Citizen Development at S&P Global

Peer Perspective

Organization Overview

Catalyst for Citizen Development

Why build a community of citizen developers? What are your key objectives for the program?

D.F: For us, Appian citizen development helps answer the question: ‘how do we scale?’ For a [central IT] organization our size, if we didn’t embrace citizen development, the alternative would take a lot of time or use a lot of money to build scale.

I knew citizen development was possible, because [we were] not deeply technical people before using Appian. At the same time, the demand from business units for more Appian apps was greater than we could supply. So we started pitching [citizen development] as a way for business units to build small apps that they wanted on their own. We continue to do the big stuff, but these projects are generally small in scope and wouldn’t otherwise be fully resourced. A grassroots campaign around the promotion of citizen development that would help business partners solve ‘real pain’ just made sense.

Citizen Developer Qualifications

Can anyone be a citizen developer? To you, what makes for a ‘good’ citizen developer?

D.F: Good citizen developers are people with actual problems that they need to solve - it’s a good motivator. We generally look for someone with a high level of intellectual curiosity and patience. They have to be okay to hit a brick wall and sift through it over time. Given the nature of our business, most folks now have some basic technical background which, while helpful, is not a requirement.

Supporting Citizen Developers

What types of support are you providing citizen developers? Similarly, what are the parameters or guardrails you’ve put in place?

D.F: Initially, to become a citizen developer, you had to go through our in-house Appian training program. After three rounds, we realized that it didn't scale and now folks just go to Appian’s free online training program. After they learn the basics, we assign a mentor to work with them on their project. Mentors are experienced Appian developers in central IT, but they never do anything for people, just coach and show the way.

We want to make sure people can continue to use the training they receive, so we’re building an Appian ‘alumni network’. This will be a forum within the business where individuals submit small projects and these alumni can help advise their colleagues across the company.

We are also working to provide the citizen developer community pre-developed pieces of functionality that will make their toolbox more robust.

Citizen Development Guardrails

What are the parameters or guardrails you’ve had to put in place? How is that different from ‘regular’ developers?

D.F: All citizen developers [and regular development teams] have to get architectural blessing before application go-live. Our CoE is still responsible for final deployment. This is usually not too big a barrier since the types of applications built by citizen developers are more internal-facing (collaboration across departments, request tracking, etc. - small scope projects that otherwise might not get funded).

Lessons Learned

With respect to this program, what has worked well and where have you struggled? What advice would you give to others on their citizen development journey?

D.F: So far, we’ve trained 60 people in just over 6 months; with 10% actively and regularly using Appian. Some advice and guidance to others who have not yet gone down the citizen development path:

• Let people who are professional trainers actually do the training.
• Don’t let your team get sucked into ‘taking over’ citizen project, especially when they run into trouble. Sometimes there just has to be ‘tough love’: people will figure out stuff when they have to.
• Be really aggressive about expectation setting: for instance, we had to be 100% clear up-front that the CoE does not support their application once they build it. We will educate them on ‘how’ but we don’t own it.
  
• Encourage honesty. It’s okay for a potential citizen developer to try it out and, after a while, if they decide isn't not for them, that’s ok.

What do you think about citizen development? Share your perspective in the comments below or email us at bestpractices@appian.com to schedule a research call with our team.