Benefits of building catalog items in scoped applications?

[codyesmay]

Long time lurker, first time poster here.

So the situation is this. We have a high demand to create catalog items in our service catalog. Our target audience is primarily technology - so many of them kick off complex integrations with AD/infrastructure tools/ect.

The problem statement is - The organization wants other teams to develop these complex service catalogs that kick off integrations. We have been doing this for over a year now but it has all been in global scope and giving these "developers" admin rights in lower environments. The governance has been a bit of a nightmare to be honest. Some of these developers have little to no direct ServiceNow experience so you're pretty much looking through every single customer update because you can't trust them to make a simple variable correctly. 

Now the hope is that we can use Scoped Applications to create these Catalog Items and their respective integrations(workflows, script includes, business rules, ect) and use cross scope privilege's and delegated development to help govern these low-skill developers. 

My understanding from reading through various documents from ServiceNow and the community is that if you are creating something that extends global functionality - example in this case a catalog item that uses REQ and workflows - then you really should just be building it in the global scope. 

Anyone have any experience with something like this? Is there enough benefit to off set the licensing cost to stand up a scoped application for 1 catalog item with a workflow that does an integration? Are there any cons I should be aware of? We probably have 6ish teams that would like to utilize this at some point and I'm sure it would continue to scale if we went this route. 

Any advise would be greatly appreciated.

[Nia McCash]

Regardless of scoped apps or no, would it be possible to strengthen/improve your governance processes (eg. train your 'citizen' developers in ServiceNow, require that they have certain courses and/or certification completed)? I wonder if that may remove the need for scoped apps altogether.

I don't know anything about your organization so I don't know if this is feasible but your query had me thinking of the various Citizen Development webinars that I have seen. This line in particular jumped out at me:

Some of these developers have little to no direct ServiceNow experience

Here's one such webinar that comes to mind: https://www.servicenow.com/lpwbr/novant-health-citizen-development-journey.html

[guythatusesserv]

I would recommend you check out App Engine Studio.  Under "Experience" users can create a catalog item or record producer.  I think this method fits exactly what you're describing and is designed by ServiceNow for citizen development. 

Each app in the App Engine Studio is a scoped app.  So even if you don't use App Engine Studio to create what you're talking about, it appears ServiceNow's prescribed method is to have your catalog item as a scoped app.  Although, I personally think you should have this person give App Engine Studio a try.  To repeat what Nia said, citizen developers don't have a lot of experience, and App Engine tries to put them on rails.