Phil Simon's Blog, page 13

Looking for Case Studies for My Next Book

A few days ago, I announced the upcoming publication of The Nine: The Tectonic Forces Reshaping the Workplace. The writing and research are going smoothly, and it’s time for my regular post to solicit case studies.

Make no mistake: Case studies matter and all of my books contain them. You have to show before you tell, right?

For the new book, I’m particularly interested in organizations that have used robotic process automation and blockchain technologies in interesting ways.

One disclaimer: I insist upon providing a draft of the case study write-up prior for your review before the book’s publication. If approving the final copy will involve 18 revisions with your employer’s PR folks or legal department, however, then we should probably pass. I’m not a fan of bottlenecks.

If this sounds interesting, let’s chat.

CONNECT

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Announcing My Next Book

I’ve got some news on my next opus. Here are the deets.

As COVID-19 has receded, companies such as Apple, Amazon, Google, Salesforce, and Twitter have severely restricted or even eliminated remote work. Ditto for countless, less iconic firms and small businesses. At a high level, executives and managers at these organizations are trying to turn back the clock to 2019.

There’s just one problem, though: For a bevy of reasons, they won’t succeed.

In many ways, the workplace of 2023 already differs from its pre-pandemic counterpart. In some cases, it’s downright unrecognizable. What’s more, this gap will only intensify in the coming years. Blame—or thank, if you like—powerful economic, societal, geopolitical, and technological forces. They include generative AI, automation, dispersed workforces, blockchain, immersive technologies, employee empowerment, and the return of systematic inflation.

Brass tacks: The workplace is undergoing a massive, irrevocable shift. The only question for business leaders is, What should you do about it?

The workplace of 2023 already differs from its pre-pandemic counterpart.

In The Nine: The Tectonic Forces Reshaping the Workplace, I answer that question in spades. I peer into the dizzying and chaotic future of work. In the process, I slice through the hype surrounding nascent trends and newfangled technologies.

Insightful, timely, and essential, The Nine clearly explains what’s really happening, why, and how business leaders can navigate the dramatically different workplace of the future.

The Nine will be the fourth installment in my series on the future of work. You can pre-order the e-book now on Amazon. (Yes, paperback and hardcover versions are coming.)

Note that the current pub date is not realistic—but in a good way. I suspect that, just like Low-Code/No-Code, it will drop much earlier. (The initial pub date was February 1, 2023 but it dropped four months earlier. #moderationissues) Look for The Nine in early May or June of this year. Props as always to my cover designer Luke Fletcher.

PRE-ORDER KINDLE VERSION

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Korean and Chinese Translations of Low-Code/No-Code Coming

I’m pleased to announce that Low-Code/No-Code: Citizen Developers and the Surprising Future of Business Applications will be coming to South Korea (Hanbit Media) and China (China Science and Technology Press). Mad props to the folks at Dropcap for making the deals happen.

Interestingly, the book is my third title in Korean. The Age of the Platform and Too Big to Ignore are the others. China still leads the Unofficial Phil Simon Book Translation Olympics with four.

I suspect that more translations of the new book are on the way, specifically in Europe. Looks like I learned a few things about author marketing over the years.

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Episode 75: Citizen Development at Scale with Amtrak’s Michael McCullough

Michael McCullough joins me today. He’s the Citizen Development Business Architect at Amtrak. We talk about low-code, training, governance, Microsoft’s Power Platform, and the challenges of running one of the world’s largest citizen development departments.

WANT EARLY ACCESS TO PODCAST EPISODES? ➡️

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On ChatGPT, Duplicability, and Citizen Development

ChatGPT is having its moment. Over the past few days, I’ve read a few articles about it. (This one from The Atlantic on the death of the college essay was particularly interesting.) This morning, I decided to give it a try.

I typed in the following query: What are the benefits of citizen development?

The Results

ChatGPT quickly generated the following response:

A bit generic to my liking, but certainly not terrible, as my friend Josh Bernoff recently pointed out. It’s certainly an order of magnitude better than what one university president wrote to start his book. Note that it doesn’t generate any sources. That is, the reader is just taking it on faith that these claims are true.

I was curious to see if ChatGPT would generate the same list two seconds after it created the first one. Pasting in the same query, ChatGPT presented the following text:

Is there overlap? Of course, but what happened to “the improved user experience” from the first one? If it’s one of the top-five benefits at 5:50 a.m., then I fail to see how it could cease to be one just a few seconds later. Beyond that, I take issue with the notion that citizen development is fundamentally more secure than traditional software development. Says who?

Simon Says

ChatGPT is certainly interesting, but I won’t be using it in a meaniningful way—at least for now. I enjoy the process of writing far too much and, at the risk of being immodest, think that I produce superior content than a glorified web search. Oh, and I’ve got morals, unlike ChatGPT.

