Bringing Autonomy to App Design

Why is the autonomous use of digital documents important to digital transformation? In this article, we dig deeper to find out.

Citizen developers—nice idea, but not in an enterprise

Creating business applications is nontrivial. Even the simplest ones are a complex composite of data, presentation, workflow, logic roles, reports, and integrations.

Building applications is not for the faint-hearted. Something strange happens when documents produced on desktop applications, like a spreadsheet, are converted into web deployed and database-driven applications. They grow tentacles, and take on gargantuan proportions; doubling, or tripling in their size and complexity. And it helps when the authors of applications know some of the fundamental background issues of how database theory works, how data is presented on web browsers, and how if/then logic rules are applied.

Can a knowledge worker learn these skills? Yes, definitely. Is it a good idea to make every knowledge worker a citizen developer? Definitely not.

Sticking to the day job

Most people I know who run a business or are information workers don’t really harbor an unrelenting passion for coding software or building applications. They want to use tools to harness information and streamline processes. But, that’s where the passion ends.

Frustrated by the lack of useful tools to work with data can lead businesspeople to unimaginable attempts to build applications by themselves.

Even for those that want to build software applications (and, if that’s you, you’ve arguably chosen the wrong career if you’re not already in IT), using citizen development tools without some foundational training in IT is going to make your life extremely painful.

What’s more, for IT professionals, this idea really sucks. The buck stops with IT when things go wrong, when data is lost, when processes fail, and when information workers get stuck with using technology. Citizen development, however generous of heart, is a bad idea in a highly regulated environment like a company in the 2000s.

The motives for citizen development are in the right place

While one might question the act of citizen development, nobody can surely argue with the motives of those that engage in the practice. For digital businesses, useful ways to capture, process, publish, analyze, automate and collaborate with data are a key element of the customer value being served up.

When executives and information workers hit a wall with underperforming or unsuitable software tools, who could do anything but admire their pluck for picking up a citizen development tool and jolly well having a go at building apps themselves. All very admirable, but there are other ways of achieving the outcomes you seek without becoming a pin-up poster dartboard in the IT department.

Autonomous digital documents

Digital documents are the logical evolution of the document form for the digital age. Like their analog (hardcopy) and digitized (think PDF) predecessors, intelligent digital documents are easier to work with than citizen applications.

Autonomy of use is the key factor with digital documents. They exist on a digital data fabric that spans the enterprise serving up composable data, and are, to some extent, tethered to the digital cloud space that serves them up. Nevertheless, for users, they feel empowering and very much autonomous of large IT.

Autonomy means that information workers are free to do ‘as much as digital documents empower them to do’ without the risk of breaking anything important in the enterprise architecture.

A better outcome for software app seekers and solvers

The win: win for IT leaders, is that enterprise digital document architectures provide a high level of attribution control for IT teams, so they can give information workers enough rope to do what they need to do, without losing control over endpoint security, data structures, technical architectures, and process workflows. An additional layer of no-code administrative tools make light work of tedious IT admin tasks such as replication, backup, data security monitoring, etc.

They can give information workers the digital tooling they need to work with data, without suffering the nightly anxieties of handing over the keys of their kingdom to untrained and unregulated citizen developers.