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This article was co-authored by Massimo Pezzini, Head of Research, Future of the Enterprise at Workato.

The uncertain economic environment and rapidly evolving technology landscape have pressured organizations to improve efficiency, innovate, and adapt. Citizen developers have emerged as an approach to bridge the gap between technical expertise and domain knowledge. Those self-taught deeply understand their industry’s needs and pain points, enabling them to create tailored applications that address specific challenges. Citizen developers are a vital resource for organizations looking to streamline processes, increase efficiency, and reduce costs, whilst supporting business innovation and agile change. One can trace the emergence of citizen developers back to end-user computing in the late 20th century. However, the rise of the internet and subsequent development of low-code and no-code platforms, increasingly assisted by AI technologies, are democratizing software creation.

Who is a citizen developer?

Citizen developers are non-technical employees who take the initiative to develop software applications or automate business processes without relying on IT departments or specialized software engineers, if not for training and support. They use “low-code” tools and technologies to address personal or workgroup-level enterprise development and automation challenges that are key for them but not critical enough at the enterprise level to deserve the attention of central IT.

These individuals possess a deep understanding of their industry’s needs and pain points, enabling them to identify opportunities for development and automation that can drive efficiency and productivity within their organizations. Citizen developers are business technologists (that is, they have “enough” IT skills) who can and want to address development and automation tasks alone, by using low-cost or free cloud services. Characterized by the low cost of entry, short learning curves, minimal training requirements, intuitive (often conversational) UIs, and AI-assisted high productivity, these tools empower users to excel.

Their goal is to:

Improve efficiency by automating their own or their workgroup’s formal or informal processes

Respond quickly to opportunities and threats (business agility)

Introduce new creative ways of doing their job (innovation)

Collect and aggregate the data they need to steer their activity or make operational decisions (insights)

Interact with the enterprise systems in a simplified, optimized, and personalized way (experience)

The key point is that they are enabled to achieve these goals at the micro-organizational level (department, workgroup, or even individual), whereas the central IT department focuses on the macro, organization-wide issues.

The implications

Enterprise automation technology providers increasingly offer tools tailored to citizen developers, making them easily and widely accessible through low-cost or free cloud services. While citizen developers can improve micro-efficiency, business agility, and innovation, they also present risks, such as security, compliance, privacy, data quality, duplication of efforts and technologies, and mounting technical debt.

In general, citizen developers may possess different technical expertise than professional developers, therefore the applications and automations they implement might be sub-optimally designed. Furthermore, these applications may need to be designed with scalability, a skill that citizen developers don’t necessarily master, thus potentially creating challenges as the organization grows.

Challenges can also arise in ongoing maintenance and support as the lifecycle of citizen-developed applications may not be rigorously managed. Consequently, outdated applications may remain in place for a long time, potentially harming the organization in the long run.

Additionally, the lack of coordination among numerous citizen developers can lead to fragmented processes, uneven development, and duplication of efforts across the organization.

Lastly, documentation by citizen developers can help others understand, maintain, and modify the applications they create, but usually documenting what they develop is not a priority for them.

Technical debt, that is the accumulation of technical issues, poorly developed and hard-to-maintain code, can arise when organizations do not put in place proper development governance processes. While citizen development has a good deal of merits, the risk of building technical debt looms large on it. Ensuring the appropriate governance guardrails are in place and involving the relevant people is essential for success.

“Strong governance is the cornerstone of successful citizen development, as it ensures that organizations can scale their digital initiatives enterprise-wide while maintaining control and compliance. By meticulously evaluating and choosing the most fitting combination of low/no-code platforms such as apps, automation, analytics, and BPM, organizations can unlock the power of citizen development while reinforcing the crucial role governance plays in fueling sustainable, secure growth.”

