CITIZEN AUTOMATION SPECIALIST PROGRAM
CITIZEN AUTOMATION SPECIALIST PROGRAM
There is a need to further develop business side specialists with focused talents in digital areas that can help a company win in the market. We have developed a program to help build citizen data specialists within organizations, and it has been successful for those organizations. We now offer another high-value sister program that’s helping business side users to identify and scope automation projects throughout the entire organization.
WHAT IS A CITIZEN AUTOMATION SPECIALIST PROGRAM?
Organizations invested in resources to amplify their workforce through automation and are struggling to be state of the art.
Software developers can help but they are expensive and hard to keep on the team for the long term because they are in high demand.
One of the cost-effective investments you can make to improve automation capabilities is to train business side team members on the basic skills for identifying possible automation improvements, and the ability to do initial design work.
An automation specialist is not a full stack developer, analyst, or administrator. The specialist transforms insight into amplified outcomes using the knowledge to document as-is & to-be process maps, and the ability to self-serve small scale automations using low code tools when available.
A Citizen Automation Specialist is someone who has developed core competencies in the following areas:
- Having an eye to see automation opportunities within the organization
- Able to document “old way” and “new way” flow diagrams
- Understand tools that can be used for automation
- Able to calculate the ROI of automation and decide on investing the effort
- Can proactively solve common challenges around automation
- Aware of the change management required to move from “done-by-hand” to automated
- Able to effectively deal with job reallocation
CITIZEN AUTOMATION SPECIALIST DEVELOPMENT MODEL
It takes time and effort to develop competencies and skills. This is not the training route an Automation Specialist would have gone through in a traditional education track.
Our approach aims to gradually open up areas of competency to the Citizen Automation Specialist to learn how to add value to the organization in new places. When you hire a traditionally trained Automation Specialist, the expectation is that they learned a majority of what they needed in school and are ready to add value on day one – which has been proven to not be true.
The following is the path that we would customize to build a Citizen Automation Specialist Program (CASP).
LEVEL 101 FOUNDATIONAL KNOWLEDGE
This level is an overview of the responsibilities, the tools, capabilities of the organization, and the techniques.
It covers the current state of the organization’s automation tools and available data, systematic thinking, creating current and future state process maps, professional automation techniques, avoiding common automation hurdles, and understanding the future of work alongside artificial intelligence.
LEVEL 201 ADVANCED INTERNAL LAB
Citizen Automation Specialists get more hands-on at this level, creating multiple real-world projects for the organization. The goal is applying the foundational concepts learned in 101 with the concrete, applied learning of a lab environment.
1) Organizations need the ability to amplify their workforce through insight automation from their data in order to make the constant improvements the market and competition demand
2) Developers are very helpful but they struggle to keep up with a large number of needs across the whole organization
3) IT teams have had to carry too much of the burden with automating insight. The business side must take more responsibility for exploiting data
4) Automating the use of data is becoming more critical as AIs, Machine Learning, RPA, etc. are becoming mission critical