Preface

Jay Crotts: Bringing “Shadow IT” Into the Light

It’s fitting to begin this book with the story of an unlikely hero of citizen development. Jay Crotts is a semi-retired former chief information officer of Shell PLC, the energy giant. Jay Crotts was executive vice president and group CIO of Shell from 2015 to 2023, and about halfway through his tenure he had a bit of a revelation. Shell was in a race to digitalize its business, and Crotts just didn’t feel like it was happening fast enough. His global IT function had a multibillion-dollar annual budget and more than 8,000 staff and contractors, but they still couldn’t satisfy the demand for applications, automations, and analytical models around the company.

Crotts kept telling his people that they needed to get closer to the business in order to create value, but he realized that there were plenty of people in the business who could create value with IT as well. People were getting citizen-oriented tools in their hands, but he was a bit worried about what they were doing with them.

Crotts was based in the Netherlands, and the European Union had passed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016. He was afraid that citizen development would get out of control and that employees would violate the law by inadvertently making available critical personal data—the medical records of sailors on Shell tankers, for example. He felt that there were lots of smart engineers and other employees at Shell doing innovative things, but there was no safe place to access and store the data they needed to use. Crotts knew those people were thinking, “I want to be productive, but there is no place to do it. Crotts’ group says no, because there is a risk of GDPR violations or cybersecurity issues.” He looked around the energy industry and elsewhere to see if anyone else had solved the problem, and they hadn’t. Many CIOs were still viewing citizen development as undesirable “shadow IT,” but Crotts saw it as a way to bring it out of the shadows and into the light.

So Crotts put Nils Kappeyne, one of his trusted business unit CIOs, in charge of the do-it-yourself (DIY) initiative. They didn’t want to call it citizen development because they were afraid engineers might think they were being taught how to vote. Crotts thought the initiative would work out well, but he wasn’t sure. The critical thing, he believed, was finding a safe place to access and store data for citizen use. He told Kappeyne to find a place to put the data, and then data owners—which already existed—throughout the business would determine access to it. He said to Kappeyne at the time, “What will bring people to your platform is where the data is.”

As the DIY program was rolling out, Shell was deepening its partnership with Microsoft, and that vendor was making big bets on both cloud and citizen development. The data at Shell for citizen use ended up being stored in Microsoft’s Azure cloud. And the vendor had also just introduced its Power Platform—a collection of citizen-oriented tools for application development, business intelligence, web portal development, and later workflow automation. Crotts and Kappeyne placed their DIY bets on these Microsoft tools and a few others from vendors like Salesforce.com.

Kappeyne thought that he could keep his day job as a business unit CIO while getting DIY going, but Crotts felt otherwise. “It needs to be big,” he said. Kappeyne, already a Shell VP, suggested that the program wasn’t worthy of a VP title, and he could take a demotion. “It needs to be big,” Crotts said, “and you should keep your VP title.” Kappeyne also thought that he could establish the DIY program within a couple of months. Crotts doubted it but didn’t say so. Kappeyne stayed in the job for a couple of years and then reluctantly handed it off to somebody else.

Crotts also supported a collaboration with Shell’s research function on citizen data science. Dan Jeavons, the head of that initiative, reported into the research organization but was formally included in the IT leadership. Shell collaborated with Microsoft Azure to be able to run models at scale in the cloud. As with the application development DIY program, data was provided to the data scientists, “and they could go to town,” Crotts remarked. The DIY approach, accompanied by effective cloud security, enabled data science to thrive. It was a good fit for a culture where, as Crotts put it, “engineers—many of them come out of school knowing Python these days—question a model if someone else develops it.”

Some IT people worried about losing their jobs, but Crotts thought that they—or some, at least—would move from being developers to coaches and enablers. And that is what has happened. Shell still has plenty of professional developers, and in many cases the DIY program has brought the business and the IT people into closer collaboration.

One influential aspect of the Shell DIY approach to citizen development is the “zone” program, in which different zones (green, amber, red) get treated differently in terms of governance. We’ll describe the approach later in the book, but suffice it to say here that it has been adopted by a variety of organizations. Microsoft has endorsed it for Power Platform customers, for example, and the Project Management Institute has adopted it for its teachings on citizen development. Several companies we spoke to said they had adopted the Shell zone approach.

But perhaps even more influential for the worldwide spread of citizen development has been the idea that a corporate IT organization can get behind citizen technology activity and give it the support it needs to thrive. Crotts is pretty modest about this achievement:

People really liked it, and it’s one of the fastest things going. A significant number of engineers adopted DIY, and we’ve given them credit for the work. The tools are easy to use, and the data is there. Once other CIOs understood it they thought it made sense.

Crotts mentioned several DIY projects that have enabled energy transition activities or substantially reduced fuel consumption in Shell operations. He doesn’t say that citizen development has transformed the huge company, but as he put it, “We’ve hit singles all across the globe.”

Benjamin Berkowitz: A Finance Professional Turned Citizen Automator

One shining example of citizen automation turning a domain expert into a digital transformation leader is Benjamin Berkowitz. A self-professed “finance guy,” he was motivated to solve operational and budgetary challenges in the hospitals where he worked. He studied history and psychology in college and earned an MBA. He’s now pursuing a PhD in management and organizational behavior. He wanted to know what made enterprises tick.

Berkowitz began his career in the healthcare field, working first as a financial analyst at Boston Children’s Hospital before moving to Mass General Brigham (MGB). Based in Boston, MGB is the largest hospital-based research enterprise in the United States, with revenues of nearly $19 billion and more than $2 billion in annual research funding. It is, in short, a hospital with a lot of work for its finance department. Berkowitz’s 11-year career at MGB afforded him the chance to experience and impact almost every part of it. Starting as a team lead for payer strategy and contracting, he then moved to lead revenue calculation and revenue finance systems, finally becoming director of financial analysis and strategy, and chief of staff of revenue cycle operations—the lifeblood of any healthcare business, since it’s how the organization gets paid for its work. But on this journey he found himself doing more than simply overseeing financial functions.

Berkowitz had always been interested in making work processes more efficient and effective. Early in his career that meant using Microsoft Access to automate reporting. He then graduated to using SQL to process large data sets in order to process revenue models. This trend then accelerated in his revenue cycle job at MGB. In his own words, Berkowitz was “bouncing around from department to department, automating as he was going.” He didn’t know he was a citizen automator; he hadn’t even heard the term. He was just applying his penchant to problem-solve to challenges as they presented themselves and using the automation tools at his disposal.

Berkowitz’s pivot to becoming a full-time champion of automation began while looking at budgets, as finance people are wont to do. The growth of MGB’s operations over the previous decade had been strong. Staff levels grew accordingly. But Berkowitz was now facing a challenge. He had 800 people in the RevCycle and Shared Services Center and no end in sight to growth in hiring. The challenge was compounded by talent shortages and rapid wage inflation. Clearly the status quo wasn’t sustainable. As part of a budget planning conversation, he said to his VP, “There must be a better way for us to manage all of this work.”

His next steps (highlighted in an article1 Berkowitz coauthored) addressed the growing scale of work to track and catalog an increasing number of healthcare providers. The current system was slow and inefficient. It took three different hospital administrators to collect, aggregate, and export data, all of which...