If you work for a medium-sized or large organization, you may be familiar with the phenomenon: somewhere in the organization, outside the IT department, there is an employee with just a little more interest in IT than the rest. This employee notices that there is an IT problem within his or her department and decides to come up with a solution. His or her knowledge and perseverance ultimately lead to a workable solution. Often in the form of an Excel file or an Access database. This does not go unnoticed by colleagues for long and soon the news spreads throughout the department or even the entire company. Everyone is happy you would think… or not?
Because what if the inventor of the solution is suddenly no longer available? He/she may have been given another job or position. Or has the workload increased and this IT enthusiast is struggling to cope with all the different questions and problems. What we often see is that these types of projects grow until the creator’s capabilities are reached. Usually, it is only at that moment that the IT department is called in to save the day. Difficult, because the application has probably already been labeled as business-critical and can no longer be disposed of so easily.
Gold mine
It is therefore not surprising that these people are approached with mistrust by IT professionals in general. After all, they cause a lot of unrest and inconvenience. And wouldn’t they have been better off immediately calling in the IT department? What IT professionals do not always realize is that these island solutions do not arise by themselves. Perhaps this well-meaning hobbyist has reported to the IT department for a long time but has not been properly helped. For example, because there was no budget or time available. Or the importance of the problem was not recognized. Or was the IT department not open to new challenges at all at that time? However, there is often a reason these problems arise, and the IT department can blame itself for that! That is why I say: cherish these people, they are a gold mine for your organization.
Citizen developer
The understanding for these people is starting to get a little more common. A new term has even been coined for this group of people: citizen developer. The average citizen developer has no programming background or computer-related training but does have extensive knowledge of the problem area for which he/she wants a solution. The average IT person, on the other hand, has an extensive programming background and/or computer-related training, but his/her knowledge of the business process is not always in-depth. Together they form an incredibly powerful team.
From my own experience
I have experienced this myself. A few years ago, I was hired at a company to take these kinds of initiatives from employees and place them under the umbrella of the IT department. At first, I approached this in the traditional way of the slightly arrogant developer who knew it all better. Until I met an employee who had developed a genius application for his department. The whole department was already using it, but the program (written in Access) kept crashing and the database got corrupted. In short, it had grown the poor man a little over his head and he needed help. It was amazing to see how far he had come without any formal programming knowledge. He had single-handedly built a system that was functionally fine. Architecturally and technically, it was a bit of a struggle, but converting the Access database into a solid, robust application was (relatively) easy because the functionality was already fine. The employee’s domain knowledge had ensured this. He knew exactly what he and his colleagues encountered in their daily work and had the perfect solution for it. All I had to do was rebuild from scratch, using the knowledge already in the Access database. In fact, the Access solution acted as a (kind of) functional design. The success of this approach is demonstrated by the fact that the application we created together in this way is still in use after ten years and has even been distributed within other branches of the company.
Brilliant insights
In the years that followed, we worked together a lot in this way. He often had brilliant insights into how work processes could be improved with simple IT solutions and was often able to solve or demonstrate it with limited resources. Those solutions were not always conveniently designed, maintainable, scalable, compliant with regulations, et cetera, but that was the role for me as an IT professional. Together we have built very beautiful things for the organization in this way.
Why this story in an Office365 blog? Easy. Microsoft has always seen citizen developers as an important target group, judging by the many products they have brought to the market over the years (with the forementioned Access and Excel as leaders in an extensive list). And now with Office365 that has not diminished. In fact, products such as Flow and PowerApps were added quite recently, and these are ideally positioned as tools for the citizen developer. The power user therefore gets more and more tools to do more with less effort. Make use of it: embrace the citizen developer!
Finally, some tips:
- Keep looking around the organization for citizen developers and their projects. Identify unsanctioned projects early, before problems arise.
- Talk to your power users, gain their trust, take them seriously and listen to their problems.
- Support citizen developers with advice and do’s and don’ts and provide them with tools to make their solutions better.
- Dare to say no. Sometimes (usually?) a solution – however brilliant – is not feasible in practice, for example because it does not comply with the regulations within the company, or because there are technical objections.
- Make your infrastructure power user-friendly. Office365 already offers a very good basis for this.
- See citizen developers as full partners in creating solutions for the organization.
