The Citizen Developers Guide to Automation 

Citizen Developers: A New Frontier in Efficiency 

With IT teams stretched thin, and the availability of low-to-no-code tools, organizations around the globe have seen an increase in employees outside the IT department automating routine tasks and applications. Called citizen developers, these non-technical resources can add significant business value as they seek to automate routine tasks and applications they know well.  

In this guide, we’ll explore the value of citizen developers and how businesses can support them with user-friendly robotic process automation (RPA) tools. We’ll also review the difference between citizen development and shadow IT, and why it’s important to develop a culture that supports these motivated subject matter experts on their quest to enhance productivity. 

 What Is a Citizen Developer?  

Many organizations have citizen developers, employees who use technology to automate a time-consuming manual task or application they carry out on a routine basis. These aren’t professional programmers or IT team members—in fact, the term ‘citizen developer’ isn’t a sanctioned title or role at all. It’s a persona taken on by anyone motivated to automate a mundane or repetitive activity to save time.  

Although the citizen developer terminology is new, enterprising employees have been creating applications since the advent of software. For example, users in years past developed custom business applications using Microsoft Access. Today, Excel, Excel macros, and Google Docs are popular options for automating projects such as sales forecasting. Other common tools include VBScript and PowerShell, which can be automated using the Windows Task Scheduler. 

Newer, more citizen developer-friendly RPA tools have emerged in the marketplace empowering these employees to develop much more productive and complex applications. Intuitive RPA capabilities mask the complexity of the technological interactions happening behind the scenes to enable creativity in automation, which is further enhanced by pre-built bots. 

 What Is Citizen Development?  

For most organizations, there are more tasks that can and need to be automated than the IT department can realistically handle. In addition, IT admins are experts in technology and integration— not in the particulars of the tasks happening in specific departments. Citizen development is the process or practice companies adopt to encourage employees to automate applications, generally in support of their own work activities and to add business value to the company.  

Citizen development is different from shadow IT, where employees develop applications without the knowledge and approval of the IT team. This introduces business and security risk. Citizen development is sanctioned by the organization and the IT department. In fact, they provide approved tools ideal for non-technical staff to introduce helpful automation. Citizen development is gaining in popularity due to the use of these no-code and low-code tools that target the citizen developer, most notably RPA options.  

 How Citizen Development Benefits Organizations   

As previously mentioned, the backlog of software and other projects in the hands of IT typically exceeds available resources and budgets. This long-standing issue is the primary reason shadow IT emerged. How do IT departments address this challenge? The increasingly popular answer is to implement a citizen development initiative that essentially legitimizes shadow IT. This strategy has numerous benefits for all involved. 

Enhanced Business Value 

One obvious benefit of citizen developers is the ability to tackle important initiatives lingering in the IT backlog. As citizen developers are the subject matter experts for the application they’re developing, they can implement automation quickly given user-friendly RPA tools. With the right training, this expertise is a great benefit to the application development process and helps increase an individual user’s productivity as well. Ultimately, these contributions mean these employees are becoming more involved in improving the overall agility and efficiency of the business, which can have a positive impact on its long-term success. 

Higher Employee Satisfaction and Retention 

The nature of the citizen developer is to identify and solve problems in creative ways that benefit both the employee and the organization. This is the type of employee companies want to keep. Enabling them to automate routine, mundane applications means they can devote more time to higher-value strategic work that likely gives them higher job satisfaction and incents them to stay with the organization.   

Greater Agility 

Oftentimes, citizen developers can be more flexible and agile than an IT team member devoted to large-scale business technology initiatives. As citizen developers are the subject matter experts for the tasks in question, they know when business process changes are required. Being agile means they have the time and motivation to keep up with needed modifications that support business strategy adjustments or new integrations with direct impact and immediate benefits to the business.   

Less Technical Debt 

Many applications developed by IT will eventually turn into technical debt as the original designers and architects leave the organization or move onto other projects. When these key professional developers are lost, the application is at risk until the organization can develop or hire new experts.  

However, this is not an issue when non-IT employees are the developers of the application. Yes, they can move on as well, but if the work is important to the organization, their replacements are also subject matter experts or will be in short order. They may also bring new ideas for making changes to the application to reflect a different approach.    

 How to Implement Citizen Developers Into Your RPA  

Empowering citizen developers with RPA is an organization-wide endeavor with far-reaching benefits. Here are some considerations for how to shape your citizen development initiative.  

• If you don’t have a program, start one up! Otherwise, you’re prone to a robust and potentially dangerous shadow IT presence. 