Neeraj Mathur, Director of Intelligent Automation, VMware

Citizen development is not a one-size-fits-all solution for building applications and automations. It plays a complementary role in optimizing certain business processes, but professional developers remain crucial for sustainable automation initiatives. Striking the right balance between citizen developers and professional developers is critical to successful enterprise automation.

Organizations that create a foundation of proper governance in citizen development and see the importance of finding the right mix of citizen and professional developers see tremendous success. Professional developers should handle complex, enterprise-wide business processes, while citizen development should focus on locally enhancing customer experience, building customer trust, and driving revenue. By addressing these considerations, organizations can maximize the benefits of citizen development while mitigating potential risks.

Measuring the return on investment (ROI) for citizen development and automation initiatives can be challenging, as they often involve a mix of formal and informal efforts with benefits that are difficult to quantify. Today’s market lacks specific, agreed, and measurable metrics for assessing citizen development success, aside from a number of enabled developers or new applications delivered, which primarily serve to fuel the hype. However, the value of the citizen developer approach can, in many cases, be assessed in terms of faster time to value and improved business agility.

What should CIOs do?  

Chief information officers (CIOs) should recognize that citizen development and automation will happen, whether they want it or not. It is much more effective to view it as an opportunity rather than a threat. Citizen developers can complement professional specialists by addressing the mass of medium or low complexity, local requirements that the few specialists CIOs have in-house will never find the time to tackle. As millennials and Gen Z join the workforce, the number of business technologists will naturally increase. Moreover, as these tools are increasingly enhanced by generative AI technologies, such as ChatGPT and Bard, their learning curve will further shorten, and their use will become even more widely democratized.

“Collaboration between Citizen Developers and IT can bring about the perceived benefits by minimizing the risk of creating flawed automation and receiving support from IT expertise. Although Citizen Developers can address their challenges, they could overlook the interconnectedness of systems and processes, resulting in unintended consequences. IT can provide a broader perspective on enterprise architecture, ensuring all stakeholders comprehensively understand the business.”

Karl Mosgofian, CIO, Gainsight

Therefore, CIOs should collaborate with business leaders to identify potential benefits and opportunities of citizen development and automation and incorporate its support into their enterprise automation strategy. Moreover, they should proactively empower business technologists by providing the right tools, training, mentoring, and support services through a citizen developer facilitation team.

This team should select tools that meet business technologists’ needs while allowing for monitoring, management, and governance. Implementing a marketplace for reusing the developed assets across the citizen developer community, a life cycle management process and proper governance guardrails will help minimize duplication of efforts. Establishing a citizen developer community of practice can foster knowledge sharing and feedback collection.

Periodic reviews of citizen development and automation approaches within the broader enterprise automation strategy will ensure continued effectiveness. CIOs and facilitation teams should aim to establish themselves as trusted providers of a “citizen automation platform as a service,” encompassing technology and enablement services. This position will encourage business technologists to actively utilize the tools provided by Centers of Excellence (COEs) instead of looking at the shiniest new tools that pop up on the Internet.

In today’s race to digital, the demand for customized software solutions will grow, making citizen development more compelling. CIOs and facilitation teams who can strike the right balance between citizen and professional developers and implement a governance framework that addresses risks and challenges will drive enhanced competitive positioning in the digital age. With proper planning, coordination, and oversight, citizen development can drive innovation, agility, and efficiency across the organization.

Developer, No Code and Low Code

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , ,

By Bryan Kirschner, Vice President, Strategy at DataStax

It’s high time to treat HR as every bit as important to your company’s artificial intelligence strategy as IT.

Alongside all the evidence that getting your developers working on AI is good for your business, there’s mounting proof that even providing the opportunity to work on—and work with—AI has a positive effect on job satisfaction, recruitment, and retention.

Getting this right matters a lot today. In 2022, McKinsey’s State of AI Report notes that “[s]oftware engineers emerged as the AI role that survey responses show organizations hired most often in the past year, more often than data engineers and AI data scientists … another clear sign that many organizations have largely shifted from experimenting with AI to actively embedding it in enterprise applications.”

