Empowering Citizen Development
Itäkylä, Hanna-Mari (2021)
2021
All rights reserved. This publication is copyrighted. You may download, display and print it for Your own personal use. Commercial use is prohibited.
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2021121425728
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2021121425728
Tiivistelmä
This thesis aimed to make citizen development more familiar and help organizations see its potential. The topic is handled from the perspective of citizen developers and potential citizen developers. The article looks for ways to ensure their members become citizen developers by providing the right employee experience.
Citizen development is a part of the ongoing digital transformation and is expected to spread in the future. Citizen developers can form a business-led IT, which by creating technical solutions to their specific needs, will take on the part of tasks currently in IT’s backlog.
To ensure citizen development will spread in a company, its leaders will need to invest in creating a psychologically safe, motivating, and resilient culture. They will also need to build structures that support the citizen development movement. IT will need to have a role in the endeavor as an enabler. They will need to provide citizen developers with a safe environment for development. Only then the development made by those working outside IT will become sustainable.
The interviews section includes narrative stories of eight people with diverse backgrounds. Some of them work currently as citizen developers, some have in the past, and some are potential developers whose employee experience has negatively impacted their willingness to develop.
The action research was the chosen method for this research, and based on findings on the literature review and interviews, a web page was created. The page includes three sections. 1. General information about citizen development. 2. Introductions to potential citizen developers. 3. Introductions to company leaders and HR. The website address is https://sites.google.com/view/kansalaiskehittaminen. This page was created for Finnish organizations, and therefore the language is Finnish. Also, a network for citizen developers was created for LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9104446/. Citizen development was discussed and marketed via LinkedIn posts.
The website and the group were shared via LinkedIn posts, and they will be communicated directly to selected IT consultancies and different publications.
Citizen development is a part of the ongoing digital transformation and is expected to spread in the future. Citizen developers can form a business-led IT, which by creating technical solutions to their specific needs, will take on the part of tasks currently in IT’s backlog.
To ensure citizen development will spread in a company, its leaders will need to invest in creating a psychologically safe, motivating, and resilient culture. They will also need to build structures that support the citizen development movement. IT will need to have a role in the endeavor as an enabler. They will need to provide citizen developers with a safe environment for development. Only then the development made by those working outside IT will become sustainable.
The interviews section includes narrative stories of eight people with diverse backgrounds. Some of them work currently as citizen developers, some have in the past, and some are potential developers whose employee experience has negatively impacted their willingness to develop.
The action research was the chosen method for this research, and based on findings on the literature review and interviews, a web page was created. The page includes three sections. 1. General information about citizen development. 2. Introductions to potential citizen developers. 3. Introductions to company leaders and HR. The website address is https://sites.google.com/view/kansalaiskehittaminen. This page was created for Finnish organizations, and therefore the language is Finnish. Also, a network for citizen developers was created for LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9104446/. Citizen development was discussed and marketed via LinkedIn posts.
The website and the group were shared via LinkedIn posts, and they will be communicated directly to selected IT consultancies and different publications.