By Richard McGill Murphy
Purna Jandyala is a senior IT manager at Medtronic, a medical technology, services, and solutions company with more than 90,000 employees worldwide. In this role he manages a cloud-based digital workflow platform from ServiceNow, the publisher of Workflow.
Jandyala works with business units across Medtronic to automate workflows across IT, HR, customer service, security operations, and more. Today his team maintains five separate service portals and more than 25 business-critical processes and applications, serving more than 90,000 employees. On the customer service side, Medtronic agents use automated workflows and custom apps to resolve more than 1 million patient cases per year.
Jandyala leads a team of professional developers who do the skilled work of integrating each new release of the Now Platform with the various systems of record maintained by individual departments. However, the team can’t keep up with growing demand from business partners for new software features and automation for cross-departmental workflows.
“Working in IT, we need a lot of on-demand developer resources for every new project,” he says. Amid a worldwide shortage of skilled coders, he can’t hire enough professional developers to handle the workload. The solution? “With the support of our leadership, we implemented a citizen developer model,” Jandyala says.
A citizen developer (CD) is someone who uses no-code configurations or low-code development tools, such as ServiceNow’s App Engine, to create new software applications. That’s important given the severe shortage of developers with enterprise-level coding skills. Demand for business-related apps currently outstrips IT capacity by a factor of five, according to Gartner research. And IDC predicts 30% of high-demand IT jobs working with emerging technologies will remain unfilled through 2022.
Jandyala and his colleagues created a formal program called Citizen Developer 101 (CD 101) to train employees on the Now Platform. Aspiring citizen developers learn the basics of creating and modifying digital workflows. They must also demonstrate that they understand the company’s standards and best practices for software development.
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