The rise of citizen developers

Despite all the hype and investment surrounding digital transformation, the reality is that the digitization of work is still in its very early stages at most companies. Speaking at a recent low code/no code symposium, ServiceNow CIO Chris Bedi estimated that more than 90% of business processes are managed offline. “There aren’t enough pro developers to automate all those manual processes,” Bedi said.

Citizen developer programs can help fill the gap by teaching line employees to build their own apps and workflows using low- and no-code tools. Medtronic’s CD 101 program onboards and trains new CDs, making sure they understand the guidelines and best practices set forth by ServiceNow and Medtronic throughout the app development process. In order to get access to Now Platform capabilities, each CD needs to get certified at one of three levels. Each level gives CDs access to specific capabilities on the Now Platform.

The Medtronic ServiceNow Center of Excellence team has put safeguards in place, including an automated code review tool, to ensure low-quality code doesn’t accidentally find its way onto Medtronic’s global instances. Their motto: “Teach others to drive but don’t forget the guardrails,” according to a recent presentation by Lori Breitbarth, senior IT program manager at Medtronic.

The security operations team, for example, faces a constantly changing threat environment. As a result, they often need to modify the forms they use to collect data. They also use a variety of security tools that feed data into ServiceNow via integrations, which often require light coding work. “They can’t wait two months to onboard a developer,” Jandyala says. “With their own CDs, however, they can handle most of their easy-to-make updates themselves without much assistance from the ServiceNow delivery team.”

Citizen developers on the security team can now do all their regular work at the earliest, as needed. The same is true on the customer service management team, which now uses no-code tools to modify customer communication templates. These CDs have become quite proficient at managing their own updates, Jandyala says. When they need help, they know they can always reach out to the COE team for any help and support they might need from pro developers.