Feedback

What say you?

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Is There a Difference Between Citizen Developers and Subject Matter Experts?

🎧 Listen to an audio version of this article on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and beyond.

Introduction

The future of software development will look quite a bit different than its past. In a sentence, that’s the premise of Low-Code/No-Code.

Of course, there’s quite a bit more happening in the world of software development. So says 40-year industry vet Richard Campbell in his excellent and expansive talk on the subject.

Campbell covers a great deal of ground in his fascinating talk, and I found myself agreeing with him most of the time. (I certainly learned a few things to boot.)

About 30 minutes in, he addresses the low-code/no-code movement. Interestingly, Campbell doesn’t like the term citizen developer. He prefers to label these folks as domain experts. Tomato, tom-ah-to, right?

Allow me to channel my inner Larry David.

Eh.

Yes, many citizen developers:

Come from functional areas of the business. (More here.)Have amassed a great deal of knowledge about their domains.

Until we invent a better term, I’m sticking with citizen developer.

No argument here. Still, it’s folly to assume that every lawyer, small business owner, marketing director, and other non-developer will start building his or her own apps. Plenty of subject matter experts don’t want to get their hands dirty—and that’s fine. The low-code/no-code po-po won’t come knocking on their door.

What’s more, as I discovered while researching the book, an increasing number of citizen developers lack deep domain expertise. (Here is my pod with two of them.) They just like building apps, improving broken processes, and automating manual tasks.

Since I like charts:

Simon Says

Until we invent a better term, I’m sticking with citizen developer.

Feedback

What say you?

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On Amoeba and Notion

🎧 Listen to an audio version of this article on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and beyond.

Amoebae can alter their shape. They do this primarily by extending and retracting pseudopods. (Thank you, Wikipedia.) As it turns out, today’s low-code and no-code tools exhibit similar characteristics.

Case in point: A few days back, Notion announced that its generative AI tool was now available in alpha.1 Check out the video below:

Low-code/no-code tools don’t fall neatly into a single category.

As I describe in the new book, low-code/no-code tools don’t fall neatly into a single category à la Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint files. Rather, they overlap and frequently evolve. Updates don’t merely extend the power of a feature or add an adjacent one. They introduce entirely new capabilities—ones that have historically required adopting a different app.

I struggled with creating a viable taxonomy—and apparently, Gartner and Forrester have experienced similar difficulties. 

Simon Says

Classification issues aside, here’s the good news: Notion, Airtable, Mendix, Appian, SmartSuite, and their ilk will do more next month than this month. And that expansion benefits all of their users. No, one app won’t rule them all, but we’ll be able to use fewer of them. 

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Thoughts on Citizen Developers and Author Choices

🎧 Listen to an audio version of this article on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and beyond.

The other day, I was speaking with my new buddy Sam Sibley about citizen development. Sibley serves as a global head at PMI. He’s also one of the authors of Citizen Development: The Handbook for Creators and Change Makers1 and a former tennis pro. (Yeah, I was jealous.)

He’ll appear on my pod soon, but today I wanted to share a little tidbit from our conversation.

His book advances useful frameworks on the maturity and governance of citizen developers. To be fair, Gartner, Forrester, and other think tanks also propose these types of models.

All authors need to make choices.

By contrast, Low-Code/No-Code does not.

Is this a glaring oversight?

Not at all.

For three reasons, exploring these topics just didn’t make sense.

First, all authors need to make choices. The book about everything is the book about nothing. Put differently, if you try to please everyone, you’ll wind up pleasing no one. (Cue John Madden quote.) Second, if you attempt to include absolutely everything in a book about a nascent trend, you’ll never publish. Third and along these lines, a little humility is in order. You may have written the first book on an important topic, but consider the following queries:

Will it be the last?Will it be the only one?

If your subject is as important as you think, then the answer to each of these questions is a resounding no.

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I’m Now on Anchor.fm

🎧 Listen to an audio version of this article on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and beyond.

A little more than two years ago, I did what so many others have done over the past five: I started a podcast. Since that time, I’ve recorded 74 episodes of Conversations About Collaboration.

I’ve noticed over the last six months that more and more authors are creating short-form audio for their posts. Dror Poleg is a case in point.

I’ve decided to join the party. I’m saving plenty of time since I’m rarely on Twitter anymore because, you know, Elon. (As an aside, there’s a good chance that the company isn’t around in a year, but that’s a post for a different day.)

My new mini-pod (is that a thing?) is called Short Form With Phil Simon.

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Characteristics of the Modern Citizen Developer

🎧 Listen to an audio version of this article on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and beyond.

In the new book, I describe the common attributes of today’s citizen developments. Now, normally I’m not too keen on infographics. On the other hand, I understand that people like them and often share them. Add in the fact that I’m full media-whore mode, and voilà!

 

 

Click to view the whole thing.

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