• Identify employees around the organization who are already functioning as citizen developers and encourage them to interact with one another as well as IT to share ideas and successes. 

• Evaluate RPA tools to determine which fit best within your organization. You’ll want to consider key features such as no-code development, ease of editing automated applications, and the simplicity of the tool’s pricing structure. 

• Train citizen developers to use RPA tools effectively in a way that works within your security framework and technology policies. 

• Decide whether to implement a formal approval process/checks and balances for automating tasks and applications. 

• Encourage feedback from citizen developers and the IT department to evaluate the program over time, capturing any metrics that prove helpful in the effort. 

As employees become seasoned citizen developers, and as your citizen development program matures, there are additional topics that will benefit these team members and the program as a whole. For example, you may want to assign a business value to each project to help prioritize development activities. Other topics may include how to develop ideas and the best ways to borrow key concepts from the professional development side and optimize them to suit the citizen development process.   

How to Become a Citizen Developer  

Becoming a citizen developer simply requires the right attitude and a bit of training with the RPA tool the organization selects. Citizen developers are already subject matter experts for the application being developed because it’s typically something they live and breathe in their daily work. The next step is to choose the right tool for the job. 

All reputable citizen developer-focused tools provide easy-to-follow training. Some may provide certification programs as well, although requiring this step may be considered contradictory to the grassroots citizen development movement at your organization. Each citizen developer should have a good grasp of all tools in the citizen development arsenal and be able to select the best option based on the project in question.  

The Best Tool for Citizen Developers  

Fortra’s Automate is a citizen developer-focused robotic process automation tool recognized by customers and analysts for its easy-to-use integrated development environment (IDE). This solution empowers citizen developers to employ trusted automation capabilities that reduce the burden of manual tasks with low-to-no-code development and pre-built bots that execute common functions. 

Automate’s RPA capabilities fall into four categories: UI automation, native actions, API integration, and intelligent automation. While most RPA capabilities can be used by a citizen developer, the UI automation and native actions are specifically designed for these individuals. However, intelligent automation is primarily for advanced users.  

1. UI Automation: The Automate Recorder 

UI automation captures a user’s mouse and keyboard actions so they can be automated. The Automate Recorder gives citizen developers an ideal tool for introducing this capability into repetitive tasks and keeping them updated as needs changes. This is because the Automate Recorder is a step recorder, which has distinct benefits over the more widely available but restrictive macro recorders. 

As a step recorder, the Automate Recorder enables citizen developers to: 

• Debug and test recordings within the recorder as they’re being developed   

• Edit and update recordings within the recorder without having to recreate the entire segment 

• Add business logic such as loops, expressions, and if-statements to represent the human decision-making process inherent in the tasks being automated 

2. Native Actions 

Native actions are customized to allow a user to interact with common applications like Microsoft Excel, Azure, databases, and AWS. Automate offers more than 70 of these custom-built, form-based actions. In the case of databases lacking a UI or standard API, these actions offer an interface that makes queries far easier to perform. All native actions run in the background of a user’s environment so the user can complete other tasks at the same time.  

3. API Integration With JSON 

Application programming interface (API) integration is typically out of reach for most citizen developers as they lack formal training in this complicated programming concept. With its user-friendly interface, Automate masks the complexities of working with APIs and encapsulates data with its JSON action. The solution makes authentication, API access, and data processing far easier for citizen developers. They can use the tool to automate the process of creating spreadsheets, logging into websites and downloading information, and transforming raw data into a format humans can understand and use.  

Fortra's Connector Hub and Community  

Connectors are pre-built applications that accomplish common tasks. They facilitate citizen development with ready-to-roll capabilities that can be used to create new applications. These building blocks speed the development process and help citizen developers leverage tested functionality. Visit Fortra’s Connector Hub to explore hundreds of pre-built bots. 

Citizen developers also benefit from the interactive automation community of people who build these bots and educate others about what they’ve learned from their endeavors. This global network shares updates on what works and what doesn’t to help others reduce the time required to get their own automations and applications up and running quickly. 

Unlock New Levels of Productivity With Citizen Developers and an Automation Mindset 

As citizen developers and IT teams harness the power of automation across increasing applications in your organization, you’ll build a powerful new mindset over time. Automate’s intuitive capabilities promote creativity in finding new and better ways to accomplish tasks and do more with fewer resources. This helps ensure employees are productive and able to carry out value-added tasks that keep them satisfied in their jobs and keep business operations on track.