Good ideas can come from anywhere, especially when informed by real world experience, a fact that some firms are leveraging to source new solutions from field staff, which serves to both rapidly expand its available tools and upskill their professionals.
While the specific approach varies from firm to firm, those that empower staff accountants to take an active role in technology development report they have found new versatility and flexibility to tackle the practical client engagement challenges, as well as increased engagement and enthusiasm.
However, much like any other project or initiative, success is not just a matter of throwing together a program and calling it a day. Regardless of how someone decides to pursue it, taking a deliberate approach is essential to ensuring the effort does not become a monumental waste of time and money. While different firms do so in different ways, they all stressed the importance of intentionality, oversight and a willingness to recognize when something's not working.
Accounting Today will be looking at how accountants are being empowered to contribute new solutions at three different firms. Today we will examine the program at Top 20 firm CliftonLarsonAllen.
CLA takes a formal approach via its Citizen Developer program, an internal group composed of professionals from throughout the firm that produces solutions from their own ideas. Created in 2022, its initial successes drew enough leadership buy-in for it to become an official group in 2024.
Once someone expresses an interest in being part of Citizen Development, they're connected with a mentor in the program who works with them on their ideas or assigns them a project from the group's backlog, according to tax transformation director Paige Bottano. From there, they begin training in designing and building AI-enabled tools and process improvements. They are empowered to create solutions and workflow enhancements that reduce manual effort, surface insights and improve client service.
Recruits can narrow their focus with different questions. "What's your industry? What are you interested in? And then what are you excited to automate? What's the biggest pain point for you that we've come up with? And then they embrace that, and we train them as they go through that process," said Bottano.
This has produced a number of solutions that, once developed, were scaled up and made available throughout the firm and are now routinely used in the course of everyday work. Bottano highlighted a client outreach app as one example, as it has allowed the firm to expand its automated client communications by about 35,000.
"Our users can come in, they can check which clients they'd like to email—we did this a little bit with the One Big Beautiful Bill for our targeted opportunities—and then users can send emails in bulk through that method. They love it. It's not the most complex thing I've ever built, but they definitely enjoy that one," she said.
Beyond specific apps, Rick Krueger, who serves as CLA's managing principal of transformation, pointed out that the program also allows staff to quickly develop custom solutions for specific problems clients are facing, such as with the aforementioned OBBB. It is a huge bill with many provisions and can be very overwhelming to think about how one should prioritize things in its wake. Krueger said the Citizen Developer group allows professionals to approach individual clients with solutions specific to their individual context and do so much faster than if they had relied on a third party vendor.
"This program actually helped stand up a number of apps for us in a very quick turnaround time. That bill was launched, released, and just a couple weeks later, we had our first tool out there," he said. "Big thanks to our citizen developers for being able to understand what that tax return information is, understand what the OBBB meant for our clients, and then develop tools around that, so we could be quick and swift in our action in supporting our clients."
The program has gone through some changes since it first began, one of the biggest being that people had a lot of other things to do. Krueger said this led to several false starts because staff members had too many other priorities to address. He described the initial process as "a series of failures" due to lack of serious commitment.
"Accounting is an endless stream of deadlines. Every 15th, every 30th has some sort of deadline associated with it, and when we were having a lot of partially committed people whose primary focus was on something else, whatever deadline was coming up, we were constantly having false starts. We would get some momentum, we would pick up some projects and have great ideas, and we would struggle to get things to the finish line and really make an impact," he said.
He credited Bottano with turning things around. While not everyone had to be completely committed, it was important for there to be a core of people within the larger community who could maintain continuity and keep the group active as others came and went.
"We have people who know what the opportunities are, and they're bringing them directly, and they're influencing engagements directly, but they're supported by people who are more dedicated and can help with that last mile. It is that last mile that really is challenging if you're constantly picking up and putting things down," he said.
Bottano, for her part, noted that the group also needed to change how they conducted meetings and engaged with each other. Initially, she said, everyone would get on a call and she would ask what people were working on and what people needed, "and it was that dreaded silence."
"What we've done is try to overcome that by having a purpose to every call." she said.
Members show how they built something successful and how it can be applied in the future.
In this respect, it is sort of like a book club. Someone comes in with a new workflow enhancement or way to solve a problem; after explaining it, people go try it themselves and afterward they discuss what did and didn't work so they can refine their approach. With these and other tweaks, the Citizen Developer program was able to grow from about three or four people to around 100 from throughout the firm, ranging from assurance to tax to IT and more.
Doing so safely, with proper governance and oversight, is extremely important. While the group is responsible for the solutions it produces, the group coordinates heavily with the IT department to ensure compliance with data loss prevention policies and similar requirements. But while the group is technology-oriented in its goals, Krueger said the main challenges in starting and maintaining the group have more to do with people and culture.
"I think it's easy to think of something like this as a technology initiative. It's not that we don't have some tools that we spend a lot of time on, but to me this is way more culture than it is technology," he said.
Any group like this needs to rest on a foundation that includes governance, privacy, security, compliance and quality, but he noted that most firms think in these terms by default. What is less front of mind, he said, is engagement and enthusiasm to ensure people both want to and are able to meaningfully participate.
"How do we get people enthusiastic about this? How do we get people involved in it? How do we make sure things like the day-to-day deadlines aren't a barrier to what the program is trying to do? Instead, the program is enabling us to better handle the deadlines and the day to day, and what we need to accomplish, really figuring out how to fit it together and making sure things like charge hours and deadlines and stuff don't get in the way of a better experience for everybody," he said.
This is the first in a three-part series. Join us tomorrow for our look at how Top 20 firm Armanino does things.
