Seeking Best Practices for Approving Citizen Developer Changes in Catalog Builder

[Rick Love1]

Hello Community,

We've recently implemented the Citizen Developer program in our ServiceNow environment. As many of you know, Catalog Builder allows citizen developers to create or modify catalog items, and the system automatically generates an update set for their changes.

However, we've run into a challenge: once a citizen developer completes their work, there's currently no notification or approval workflow that alerts the admin team. The only way we know an update set is ready to be reviewed and moved to UAT is if we manually check or the developer reaches out directly.

We’re looking to implement an approval process where:

• A citizen developer completes their changes in Catalog Builder.
• Upon submission, an approval request is sent to the admin team.
• The admin team reviews the changes and promotes the update set to UAT for testing.

Has anyone implemented a solution like this? Are there best practices, workflows, or platform features (e.g., Flow Designer, Notifications, Approvals) that you’ve used to streamline this process?

Any insights or examples would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance,
Rick

[Paul Kunze]

Hello, here is an idea how I would do it:

Create a Business Rule on sc_cat_item that runs when the field "checked_out" changes to true. This is run when a Catalog Item is submitted or updated from Catalog Builder.

In the baseline process, the item will immediately get active and published. You can suppress this by overwriting the fields "active" and "state" with the Business Rule.

Now you get Catalog Items which are fully created but not active. You can create a new Flow with a trigger that listens to exactly the values you set in the BR. Here you can implement any logic you want, for example sending notifications, adding approvals and setting the item to active after all approvals are given.

Best regards,

Paul