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Ashutosh Munot1
Kilo Patron
Kilo Patron

Introduction

Today we are going to sneak peek into citizenship development which i am doing from last year and would like to share the power, experience and some cons but along with that also which parts of ServiceNow are helping us to improve on this more and more and in future releases what will help us drive this initiative to broader audience. Lets start with few terms like "Self Service" and "Citizenship Development". According to me now a days self service is a term which almost all DevOps teams are working towards to allow there business processor owners to develop, test and deploy their code without dependencies on central platform teams. So we also started working towards this initiative and laid down an objective and goal of this initiative.

According to me Citizenship Development is "GIVING POWER TO TEAMS OR BUSINESS PROCESS OWNERS". Which means the people with less or low coding skills can build applications by reutilizing/ reusing the components, existing tools, features and environment to fulfill their needs. I really like the way Citizen developers and IT working together to solve dependencies and need to speed up the development and deployment.

find_real_file.png

This article will be outlined what you need to start this initiative in your organization. So lets start by looking the driving components for this.

 

ServiceNow Enablers for Citizen Development :

Most important strategy was to allow citizens (individual with low coding skill) to follow LOW CODE NO CODE strategy and train them on ServiceNow's key elements. Now it is true that people enjoy the leaning when they try something in tool directly instead of the video and some external training tool, so make sure you guys trains this citizens in tool instead of some other training material external to tool. This will really make them enthusiastic and will bring some interest to do this. Now lets focus on what drives this whole concept in servicenow.

1) Guided App creator (Custom App Delegated Development)

This is backbone of citizenship development which allows you to secure your applications and protect the data, code, flows,etc which you dont want other citizens to see. Custom App has helped us to onboard teams and have solved many questions in Governance and Risk space of storing and looking into the data.

2) Guided Tours, Portal and Quiz

Now its might be surprising to most of you that how this point helps in citizen development, well the answer is simple i.e. it will help you to create navigate people through tool using guided tours which you can create according to your need. Also you can provide sample scripts and test those using guided tours as we did this. Created a whole learning experience on portal (custom development required to create widgets and so on from you ServiceNow experts) where you guide the citizens from one tour to another tour and track the progress in real time. In short this is a training which we can give to future developers and track that. Now when it comes to assessment then what can be best that QUIZ module in servicenow, you can use this for assessing the knowledge of developers and then give rights to those people in your environment.

3) Flow Designer

This is main contributor to a low code no code functionality where NLU places an important role. Drag and drop feature in flow designer requires no coding and makes it easy for new developers to understand it quickly.

4) IntegrationHub

Major player to automate things with 200+ spoke available OOB. Automation is key aspect why people want to go for citizenship development because they want to handle there own pipelines and catalog forms which can automate there tasks quickly.

5) Auto Deployment of Update sets (Custom Solution)

In the world of CI/CD the auto deployment of the update sets is very important. This feature has made the deployment of update sets fast, easy and with administration in place about best practices. This is custom solution made by us but this can change for other customers as they use repo integration rather that update sets.

6) Repo Integration

ServiceNow provides new CI/CD APIs to deploy the applications and install the application in no time. If you have multiple developers in same scope of application then it might be difficult for you to move the changes quickly and you need to manage the stash records. That was the reason we went for auto deployment.

7) Health Scan

The regular free health check up also called as Instance scan in Quebec helps us to see loop holes in the system and maintain the reliability of the platform. 

😎 Secure development (Best Practice checker)

Inhouse built application which validates the update sets around 200 best practices and make sure that we adhere to it. Good point to add is you can also use Evergreen Instance Analyzer for checking the code quality.

New In Quebec

This below features will enhance and help to do citizen development in better manner and with best platform stability and segregation of duties.

1) Instance Scan : Check the instance across 300+ checks OOB

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/quebec-release-notes/page/release-notes/now-platform-capabilities...

2) Catalog Builder : SoD can be implemented to allow catalog item development.

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/quebec-servicenow-platform/page/product/service-catalog-managemen...

 

Resources :

  • Citizen Developer Learning Plan
  • Have a dedicated channel for this topic in your organization.
  • ServiceNow documentation is best and point them to that.
  • Now Learning of Course.
  • Ask them to ask questions on community to learn more about ServiceNow.

Security Concerns:

The important aspect of development and sharing is security, you should have a clear strategy on this explaining what is possible using this concepts and what is not. There are always pro's and con's so make them visible which makes it easy for Devops teams to plan and architect there work. Get ServiceNow involved if need to explain how secure the platform is. 

Finally if everything is in place and is followed as expected then we are good to market it and attract more DevOps team to manage there work without dependencies with central team.

find_real_file.png

 

 

Please don’t forget to mark helpful ,bookmark this article and subscribe my YouTube channel.

Thanks and Regards,
Ashutosh Munot

ServiceNow Developer and 3x Community MVP

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Version history
Last update:
‎02-05-2021 02:29 AM
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