| 4.1 Conceptual Design and End State |  |
Learn the components of the operating model and an organization's end-state design that maximizes citizen development.
In this section you will find:
•The definition of the citizen development operating model: the culture, organizational structures, governance, capabilities, tools, and technologies
•The end-state operating model design of organizations that are in an advanced state of citizen development maturity
“Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
Warren Buffet
Overview
The wide-scale organizational adoption of citizen development will have a profound effect on how an organization operates. Citizen development has the potential to radically transform and deliver significant value for investors. Organizations will embed citizen development into their core business processes and empower employees to build apps that solve business problems.
 | DID YOU KNOW? |
“The U.S. government lost US$32 billion to failed IT projects in 2017” (Friend, 2017).
Increasingly, organizations are seeing the potential of citizen development, yet we are not aware of any organization that has taken citizen development to its maximum potential. To explore such potential, we take the organizational designs that are present in high-performing agile organizations and extrapolate the impact that citizen development could have on the organizational end state. We can reasonably conclude that organizations that use scaled citizen development will achieve a significant reduction in organizational layers (the number of levels in an organization between the CEO and the lowest-ranking employees). This is enabled by a decrease in the need for project management, business coordination, analysis and design, and IT oversight as business users, in their role as citizen developers, are empowered to own larger portions of the process.
These changes translate to both significant productivity improvements and operational savings. We believe the impact on creating an innovative and continuous learning culture will emerge through the process of empowering employees.
There is a large prize to aim for, and the risks common to all transformations will still exist and need to be managed. For instance, delivering such transformational outcomes requires significant organizational alignment and effective transitioning through the five stages of citizen development maturity, both of which are covered in later sections.
Operating Model Conceptual Design
An operating model is a conceptual framework representing how value is created within an organization and how products and services are designed and delivered. Organizations are complex systems with many integrated parts, making it difficult to predict the impact of changing the organization with any degree of certainty.
Individuals who want to introduce and scale citizen development need to understand the interplay among the various components of an operating model and, therefore, be better equipped to design changes for each component. Table 10 provides descriptions of these components.
Why is operating model design important?
 | MARKET RESEARCH |
Companies with robust operating models posted better financial results over time. Those in the top quartile showed 9.0% average revenue growth and 13.5% average EBIT growth, against 7.8% and 10.9% for those in the bottom quartile (Blenko, Garten, & Mottura, 2014).
A well-designed and implemented operating model enables an organization to execute its strategy and deliver upon its mission and purpose. However, many organizations struggle to maintain and run their operating model efficiently and effectively. They haven't considered the appropriate resourcing, management practices, and best use of technology to automate and deliver a better customer experience while reducing cost. They are not optimized to execute the organization's strategy. Addressing this is a major concern for business leaders and has given rise to the growth of a sizeable management consulting industry servicing such concerns.
 | DEFINITION |
Strategy
A plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim (Google Dictionary, n.d.d.).
An effective operating model considers how changes made to one of its components will impact the others. We discuss this in more depth in Creating the Culture (Section 5.2).
The end-state operating model design of organizations that are in an advanced state of citizen development maturity
The immense power of citizen development to deliver transformational outcomes in an organization makes embarking on a journey to introduce and scale citizen development a worthy pursuit. As mentioned in the opening section, while many organizations are dabbling in citizen development, its full potential is still unknown. However, there is a growing body of evidence showing that high-performing organizations have the ability to rapidly adapt to market changes. Such organizations have many of the conditions that support wide-scale adoption of citizen development. Table 11 describes the desired end state of citizen development operating components.
