In the full article published on Integration Developer News, I explain how the creativity and innovation of the full automation project team is actually improved, not restricted, with well-defined guardrails, and an effective mechanism for citizen developers to work side-by-side with the technical experts in digital process automation teams. When good governance is baked in from the start, innovation is designed and delivered ready for action.
In recent years, low-code platforms have created a bit of a good news / not-so-good news situation for many companies.
The good news is low code 'citizen developer' platforms have opened a new era of digital transformation and business innovation. A wide range of less-technical employees can now create a wide range of useful and innovative applications all on their own – without any help from developers or IT.
The not-so-good news is that with this unsupervised empowerment, there are more opportunities for these new apps to inadvertently fly “under the radar” of some aspects of corporate governance.
Many simple, strictly-internal apps that can be done with no IT expertise involved may really never pose governance issues. But there are many categories of ‘citizen developer’ apps where lack of visibility and governance becomes an issue, as in business-critical apps that touch external users for example.
How can governance and innovation co-exist?
By design, governance is constraining. When we step back and look at the big picture, we can see two types of constraints that can be imposed on business applications:
- Constraints imposed by policies, internal standards set by the company, and external regulations
- Constraints imposed by security and information systems
A project team with both business and technical members brings together both the business perspective and technical expertise on the project, and the unique governance aspects from two points of view.
Business/strategic management brings awareness and understanding of:
- How strategic direction relates to the project at hand
- Business intelligence and other measurements (KPIs) needed
- Corporate policies
- Legal issues
- External regulations imposed on the company and its processes
- Audit requirements
The information technology team brings understanding of:
- Security issues and protection restrictions
- Overall process standardization across the company
- Systems architecture and a view of the entire technical stack
- Company-sanctioned frameworks and tools for internal standardization
With well-defined guardrails, and an effective mechanism for citizen developers to work side-by-side with the technical experts in digital process automation teams, the creativity and innovation of the full automation project team is actually improved, not restricted.
Digital Process Automation underlies smart automation
A digital automation platform should give the entire team appropriate tools to work directly together on automation projects: Low code for the citizen developers on the business side, and coding capability for the development team. If the platform also includes low-code tools specifically for developers, like frameworks and templates, that’s even smarter.
Modern business management underlies smart teamwork
Establishing the rules and policies of corporate and project governance is a mutual responsibility, as is the implementation of “corporate guardrails” via technology in automation projects of all sizes. Of course good project leaders know better than to not pay attention, wait for someone to ask, or to leave good teamwork to chance - but as with all best practices, stating them explicitly is a good way to center them for better action.
Innovation is stifled when results are rejected or sent back to the drawing board because governance issues were ignored - or worse, unknown. Being unaware - that’s where the traps are. But when governance is baked in from the start, innovation is designed and delivered ready for action.
This post is an extract of an article by Bonitasoft CEO Miguel Valdes Faura originally published in full on Integration Developer News.
