devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Rahul Bhageeradhan

  • 7 Steps to Unleashing Your Citizen Developers

    7 Steps to Unleashing Your Citizen Developers

    As digital transformation accelerates, organizations are searching for ways to enable all their employees—not just IT, development or DevOps teams—to design, build, iterate and launch new processes and applications as per their requirements. This democratizing approach is called citizen development—where business users are empowered to create their own processes and apps with only minimal supervision from IT, ultimately relieving them from IT backlogs. 

    How to Get Started with Citizen Development

    Running a citizen development program doesn’t mean relegating IT to the sidelines. Citizen developers can often be prone to mistakes due to their lack of programming background. Limited skills may also result in creating a faulty app or unknowingly developing one that resembles existing software that serves the same purpose.

    Thus, citizen development calls for a new relational approach that’s founded on transparency, trust and dialogue between IT specialists and non-IT employees. 

    As a business leader, you’re in the best position to initiate such a program. Here are the steps you can take to get you started: 

    1. Identify citizen development potential

    You can issue surveys across departments or meet with division heads to understand who is using forms of shadow IT or already using citizen development tools, what they’re using these for and the number of users of these apps. Your findings can help you assess which departments have the most citizen developer candidates.

    Also, determine your company’s backlog of IT requests and current IT pain points. Knowing the pent-up demand will give you an idea of what issues citizen developers can seek to resolve.

    2. Set clear goals

    Communicate what citizen development aims to accomplish for your organization. Identify the apps you intend to create, the mode of deployment, the role of citizen developers and which departments will benefit.

    3. Get support from IT and fellow business leaders

    Find partners in the IT team and among other managers who can help champion your vision for citizen development. 

    First, approach the potential managers who will be collaborating with you in this cause. Getting their support early can aid you in establishing a more well-rounded vision and avoiding any conflicts down the road. By helping them understand how it will actually boost their department’s workflows instead of delaying internal tasks, you’d be able to muster credibility for your proposal.

    Meanwhile, assure your IT team that there’ll be a clear delineation of responsibilities between citizen developers and IT personnel. Employees will undergo self-directed and group training before being allowed to access a development environment. The software development life cycle will also be documented to make citizen developers aware of the process and necessary requirements for submitting their ideas. Moreover, IT developers will still be in charge of providing documentation, evaluating ideas and offering technical guidance with regular check-ins.

    4. Shortlist low-code/no-code platforms according to your business needs

    It would be best to look for low-code platform providers, schedule demos and invite IT and business unit leaders during dedicated sessions. They can compare feature sets and appraise learning curves with you. 

    5. Lay down a governance plan

    A governance plan ensures that data security best practices are in place and that IT assistance is well-defined in your citizen development program. Such a plan should cover:

    • The evaluation process for admitting projects into the citizen developer backlog or IT backlog
    • Standard compliance and security requirements for any project accepted for citizen development
    • Standard workflow protocols including testing, validation, audit and integration
    • What instances will require IT involvement

    6. Get senior management buy-in

    You’ll need to communicate your intentions with your senior executives and prepare to formally present your citizen development plan. 

    • Establish the rationale behind the plan. Compare internal metrics with industry stats showing the current need for citizen developers. Cite success stories or case studies.
    • Share internal figures pointing to the current IT backlog as well as results of surveys and discussions with employees and fellow managers.
    • Calculate and show your company’s projected one- to five-year ROI for using low-code/no-code platforms for citizen development.
    • Introduce your proposed governance plan and pilot program.

    7. Start training

    The citizen developers should be given time to learn the selected low-code/no-code platform. You can later pick a use case to pilot the tool. Identify your expectations and criteria to measure the success of the project.

  • Low-Code: Bridging the Gap Between DevOps and Business

    Low-Code: Bridging the Gap Between DevOps and Business

    The need to innovate faster, manage multiple environments, optimize an application’s life cycle and achieve continuous delivery are aspirational goals that a successful DevOps team strives for. But there are loads of challenges, as meeting these goals increases the pressure on DevOps teams to adopt improved application architecture, new tools and developer workflows.

    The overarching principle of DevOps is continuous effort, including continuous business planning, collaborative development, continuous testing, continuous release and deployment, continuous monitoring and collaborative customer feedback. This is where low-code development platforms are emerging as an integral way to empower DevOps teams.
    If you look closely, ​​low-code and DevOps share common benefits: The ability to offer faster, scalable and complex applications consistently to meet business needs.

    However, many DevOps teams still rely on conventional manual coding and automation. Low-code can also supplement the talent shortage by enabling folks without extensive programming experience to develop and deploy applications faster.

    How Low-Code Platforms Impact DevOps

    Automated Application Deployment: Low-code platforms increase the speed of DevOps while also reducing the overall complexity by providing a unified platform to enable the cultural shift. From managing version control to validating builds, low-code platforms do all the heavy lifting for your developers. With low-code, you can deploy almost anything in a single click—user interface, workflows, database and/or integration components.

    Clutter-Free DevOps: Low-code platforms allow you to integrate with different programming tools using APIs, SOAP and REST web services.

    Hassle-Free Migration: Organizations can keep their legacy systems alive longer by making their functionality available to many other systems. Consider developing an Android and iOS mobile application on top of your existing CRM system. While your core system maintains, a low-code platform allows you to develop add-ons or new apps on top of it. Furthermore, because low-code platforms provide easy-to-use tools, citizen developers may participate in the migration process.

    Maintenance at Scale: With low-code, you don’t have to worry about updating apps over time because the platform designer always updates and refines the stored interfaces—and, as a result, your application—without even bothering you.

    Enterprise-Grade Security: Security is a top consideration when building scalable apps. Low-code platforms enable your IT and DevOps teams to manage data and user access. Each user can be provided with access to only the information and functionality that they require based on their roles and responsibilities.

    Compliance and Security: Legitimate low-code platforms adhere to the Global Compliance Assurance Standards, as well as ISAE and ISO certifications. Security should be a top priority for your platform, which will serve clients from a variety of businesses, including government entities. Besides integrating robust security and governance features, make sure that your platform has also implemented an ISO/IEC 27001-compliant information security management system (ISMS).

    Democratizing IT: Bringing Business and DevOps Together

    A major challenge for DevOps is to constantly meet the changing needs of the business. The invariably dynamic nature of processes demands continuous optimization, which turns out to be a bottleneck for business, especially if IT can’t deliver applications on time. To make this whole approach scalable, low-code platforms provide multiple environments for your business and DevOps team to test, build, deploy and modify applications collaboratively.

    A comprehensive low-code platform offers the means of both visual programming and coding capability. For usability reasons, these tools are clearly separated and presented to the development team in a way that allows citizen developers and business users—who are most commonly the domain experts—to use the visual components while developers can work on adding custom code to extend the capabilities of the application.

    While a complex app can only be developed by an experienced professional developer, modifying the look and feel of an app or building/modifying basic functionality can be carried out by business users/citizen developers.

    Moving IT Up the Value Chain From Executor to Enabler

    IT teams are now viewed as critical to enabling their businesses to achieve greater productivity and profitability. By providing a self-serve model using a low-code platform, you can enable citizen developers to build custom apps, employees to use portals at their convenience and create dashboards to improve everyone’s visibility, among other value-adds.

    The key is to provide your teams with the right set of tools with the right level of access while still enabling IT to manage and monitor these low-code applications’ reach. For DevOps and IT ­leaders, it provides an opportunity to empower businesses with strategic insights and recommend solutions that best suit business goals, mitigating risks and offering budgeting strategies, rather than just being a facilitator of technology.