Introducing low coding and citizen development

[Abdellah TAHRI]

There is many categories of Servicenow developers: you have the professionals , trained and certified developers , the configurators … and Citizen developers .

Citizen developers are people with little to no coding experience who build applications using IT-approved technology and processes.

Despite the progress that we see in the low code & no code approach of ServiceNow , organizations are still hesitating to introduce low coding and citizen development, their biggest concern of having citizen developers , is brining bad code into production

So how to “trust” citizen developers without loosing the control of the platform ?

First step of introducing citizen devs is team preparation . How to prepare someone to be a citizen developer ? it starts with candidates identification :

There is different criteria which must exist in order to identify the right candidates:

The candidate needs to understand the business apps, have at least some tech skills : understand the algorithms , moderate experience in development using a programming language, understand processes … , and an appetit de create apps , and getting ready to learn .

How to prepare people?

Leverage the NowLearning and the developer program of ServiceNow to train the citizen developers , and make them aware of the new features of each new release.

Integrate the citizen developers into your community of support .

Identify your use cases , and the minimum required level of each use case : for example , simple modification of catalog item can require a citizen developer level .

What tools are available for the citizen developer ?

In ServiceNow , you have many low code / no code builders , like Creator studio or App Engine Studio to create request applications , with automation and integration .

Those tools will help the developers through guided steps on how to structure and protect the data .