In 2009, global research firm Gartner spoke to the rise of the Citizen Developer by 2014, based on: mass personalization, infrastructure industrialization, changing demographics, and developer tool evolution.
Well it's now 2014 and, in my opinion, another force is now driving the rise of the Citizen Developer — Consumerization. As employee consumer experiences, and the associated elevation of expectations, are driving corporate IT organizations to improve their service delivery for the better through Consumerization-inspired technology.
It's an enterprise-wide issue and opportunity
But it's not just IT that's impacted. These consumer experiences are also dictating employee expectations of service delivery, and the associated service experience, for other corporate service providers such as HR, legal, facilities, and finance.
Thus line-of-business service owners, who have seen the power and success of custom applications, the service catalog, and automation within IT, now want to exploit these technical capabilities to improve service within their own functions.
It's a great opportunity for IT to better demonstrate its relevance and worth to business peers, but not necessarily an opportunity that's easy to take.
The difficulties of matching line-of-business demand to IT supply
So, on the back of Consumerization, many enterprise IT organizations are struggling to keep up with the rising demand for line-of-business service-enabling applications. Where business peers, in particular, want to replace slow and error-prone manual service request mechanisms — often where the requester has to download a form, print it, fill it out, and then email it for approval, processing, and fulfillment — with a better service experience and improved efficiency.
However, the fact that IT lacks the resources to meet this increased demand is only part of the challenge. These business people also want greater input into how their services are structured and how their service requests are submitted and fulfilled. But they lack the technical skills to build, publish, maintain, and deliver such services themselves. Thus there is a dilemma. IT, with finite resources, needs to better support lines-of-business, while business people want to be empowered to do more themselves.
So how can IT:
- Cope with these extra demands on its time?
- Empower non-technical colleagues to allow them a more active role in creating and providing simple line-of-business services to improve the service experience?
Supporting ServiceNow's founding vision — to "Build a cloud-based platform to enable regular people to create meaningful applications that route work through an enterprise" — and based on existing customer successes, ServiceNow Service Creator empowers non-technical business people to quickly build line-of-business services.
Service Creator provides a simple drag-and-drop experience that enables business people to create or modify services without programming knowledge or experience. Individuals then request the services by selecting a service catalog item.
For example, someone in HR might create a new service to automate continuing education tuition cost reimbursement. It's easy for HR to design and create it themselves — from the information captured, how it looks, to the way that service requests are handled and fulfilled.
Service Creator can also take advantage of other ServiceNow capabilities. Mobile access can be enabled, service levels can be designated, fulfillers and requesters can be notified of new requests and status changes, workflow can automate fulfillment, and dashboards and reports can be created to help manage operational performance.
The result is a unified service request experience, higher service provider productivity, and increased customer satisfaction.
So what are you waiting for?
Your peers in other lines-of-business need help in meeting employees' increased, consumer-driven, service expectations. You probably have insufficient time to support all of their requirements. So take a look at how ServiceNow Service Creator can help you to help them to help others.
With Service Creator, IT can help other corporate service providers to become Citizen Creators and to:
- Improve the service experience. Empower them to deliver better services and a more consumer-like service experience that better meets service expectations.
- Increase productivity. They can rapidly create, change, and publish new services on their own. Improving line-of-business productivity and freeing up IT to focus on business innovation and growth.
- Improve service visibility. Make line-of-business services easier to find and access for employees. And give corporate service provider colleagues better insight into service demand and their operational performance.
Want to know more? Download the Service Creator Data Sheet or view the Service Creator demo (requires registration).
Related blog: What's New In The ServiceNow Eureka Release?
Image source: Flickr: â–“â–’â–‘ TORLEY â–‘â–’â–“'s Photostream