And the stakes are high. In the data gathered for the latest State of the Data Race report, the developers most tapped into next-generation technologies (these are developers who describe themselves as “the first in their organization to learn about new tools and technologies” and those upon whom others rely on for answers about new tech) describe interacting with real-time data and building AI and ML-powered apps as the most important factors in deciding where to work.

Overall, developers in organizations with both AI and ML widely deployed were 15 percentage points more likely than those in organizations where AI and ML are in “the early days” of deployment to say that “tech is more exciting than ever.” Similarly, they were 18 points more likely to say they felt “energized” about their jobs.

AI: An opportunity for your developers to make an impact

It isn’t hard to grasp why. Developers have always leaned into technologies that enabled them to increase their impact and keep their skills up to date. (In State of the Data Race data, for example, about three quarters rate opportunities to learn and to use the latest technologies as important in their work.)

And now, with many CIOs feeling pressure from corporate teams to create AI apps that could quickly cut costs, AI offers the prospect of helping to recession-proof their jobs.

So it’s vital that your people strategy keeps up with the pace at which your competitors are pushing their developers to produce, but also the ways rivals equip them to not only be happier, but also more productive.

AI: A way to help your developers be more productive

AI has a role to play in this, too. New research that details GitHub Copilot’s impact on developer productivity and happiness really hammers this home. Nearly nine out of 10 (88 percent) of 2,000 developers surveyed said that using Copilot, a real-time AI assistant that offers code suggestions, made them more productive. Sixty percent said they felt more fulfilled with their job.

The words of one software engineer illustrate why: “(With Copilot,) I have to think less, and when I have to think it’s the fun stuff. It sets off a little spark that makes coding more fun and more efficient.”

But it’s arguably the perspective of one chief technology officer that tees up the call to action best: “The engineers’ satisfaction with doing edgy things and us giving them edgy tools is a factor for me. Copilot makes things more exciting.”

You already know that the apps that will most delight your customers and win you market share or margin going forward will be AI-driven. Developers who already work for you today—and those you might be keen to hire—are eager to get to work on them, and to use AI tools themselves. That’s a clear North Star for your business, people, and IT strategy to align toward, ASAP.

Learn how DataStax enables real-time AI here.

About Bryan Kirschner:

Bryan is Vice President, Strategy at DataStax. For more than 20 years he has helped large organizations build and execute strategy when they are seeking new ways forward and a future materially different from their past. He specializes in removing fear, uncertainty, and doubt from strategic decision-making through empirical data and market sensing.

Artificial Intelligence, IT Leadership

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

The Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) market is big and growing fast. Already worth more than $8 billion, analysts predict that the market will nearly triple in size to $22 billion by 2025. CPaaS is a cloud platform that exposes communications functions such as SMS, voice, video, and IP chat via programmable application programming interfaces (APIs) so that developers can more easily code these functions into applications, workflows, and systems.

Recently, Ericsson’s CTO Erik Ekudden interviewed Vinod Lala, Chief Strategy Officer at Vonage, on the opportunities on offer at the nexus of CPaaS and 5G. According to Lala, one of the key drivers behind the growth of CPaaS is business-to-customer engagement through mobile apps.

“As customers increasingly…‘live’ in their mobile phones, so businesses have reacted by communicating with them that way, via SMS, chat, or now even video and voice,” he said.

CPaaS simplifies the deployment of multi-modal communications integration and is therefore an ideal solution for both digital native brands and non-native brands looking to reach customers through apps.

The second key driver behind the evolution of the CPaaS market is the arrival of 5G APIs. As Ekudden explained, being able to connect to 5G is “very handy” for developers and enterprises as it provides access to a range of pre-built tools and capabilities including Quality of Service (QoS), network slicing, advanced security features, device status information, and precise positioning.

As Ekudden noted: “There’s a real opportunity to look at what 5G already brings and how that can fuel and enhance capabilities in existing applications and enterprises.”

