How AI-empowered ‘citizen developers’ help drive digital transformation

A shortage of software talent and a rise in user-friendly automation technologies have companies cultivating “citizen developers” — nontechnical employees who use domain expertise and creativity to develop apps, configure automations, and build data analyses that can drive value across the enterprise.

Using citizen developers enhances companies’ innovative capacity, minimizes risk, and liberates IT departments to pursue more strategic initiatives, write Babson University professor Thomas H. Davenport, who is digital fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and Ian Barkin, MBA ’06, co-founder of 2B Ventures, in “All Hands on Tech: The AI-Powered Citizen Revolution.” 

The book, which was written with Chase Davenport, an AI researcher and the founder of Ocean Beach Institute, provides examples of how companies have aligned the work of citizen developers with wider organizational goals, and a framework for integrating citizen development with broader strategy. 

The following excerpt has been lightly edited for clarity. 

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Copious data suggests that enterprises struggle with a chasm of digital capabilities. A quick internet search for “why digital transformations fail” yields a plethora of blog posts, articles, and books on the subject. Digital transformation is taking too long, in part because millions of application development, coding, data science, and tech-associated jobs are going unfilled. To compete in the future, companies know they need more IT capabilities, and the current supply chain has failed to provide the necessary resources. The only way for companies to fill the void is through greater emphasis on the skill development of their existing staff — their citizens.

Imagine two different organizations. Both have explicit initiatives underway to digitally transform their businesses. In one, the IT organization tries to carry the load by itself. There, the mandate to digitize has only created more demand for new applications, automations, and data analyses — but no new supply. Department leaders and digitally oriented professionals initially submitted request after request, but as the backlog grew, they became discouraged and stopped bothering to ask when their solutions would be forthcoming. After a couple of years, no one even mentioned digital transformation anymore.

In the other organization, digital transformation was a broad organizational mandate. IT was certainly a part of it and had to update a variety of enterprise transaction systems as well as moving most systems to the cloud. They had their hands full with this aspect of the transformation.

Fortunately, in this hypothetical company, many citizens were engaged in the transformation process as well. They built individual and departmental applications and even an occasional mobile app for customers — mostly with a quick review from a helpful IT professional. They automated their own processes after improving them. They built dashboards, scorecards, and even some straightforward machine learning models for marketing, supply chain management, and human resources. Digitizing the company was regarded as everyone’s job, and thousands of initiatives took place all around the company. Not surprisingly, the company began to outdo its competitors — not only on digital capabilities but on market share and profitable growth as well.

These two organizations are fictional, but they are reflective of a variety of companies we’ve seen and researched for this book. Almost every company, nonprofit, and governmental organization wants to be more digital these days, and for good reason. It leads to less friction in dealing with customers and suppliers, product and service offerings that are better attuned to customer needs, more satisfied employees, a better fit between production and consumption, and so forth. 

It’s a worthy objective, so why not try to achieve it with all the resources available to an organization? Noel Carroll, a business school academic at the University of Galway, researches citizen development and has concluded that organizations employing it broadly have considerably more “digital agility” than those that do not. We wholeheartedly agree.

“Citizens,” as we’ve defined them, are the front lines of digitalization. Just as we rely upon front-line workers to figure out better ways to do their work, to satisfy customers, and to make good use of their work hours, we can now rely upon them to use information technology to make themselves and their departments or functions more effective and productive. Where we once depended upon front-line employees to practice Lean Six Sigma or other approaches to quality improvement, we can now also allow them to create applications, mobile apps, automated workflows, and data analyses. Not everyone wants to be a citizen developer of technology, but increasing numbers are willing to volunteer — particularly if the communications, tools, and incentives are right.

When front-line employees develop their own technologies, there is often a very different attitude toward them than with centrally developed systems that are imposed by IT. We’ve all experienced systems that we have to use by central mandate, and we often don’t like them much. We focus on their shortcomings more than their advantages, and we resent having to learn the new tools or to change our work processes to incorporate them. But when we develop the technologies ourselves, we’re much more tolerant of any problems, and we’re more likely to be positive about workflow adjustments that we’ve imposed upon ourselves.

It’s also possible — though just speculation at this point — that citizen enablement could play something of a leveling-up role in financial inequality. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, has argued that citizens on “the front line” in many industries could learn new skills, accomplish new tasks, and be paid more as a result. The phrase he used in a speech was that “IT level wages can go to the front line.” If this seems self-serving for the CEO of a company offering citizen development tools, then David Autor, a respected labor economist at MIT, has made a similar point. But Jeremy Kahn, a Fortune magazine editor, argues that this leveling function is far from certain — in that, for example, citizen enablement could end up reducing the compensation of IT people — so it is far too soon to count on any reduction in inequality. He compared writing software by citizens to a time-consuming and unrewarded task like making travel reservations; he wrote: 

The same may now happen with the task of building software or compiling and analyzing data — workers will now be expected to do it themselves, without any increase in pay or compensating reduction in primary responsibilities. So our jobs might just get a little more stressful and more miserable.

Kahn’s perspective suggests that to make citizens happy in their jobs, we’ll have to figure out ways to motivate and incentivize citizen development. And our research suggests that many organizations haven’t figured out how to do that well yet.

Not every citizen-developed technology will function well or advance the broader digital cause, but many will — and far more than just professional IT developers can create. Of course, there are risks to citizen tools and activities. But after talking with more than 100 people involved in citizen development — citizens themselves, sponsors, IT leaders, and vendors — we have yet to hear any disaster stories. With proper guidance and governance, development of technology by people at the front lines of organizations can be empowering, productive, and safe.

This is an edited excerpt from “All Hands on Tech: The AI-Powered Citizen Revolution,” by Thomas H. Davenport and Ian Barkin, with Chase Davenport (published by Wiley, October 2024).