the hands of citizens. Thanks to the mass simplification of technology development, we are all now the potential builders of the next generation of these tools. Generative AI is the final straw that breaks the model of most IT development. The future of coding is no coding at all.
Imagine two different organisations
In one, the IT organisation tries to carry the load by itself. In the other organisation, digital transformation was a broad organisational mandate. The latter is considerably more “digital agile” and has a much higher innovation capability and clock speed.
The questions
Those are the principles. Then, the book becomes a handbook. With interesting questions. Such as:
The issues
Addressing issues such as cyber security, shadow or rogue IT (and soon shadow AI), governance, guard rails, empowerment, training, education, LCNC, architecture, workflow, RPA, ERP, CRM, system gaps, repositories, tech stack, data stewardship, AI enablement, maturity models (awareness, acceptance, adoption, industrialisation and absorption), fusion teams and the evolution of citizen developer to citizen data scientist.
Examples
Examples include Shell, PWC, Siemens, Dentsu, Arcadis, Amtrak, Microsoft, BMW, Johnson and Johnson, the Mayo Clinic, Arcadis, etc.
The concepts
And covering concepts such as digital accelerators, hackathons, fusion teams, centres of excellence, digital portals, community development, open source, MVP, prototyping, technical debt, business intelligence, data, culture, and how the strategic benefits of citizen activity come with targeting, scale, experimentation and innovation, and better decision-making.
It is not going away
Innovative organisations will continue to implement more technology into their operations, and all hands will need to be mobilised to create and use it effectively. Citizen development isn’t going away and will only become more pervasive. If citizen developers and IT people become (more) indistinguishable, what does this mean for the future of the IT organisation? You should question if citizen development is a relevant term today. Should it be changed to employee enablement?
We are just getting started
And now imagine combining citizen development with quantum computing, blockchain, augmented reality, IoT, and the internet of many, many things. We are just getting started.