About
We want to unlock each team's full potential and drive digital innovation from the ground up with the citizen developer program! Empowering employees to create their own automation solutions using low-code software robots and transform our way of working. The citizen developer program allows non-technical staff to become tech-savvy problem solvers, accelerating processes and improving efficiency.
Innovation presentation
Smart Automation is one of the key levers to execute digital transformation and improve customer experience
Smart Automation is a modern approach to generate business value, radically improving user experiences by simplifying interactions and speeding up processes, reducing repetitive and replicable tasks, understanding how activities are executed and emulating human behaviors. It is achieved and improved by leveraging a set of emerging software technologies combined with traditional process redesign that can be brought to scale in selected areas of the value chain, with limited impact on existing systems and limited invasiveness on underlying IT applications. In the definition of Smart Automation are included technologies such as RPA, Intelligent OCR, Virtual assistant, Natural Language Processing, etc.
Smart automation is a key transforming technological trend of this era and one of the most effective levers for digital transformation. Smart automation is helping organizations in making their operating models more efficient, in serving better their clients and in overcoming the most common bias affecting many organizations on the planet: "we have always done that way".
Companies that are investing consistently in automation are changing their mindset, shifting the approach towards automation from tactical to transformational. In this cultural change, Companies should support employees to understand how automation can improve their work and equipping them with the right tools to make their job easier.
Generali Investments' Citizen Developer program: empowering non-IT professionals to create business applications with ease through Low-Code/No-Code platforms
In this context, Generali Investments launched in 2022 its citizen developer program whereby non-IT professionals can create their own business applications, using low-code/no-code (LCNC) platforms. with the aim to train employees on the key concepts of smart automation, the benefits of smart automation for them and for the Company and to code using no-code/low-code softwares.
Through this program, the employees that participated into the trainings can code their own automations. The initiative is opened to employees from all departments of the organization, such as Operations, IT, Risk management, Investments, Legal. During the time, more than 50 colleagues have been trained.
The training is organized according to the different levels of IT/ digital skills of the colleagues, and it ranges from entry-level sessions where colleagues learn to code attended automation to advanced sessions in which employees learn how to code unattended intelligent automation. Thanks to the no-code/ low-code software, employees learn to code in hours rather than in months of intensive training.
The citizen developer program promotes collaboration across teams, encourages an innovation mindset, and enhances employee satisfaction.
The benefits of this initiative are several for the organization and employees:
• spread the “automation-first” mindset, where colleagues think to automate a task first rather than doing it manually
• foster collaboration across teams, typically the training sessions are held in small groups of colleagues of different teams
• increase employee satisfaction, positive feedback has been received on the initiative from participants
• reinforce the problem-solving attitude of colleagues
• increase efficiency and reduction of errors through digitization of activities
• accelerate innovation as a data-driven company
• 1/3 of our automations have been developed by our Citizens
Uniqueness of the project
Generali Investments puts employees at the heart of digital transformation by leveraging innovation, data, and automation to drive operating efficiency, while democratizing the journey through its citizen developer approach.
For Generali, Innovation is one of the three strategic pillars that will enable us both to increase the value of our customer relationship and to achieve additional operating efficency ; we will leverage more and more on data, and we will scale automation and technology to achieve additional operating efficiency. On top of this, one of the key elements to perform a successful digital transformation is to have employees at the center of it. With the citizen developer approach, we shifted from the classical paradigm according to which only certain teams are in the driving seat of the digital transformation, and we democratized this journey, leveraging simple low-code platforms that provide easy-to-use tools to make an immediate impact.
Generali Investments' Citizen Developer program creates a positive feedback loop by empowering employees to collaborate with robots and identify new automation opportunities
In Generali Investments, we noticed that many requests of automation cannot be performed using the traditional Center of Excellence (CoE) centered approach (i.e., each automation is implemented by the automation CoE), while the citizen developer program is an effective way to manage certain type of requests. In this way the colleagues are empowered to create their own automation, generating benefits for their own teams and the organization overall in short time.
The colleagues that are part of the program collaborate with the robots by delegating repetitive tasks, interacting with them, and working alongside them. As employees become familiar with robots, they typically identify new opportunities for automation, enabling a positive virtuous cycle.
