The value of citizen automations: What’s a workflow worth?

Historically, IT teams have exercised tight control over automation initiatives — for good reason. It’s been essential to minimize risk and maintain system stability. But a shift is underway.

As organizations move toward automating more complex, cross-functional processes, there’s less of a focus on traditional, IT-controlled automations and more of a prevailing collaborative approach.

Why the change? Directly involving business users means that automations will reflect real-world use cases and address nuanced challenges. In the 2024 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs) report, Citizen Automation is one of five key Use Cases for this type of software. This inclusion highlights its potential to transform how you develop and manage automation.

Let’s explore the real value of citizen automations and how, when they’re done right, they can create workflows that aren’t just efficient but resilient and add significant value to your organization.

IT: A facilitator rather than a gatekeeper

Opening up the automation process to non-IT team members can be frustrating for IT, especially as it can introduce inefficiencies or inconsistencies. Overcoming this frustration is crucial to unlocking the true value of automations. Continuing to work in silos in which business users don’t know what can be automated and IT doesn’t know what those users need is not sustainable if you want to mature your use of automation.

At the very least, business users need to be part of the review process to weigh in on the unique aspects of a workflow and, sometimes, make important decisions.

Embracing low-code SOAP solutions built for collaboration, IT teams can maintain control over core processes while enabling more people to effectively contribute to automation design. The best SOAPs enable IT to develop automations that consider business users and provide easy tools for them to get involved in the process.

Without a SOAP: Processes bottleneck, and there’s no visibility for business users.

With a SOAP: Teams experience agility and real-time collaboration.

The intrinsic value of a workflow with citizen input

Those who use workflows daily know their intricacies better than anyone. Incorporating their insights can result in practical, adaptable automations that are better aligned with real scenarios. They’re also likely to be more adaptable, as you can consider exceptions and historical patterns in the initial stages.

Automations designed purely by IT often excel at back-end system integrations, data transfers and rule-based logic. For workflows that intersect with unpredictable human decision-making, such as logistics or customer service, citizen input is invaluable.

There’s a big difference between a process that looks efficient on paper and one that truly works in practice. 

In the real world: An example of collaborative enterprise automation

A retail giant faces persistent delays in its order fulfillment process during high-demand seasons. IT-designed automations handle backend data transfers and rule-based decision-making but struggle to accommodate issues like unpredictable shipping requests or vendor delays. 

By collaborating with non-technical employees in customer support, warehouse management and logistics, IT implements well-designed integrations as necessary to engage in adaptive logic and establishes guardrails to ensure security and business continuity. They incorporate business users’ suggestions for exception triggers.

As a result, the company sees significantly reduced fulfillment delays and improves overall customer satisfaction during peak seasons.

This is just one example in one industry — there are endless possibilities for involving more people in automations.

Goal: Shorter time-to-value

Speed is critical in automation adoption for operational efficiency, but it’s also the ingredient that will help you maximize the return on your software investment. The longer it takes to deploy and optimize automations, the more time and resources you’ll spend without seeing tangible benefits. Citizen automation can contribute to faster deployment.

To achieve rapid time-to-value, be sure to:

• Establish clear guidelines and defined roles for automation initiatives
• Follow a governance model that empowers users at all skill levels
• Streamline approval cycles

Intuitive, low-code automation tools can also support speed by making it easy to adjust workflows through a user-friendly visual interface, reducing the time IT spends on intervention.

Goal: Eliminate frustration

Friction between IT and business users is common. Despite your best intentions, it could be that workflows are too difficult for business teams to create or adjust. IT may feel they have to step back into the gatekeeper role, which slows down productivity and could frustrate both sides.

Think about three key areas to avoid this:

1. Shared ownership: Make it clear that everyone involved in automation, from design to execution, will be accountable for outcomes.
2. Regular communication: Frequent, open communication between IT and business users reinforces your culture of shared ownership.
3. Feedback loops: Set up clear channels for suggestions, evaluations and conversations.

Go with a low-code/no-code platform

Your technology should facilitate automations at scale, and low-code SOAP solutions can step into this role. They simplify automation development with drag-and-drop components and pre-built templates for common jobs or processes, making it easier for IT to blueprint and quickly adapt automations as they discuss the proper setup with the affected teams.

RunMyJobs has a refreshed UX that facilitates this collaboration — get a demo to learn more.

While democratizing automation isn’t free of roadblocks and may never fully come to pass for your use case or company size, it’s possible to reduce the burden on your IT team and involve relevant team members in each workflow with the right tool.

Solid internal workflows line the path to external success.

A workflow = more than just lines of code

A well-designed workflow does more than automate manual tasks — it:

• Reduces repetitive tasks and frees up time to focus on high-impact work.
• Accelerates outcomes so your results are measurable and predictable.
• Builds resilience as your business adapts to unexpected conditions.
• Boosts engagement to get teams across your organization involved in automation.

An inclusive automation strategy

As is clear in Gartner’s inclusion of Citizen Automation as a Use Case in its Critical Capabilities analysis, it’s an important facet of enterprise automation moving into the future. 

It’s time to take all of your team’s strengths into consideration as you apply automation to more departments and workflows.

Empower your citizen developers by backing your IT team with a leading SOAP solution. Download the 2024 Critical Capabilities report to learn why Redwood Software ranked #1 in Citizen Automation among SOAPs.