To start and sustain a low-code-enabled citizen developer initiative, it’s critical to partner your IT department with your citizen developers. And not just at the beginning—IT should be involved throughout the process, from ideation to optimization.
Lay a safe foundation for a smart low-code program
If you don’t allow people to solve their own problems with in-house business apps, chances are high they’ll find a way to do it outside of the organization.
This “shadow IT” mostly likely already exists—already without the awareness or oversight of IT. Your more tech-savvy employees have doubtless been creating spreadsheet macros and templates for some time, and others may be setting up information-sharing Wikis, blogs, and web pages. And that’s not a good thing.
“Processes running off non-IT provisioned platforms could create risk for the organization,” warns Rajeev Sethi, VP of emerging technologies at ServiceNow.
One of the concerns with shadow IT is that while they may solve some immediate problems for individuals and departments, they may expose sensitive data, creating other security risks and causing other IT problems. Even when seemingly safe and useful, these local solutions aren't done in a way that benefits other departments and groups.
"Anybody with a credit card can use third-party cloud services," notes Sethi. "But then you have processes running outside of IT control, and outside of your company's environment."
The first step toward implementing a low-code strategy is to choose a low-code platform that can smartly—and safely—support a citizen developer program. Low-code application development tools like ServiceNow’s App Engine can reduce shadow IT, giving people a chance to solve their own problems using a platform that provides the IT governance and scalability missing from rogue solutions.
Choose the right low-code platform
Once your company has decided to pursue a low-code initiative, IT needs to be involved in selecting the right low-code platform to ensure that it:
- Fits with your company's existing (and planned) infrastructure, key applications, and resources. “Ideally, from an IT PoV, the low-code platform for use by citizen developers is one that IT already is, or is committed to, using,” notes Sethi.
- Is capable of creating the right types of business applications.
- Can integrate with the various internal and third-party services your company uses (ERP, HR, finance, etc.)
- Is scalable. Some citizen developer apps may only be useful to a small group, but others could be valuable to everyone in your company, and also to customers, suppliers, business partners, and others.
Support your citizen developers
Be sure to ask potential low-code platform vendors what will be needed in terms of staffing. For instance, will it be necessary to bring in additional admins and support? Who will take the lead on policy creation, compliance, governance monitoring, and reporting? Some of these roles and tasks will fall under the domain of IT. Others, like training, might be assigned to HR or whoever leads your in-house education programs.
“ServiceNow offers self-learning resources for the App Engine platform, for use by employees wanting to become citizen developers—and your company’s IT is not required for provisioning or support of these resources,” according to Spandan Chakraborty, ServiceNow’s director of enterprise application software. ”For example, ServiceNow has more than 150 citizen developers, and our IT did not need to be involved in or provide their training.”
Here's a starter list of resources and capabilities IT may need to be responsible for:
Citizen developer coordinator(s):. It’s good to have someone who can coordinate and promote the citizen developer initiative to employees as well as to their managers. This includes keeping track of applicants and their progress through the process of becoming a citizen developer.
Tracking low-code apps through their lifecycle: IT will monitor and track apps created by citizen developers through their entire lifecycle, Chakraborty says. These lifecycle progress steps include:
- Creating and maintaining an inventory/repository for completed citizen developer apps to be registered and monitored. (“ServiceNow provides a portfolio management tool for this,” notes Chakraborty.)
- Evaluating requests and proposals for low code apps created by citizen developers.
- Ensuring the task the app is intended to perform is appropriate.
- Reviewing apps to confirm they are doing what they are supposed to, and that the apps are easy to learn and use.
- Ensuring apps comply with privacy, security, and other requirements.
- Tracking the usage of these apps to assess their usability, adoption, and value.
- Optimizing apps that aren’t performing to their potential and monitoring app behavior after upgrades.
Create an ongoing cycle of support
As your citizen developer program matures, IT staff familiar with the low-code initiative should play an active role in its development. Sethi encourages IT to suggest “use cases that new citizen developers might develop apps for, such as automating email or spreadsheet-related tasks. Stay connected to your citizen developers via email, chat, and community forums—perhaps even occasional meetings and in-person discussions. And for citizen developers who want to increase their application development abilities, provide some degree of mentoring.”
IT should help create, monitor, and participate in a community of citizen developers, Sethi says. Ideally, as time goes on, they will begin to learn from and support each other, with input as needed from IT.
Keep an eye on governance and compliance
"Governance is a crucial part of the citizen developer equation," says Mark Tognetti, director of creator workflows outbound product management at ServiceNow. “To ensure success, you must have the right technical and process guardrails in place.”
For example, the right low-code platform – like IT's own applications – must ensure application security through standard features like ACLs (access control lists), roles, and login/authentication.
Sethi adds that IT’s governance role also extends to “making sure that citizen developers aren’t trying to build apps that are beyond their capabilities.”
If you are an IT professional thinking to yourself, “Wow...this seems like a lot of work,” rest assured that creating a high-functioning cadre of citizen developers will pay dividends in the long run. Once you have empowered people to solve the problems that mean a lot to them—but perhaps not so much to the entire organization—you can say bye-bye to your backlog and start working on the big, hairy applications you became a coder to tackle in the first place.
When done properly and with purpose, low-code programs partnered with IT pros are two great things that are better together.
