All Hands on Tech

8The Citizen Champion: With and Without Air Cover

Perhaps not surprisingly for a citizen technology program that is largely voluntary, someone has to step up or be appointed as champion of the initiative. In our research we’ve found a number of champions and are able to describe their essential tasks and some differences between them. Perhaps the major difference is whether they have senior executive support.

To “cross the chasm” (to use the Geoffrey Moore term) of user and organizational adoption of citizen development, encouragement and resources for the concept from senior executives—ideally, all the way to the CEO—are necessary. You simply can’t have large numbers of employees changing their jobs and workflows with technology without someone in the thick-carpet corner offices knowing about it and at least accepting what’s happening. What we’re really looking for is enthusiasm among senior executives about citizen technology usage, and we hope we’ve given plenty of reasons why they should be enthusiastic. In short, it’s really hard to digitally transform an organization without it.

There are several different patterns we’ve noticed with regard to executive support. One is to start citizen development from the beginning with it. That’s obviously the most desirable situation as long as it doesn’t lead to compelling people to work with technology in ways that they don’t want to. Starting with executive support typically means more resources, faster development of guidance and ...