Traditionally, IT and digital teams have been kept centralized and separated from the rest of the business, acting as gatekeepers for new solutions, products and initiatives. While IT is undoubtedly a business-critical function, this centralized model can hamper innovation. With our research finding that nearly 20% of employees see a lack of innovation as a barrier to high performance across the organization, it’s clear that this unnecessary bottleneck is preventing businesses from reaching their full digital potential.
To harness the power of enterprise technology, businesses should consider a new approach, one that empowers employees across departments to become technology changemakers. These “citizen developers” – individuals who sit outside of IT – must be encouraged to identify and implement digital solutions tailored to specific challenges in their roles. This can help businesses foster a culture of innovation, agility, and continuous improvement, whilst easing pressures on stretched IT teams along the way.
Chief Information Officer at MHR.
IT should not be innovation gatekeepers
For decades, businesses recruited heavily into IT functions as their digital infrastructure needs became vastly more complex, typically funneling all technology related change through a single department. Historically this offered the obvious benefits of centralizing control and compliance, but it may be less helpful to the way organizations have now evolved.
Employees across all departments are facing different challenges to those they faced a decade ago – the advent of hybrid working, the transition to AI tools, globally dispersed teams and clients – means they require tailored solutions to help them each work efficiently and effectively. If people need to wait for IT to determine each new product or initiative introduced across the business, great ideas and new ways of working can go ignored and ultimately missed. This in turn can dissuade individuals from suggesting new ways of working if they feel they aren’t being valued or listened to by the digital experts.
Democratizing technology for all
We speak with many forward-thinking organizations that are increasingly recognising the need to democratize how and where new technologies are implemented across their teams. But the citizen developer model does of course come with challenges to mitigate. One risk in the model is that developers will focus on what is beneficial to their specific areas, and may not appreciate the up and downstream implications of making specific requests for change.
To square this circle, governance needs to remain front and center when implementing any new solution across the company. This can end up resulting in greater collaboration across teams, as citizen developers would work with the governance team to engender a greater understanding of the business, ultimately changing the culture of the company and ensuring that everyone is moving in the same direction.
It might seem a scary prospect to some, allowing staff without technical backgrounds to take charge of their own digital needs, but it can be done in a safe and effective way with the right guidelines in place. Low-code and no-code platforms are great examples of how technology can be put into the hands of employees outside of IT, allowing them to develop and deploy solutions quickly, without requiring advanced programming skills.
By empowering the workforce to become citizen developers and equipping them with accessible, user-friendly digital tools, they can take ownership of solving their own business challenges.
Removing barriers to innovation
It’s one thing if employees are crying out for digital democratization, but this sometimes isn’t the case. Some know the problems they face and the solutions they would like to see, but the gripe stops there. They continue with outdated and friction-heavy processes and don’t think to bother IT or conceive their own digital workaround – perhaps due to the extra time it takes in an already busy working day. This is where change management comes in.
We typically find that a major challenge to enabling broader tech-driven innovation is overcoming resistance to change. Certain employees may hesitate to adopt new tools or step outside their traditional roles to engage with technology.
Organizations must actively work to evolve the mindset of the workforce, encouraging them to embrace digital literacy, continuous learning, and adaptability. Providing ongoing support, celebrating small wins, and highlighting success stories can help non-technical employees feel more confident in their ability to leverage technology effectively in their roles.
Another factor to consider is the potential risk of shadow IT, where employees use unauthorized software to meet their needs. While this highlights the demand for better tech accessibility, it also illustrates the importance of making user-friendly, company-approved tools available to everyone that needs it, to help encourage compliance without hampering innovation.
The future of digital innovation depends on collaboration
The future of work is not about replacing traditional IT roles – far from it – rather it’s about enhancing them to be more collaborative with the wider organization. IT teams will always play a critical role in digital governance, security and large-scale digital transformation. But their role will increasingly shift towards empowering other departments to innovate in ways tailored to their respective functions, so that every individual can operate to their full potential without waiting on IT to come to their rescue.
Enterprise technology is no longer confined to IT departments, nor should it be. But leaders must remember that embedding technology into the culture of a business requires having a shared vision in place that all tech implementations can ladder back up towards.
With this one clear objective across the business, employees are empowered to suggest solutions that align with the business’s overarching objectives, meaning organizations can unleash one of their greatest assets – employee experience and knowledge – in so many ways previously unavailable to them.
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