Ten years of lessons learned and best practices for ServiceNow development have led to us set up our own Citizen Developer Framework, helping organizations get started with citizen development by providing guidance and guardrails.
Faster app delivery & more effective apps
Reduce ServiceNow backlog
Maximize value from developer resources
Attract and retain digital natives
Our ServiceNow Citizen Developer Framework offers a few key components to set up a program that is both scalable, sustainable and quick to set up:
After a decade of training ServiceNow developers, we know how to train and educate developers in App Engine. Thanks to our experience, your citizen developers will be up and running in no time.
We train your citizen developers on the job. They will learn how to design, build and maintain ServiceNow apps with our supervision.
When standard tools don’t provide the needed functionality (incl. integrations to other enterprise tools), we can create building blocks to help your citizen developers build complex solutions.
Through a guided intake process, automated quality assurance and architecture support, we help establish the foundations for proper governance.
Citizen Development is easy to set up, but very difficult to sustain. With the help of Plat4mation, we were able to start deploying at a much faster pace and within compliance. Everyday business owners have virtual guardrails, making it easy to complete weeks of work in just minutes via automation of the end-to-end deployment process. With IT now moving at customer speed, so is the business they serve.
Bramley Maetsa Digital Transformation Lead at Sasol
Why start with Citizen Development?
Low-code platforms like ServiceNow have matured to the point where non-developer employees can now build applications in a simple user interface.
Coincidentally, the business world has entered the era of Digital Natives, where most of the workforce is made up of millennials and Gen Z. These generations grew up with technology, know how to use it and like to solve problems with it.
It’s good timing for all of the above, because developer backlogs are overfull and application requests to simplify and automate work are taking way too long.
It now makes sense to delegate the simple development projects to your business owners, who, to be honest, know the requirements of their business need better than anyone else.
Why do I need governance for citizen development?
That is to ensure that your citizen developers do not create more work for your pro-code developers with respect to fixing things. We always recommend to establish a Center for Enablement, which ensures your citizen developers use reusable building blocks to which best practices, quality checks, and expert IT knowledge have been applied, enabling self-service and efficient automated deployments throughout the organization to speed up solution delivery.
How can we ensure that citizen developers cannot accidentally break stuff?
App Engine Studio comes with the option of delegated development. This enables you to give specific people (citizen developers) the rights and roles to build their own application restricted to a predefined scope. That way, they cannot accidentally break other things or change things that impact the entire platform.
How do we get citizen developers to perform updates without the help of the platform team?
Traditionally, any changes made in development had to be deployed to test and production environments by administrators with access to the target systems.
With citizen development, you cannot grant every citizen developer admin access to the production environment for many reasons. You also don’t want to fully rely on the admin team to deploy small changes.
By setting up CI/CD pipelines for ServiceNow, you can automate the deployment process. Automated testing, quality checks, and optional (conditional) approvals in the pipeline ensure deployment is controlled, minimizing the risk of accidentally breaking changes.
Schedule a call with one of our ServiceNow Citizen Development experts. They’ll be happy to tell you more!
