Why you should establish a Center for Enablement for ServiceNow Citizen Development
Thanks to no-/low-code platforms like ServiceNow and the digital transformation pressure many organizations face, Citizen Development is on the rise. Righteously so, as it entails many benefits, like increased innovation, speed and efficiency. Yet, it also has its downsides. Because how do you control quality and ensure best practices are followed when the business is implementing and maintaining their own applications on the Now platform? What you don’t want is to implement rigorous management and governance processes, yet you do need control. A Center of Enablement provides that control without restraining the business.
The rise of Citizen Development
With the ever-increasing demand for digital transformation in enterprises, centralized IT departments are barely coping with the growing demand for IT development. Moreover, many business units have such specific IT needs that it’s better for them to control their own IT environment. This has initiated an IT development shift towards individual departments and/or business units. Thanks to the existence of no-code/low-code platforms like ServiceNow, people without coding experience can develop solutions.
Citizen Development is great, but it also has pitfalls. If you don’t monitor or control all initiatives, your IT environment quickly turns into the Wild West where one solution being put in production leads to another getting shot, APIs that conflict, etc.
What is a Center for Enablement (C4E)?
A Centre for Enablement is an IT operating model focused on creating reusable building blocks to which best practices, quality checks and expert IT knowledge have been applied, enabling self-service and efficient automated throughout the organization to speed up solution delivery.
The assets created by a C4E are part of a continuous delivery framework. Unlike in traditional IT, where each IT project stands on its own.
The benefits of a Center for Enablement
- Standards and best practices are automatically applied
- Risks are mitigated and projects delivered on time
- Faster deployment thanks to reusable blocks of coding and self-service
- High-quality solutions thanks to standardized templates and quality checks, which enhance stability and prevent defects and errors
- Enable business units to create value independently in a qualitative manner
The way you comprise your Center of Enablement will affect its success. Therefore, we’ve listed the six essential building blocks for a successful ServiceNow C4E:
- Reusable Assets
These form the foundation of your C4E and consist of knowledge articles and reusable components like workflows.
- Scoped Applications
By organizing the platform in scoped applications, businesses units can manage their own applications without the risk of impacting other parts of the platform.
- CI/CD Pipelines
Make sure your C4E sets up CI/CD pipelines for each application to automate quality control and deployments of ServiceNow applications.
- Automated Quality Control
Automate code quality, performance impact and naming convention checks, regression testing and best practices and make them part of your CI/CD pipelines.
- Automated Change Control & Compliance
By integrating the CI/CD pipeline with ServiceNow Change Management, you enable teams to effortlessly and continuously deploy solutions while minimizing risk and staying compliant.
- Automated Deployments
With automated quality and change control and other automations in place, no human interaction is needed for deploying new functionality. Fully automated deployments will shorten deployment lead times to just a few minutes!
Paving the way for self-service
Once your C4E makes all above-mentioned components easily available to the organization, you could even fully automate component delivery via the Service Catalog. This will open up the possibility of self-service for all assets and building blocks.
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Guus Hutschemaekers