All Hands on Tech

5Citizen Automation

The heart of citizen automation is the digitization of the (often manual) processing of tasks and workflows that make up the majority of transactional work done today. What’s more, citizen automation is a term that captures a long and distinguished history of process innovators, tinkerers, and inspired change agents across every part of an organization. While this activity is also generally called citizen development, there are distinct differences that merit a stand-alone category. While citizen development often refers to the building of applications to address discrete use cases and function-specific needs, citizen automation typically focuses on automating information-intensive process workflows. These are typically individual- or department-level workflows and are supported by a set of tools known as robotic process automation (RPA) or sometimes intelligent process automation (IPA). These tools aren’t blindingly intelligent or fast, but they can perform structured digital tasks, move information from one system to another, make basic decisions, and generally act as if they are humans—except they work faster, more reliably, and over longer hours than humans.

Automating workflows isn’t new. But it is a domain that benefits from an ever-evolving and increasingly intelligent set of tools and capabilities. These tools in turn have enabled bigger and bolder visions of what can be fixed, made more efficient, or perhaps removed altogether thanks to a number ...