5G APIs are therefore profoundly important to the development of CPaaS, unlocking network controls and thereby offering a whole new dimension to developers for enhanced use cases.

According to Lala, applications that rely on low latency, such as in gaming or telemedicine, will benefit the most from these capabilities. Indeed, many of the network features synonymous with 5G were built specifically to support such advanced applications.

5G APIs will therefore provide what Ekudden describes as a “missing gearbox” for developers to create new CPaaS use cases on a global scale.

5G APIs are helping to create win-win collaborations where developers on one side have the freedom to innovate, and communications service providers – on the other side –  can create revenue streams through the network value they reveal to developers.

Ultimately this evolution is about exposing and enabling new capabilities that are guided by the needs of enterprises and third-party developer communities, closing the gap between the needs coming from applications, enterprises, and consumers and the network capabilities. CPaaS promises to unlock new layers of innovation both within enterprises and the developer ecosystem that supports them, which in turn will deliver better customer experiences and enhanced value for all.

To learn more about how 5G is empowering and extending the expanding CPaaS market, you can watch the fireside chat in full here.

5G, Telecommunications, Telecommunications Industry

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , ,

Developers are notoriously grumpy and unamenable to disruption.  They tend to want to continue working until they arrive at a place of completion and satisfaction. 

That’s all well and good unless they’ve lost sight of the bigger picture.

What’s an IT leader to do?

The following perspectives will help you better understand what motivates and mystifies developers and can guide your thinking on how to be the leader your team needs.

Cultivate business awareness

One of the critical tasks for all leaders is to provide an overhead strategic vision to the people who work on the lower-level tasks.  This is especially important—and challenging—when working with developers because their work is so demanding of careful, focused attention. 

Developers are required to master an enormous amount of complexity that can squeeze out the larger context, resulting in a kind of myopia.  The work itself is enough to occupy even the most ambitious and active mind, so it becomes especially important for leaders to provide the two-way channel between the daily coding and the larger direction.

This is a delicate task. 

Asking for progress reports or offering direction or, worst of all, changing course, are all typically most unwelcome.  In some cases, these are actually very disruptive, but in others, they are exactly what is needed. 

The right way to engage developers in strategic dialog is in a balance.  Here is where meta-engagement is important.  Asking developers about how the meeting load is, and how well they feel engaged in the larger goals is a good way to tune the balance.   It also helps to get them thinking about the bigger issues.

Cultivating developers who have both technological excellence and business awareness is a hugely precious thing to the leader, the business and the developer. 

Convey meaning

Although strategy and business value are valuable to communicate to developers, there is an even higher thing which we’ll call purpose or meaning.  The strategy is engaged to support the mission.  The mission is the raison d’etre for the company itself. 

Does the company have a potent mission statement?  Is the essence of the mission well distributed into the ranks?  The rightness or goodness of the enterprise should be infused into everyone’s activity.

Developers are especially tricky, as they are typically rather resistant to what they often cynically see as indoctrination.  Nevertheless, the sense of legitimacy is just as necessary for long-term developer contentment as anyone else. 

The key to delivering meaning to developers is to understand the next point about creativity—and integrating it.  The inherent worth that developers derive from coding can be integrated with the larger business purpose.  Uniting meaning and creativity is a major source of a drive for excellence for developers.

Foster creativity

Developers’ will to create is strong, but it can be hard to perceive as creativity is often obscured by the technological nature of development.  Developers communicate with a strange patois of acronyms that hide the artistic spirit behind it.  Learning to perceive and nurture that spirit is a special kind of leadership that developers will appreciate.

Just the awareness of the creative life of developers is important.  Not only will it help to understand where they are coming from, but it will lead to policies and decisions that support that creativity and out of that will come real bottom-line benefit.  The space and time to innovate will lead to better software that handles the vicissitudes of business.  You need the human creativity of your developers captured in the half-machine/half-thought medium of code to be agile.

