Alexandra Levits Water Cooler Wisdom The Cats Out of the Bag App Dev Moves Out of IT

Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom The Cat's Out of the Bag App Dev Moves Out of IT Shadow ITand the app-building practice of “citizen development” is still an area of concern for many leaders. Here are some actions leaderscan take to grow more comfortable around apps being developed outside of IT. Understand your own priorities IT departments are inundated with line of business requests and simply don’t have the time or bandwidth to address all of them. If you haven’t already, speak with your manager about where you should be focusing your energy, and the overarching business and departmental goals you are working to accomplish. Requests that fall outside this scope are often perfect candidates for citizen development and should be delegated if possible. Vet the technology Most line of business employees aren’t trained in programming and traditional application development, so thinking that even the most ambitious ones can become instant experts is naïve at best. Fortunately, low and no code platforms exist that allow citizen developers to build applications with little to no coding experience. Investigate these and assess how they can integrate with your existing IT infrastructure before giving the green light. Encourage pilot implementations You’ll feel better about letting your citizen developers take the reins if the implementation is reasonably contained, is of limitedscope, and is centered on an isolated business process â€" without the ability to disrupt the business as a whole. Pilot implementations give citizen developers the opportunity to experiment, tweak the approach, and improve upon it while using a minimal amount of resources. Take your citizen developer out for a drink If the very idea of what your citizen developer is up to keeps you awake at night, it may be due to an inherent lack of trust. Especially if you haven’t worked with this person before, you have no reason to believe the implementation won’t turn into a disaster that you have to fix. Build trust by getting to know your citizen developer as a human being. Take him or her out in a casual environment and start a communication exchange that builds a friendly rapport and facilitates ongoing cooperation. For the rest of the piece, head over to QuickBases Fast Track blog.