Perhaps the most important feature for the leader to bear in mind here is in realizing the attachment that developers have to their work.   Affection might be a better word than attachment.  Building a thing that feels beautiful and worthy in itself has its own momentum.  Interrupting this momentum should be undertaken with a soft touch, rather than as if switching tabs in the browser.  If possible, a gradual readjustment is best.

Developers work with machines, but they are not themselves machines.  At the same time, improving developers’ understanding of the larger context as discussed above is greatly helpful in bringing out an understanding of the necessity for redirection, tuning, and planning.  This understanding helps to ameliorate the frustration and feeling of senseless churn.

Allow space for failure

Despite their mastery of complexity, developers are prone to feeling like they are not really up to the job at hand—the strange phenomenon known as imposter syndrome.

This kind of insecurity is more common and sensible with green developers, but you would be surprised at the accomplished programmers who still acknowledge running into it.  Even coders coming from great success can find themselves burdened with uncertainty about their ability to handle the next thing confronting them.

Every leader’s style is different, of course.  So is every developer’s.  Instead of a hard and fast rule like avoiding harsh criticism or promoting recognition, it’s good to simply bear in mind the kind of difficulty developers wrangle with in their daily work.  The path of execution is rarely a straight line for a developer.  They frequently must call upon an inspirational force to get there, and this can be frightening when deadlines loom.

Even if you think there is no way that a person is uncertain about their ability to execute, it’s helpful to remember that at some point they were.  They are confident because they have come through it and developed mechanisms for dealing with it. 

In addition to awareness on the part of leaders, a good approach to helping is to encourage communication between developers as described in this Tweet.  In short, encourage senior developers to share their experience with juniors, especially with a willingness to acknowledge mistakes. 

The ability to air mistakes in a safe environment is therefore an important thing for leaders to cultivate.  Provide the ability to fail forward, with a sense that guardrails are in place, and developers will thrive.  Failure is an important part of all enterprise and innovation, and especially so for developers.

Encourage taking breaks

Here is a practical insight: When you have developers who are facing blocks, they have a tendency to beat their heads against the wall of impasse.  Usually, the block is a creative one that can’t be solved with faster shoveling and hammering.

Know when to encourage a break.  It’s counterintuitive, but so many times the breakthrough a programmer is looking for is not to be found in working harder but in getting some distance from the problem.

Developers themselves frequently miss this point.  In fact, they will actively resist it when they are in the grips of a tough challenge.  They believe that continuing to grind away at the thing is the path to a breakthrough.

Even though time and time again they will struggle against a seemingly intractable difficulty, believing that further effort will yield result, only to take a begrudging pause in the effort and then suddenly envision how the whole issue can be resolved.  Like a stroke of lightning, everything crystallized and seemed so obvious. 

Sometimes what seemed like a systemic shortcoming—a flaw in the design perhaps—turns out to be a face-palm like a botched variable capitalization.

By being outside the trenches, you can help keep in mind what the developers themselves forget: the non-linear nature of their work.  Success is a union of effort and creativity.  Sometimes the goal can’t be reached by further direct effort and must await more insight.  Be a leader who can help remember this and your developers will thank you.

Provide balance

Developers suffer from discontentment, stress, and burnout at a high rate.  Whatever you can do to mitigate this is welcome.  Developers do it to themselves and also are subject to external pressures. Both of these forces can be addressed by leaders.

Internally, developers suffer from a kind of obsessive tendency about programming.  In some ways this seems beneficial for the enterprise: Keep the devs caffeinated and coding.  But predictably, that is a recipe for burnout. 

If you can be the voice of balance in developers’ work lives, you will benefit both them and the business.  The best way to do this is to be a softening shield when bridging between them and the pressures of the business.  Often, it’s not more pressure but a sense of support and guidance that is most in need.

Developer, IT Leadership, IT Management