Back to All Stories

As part of our collection of interviews on the impact of low code and citizen development on IT departments, we were fortunate enough to talk with two IT executives from BMC Software: David Riggan, VP of Solutions Delivery, and Sudheer Sura, who manages the Salesforce practice for the company.

The full interview with David and Sudheer is recommended reading for anyone interested in building an innovative, productive IT department, fit for purpose in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. David and Sudheer are just two of the many thought leaders we’ve been talking to in the run-up to our TrailheaDX event on March 28–29 in San Francisco.

Below is a selection of key quotes from a fascinating discussion:

 

Citizen Development is key to driving innovation and productivity — it helps unleash latent talent from across your organization to solve problems and leverage opportunities.

David: Citizen development means enabling non-developers to do some development — in other words, to start ticking off other items on IT’s long list of priorities. It means I can now take a team of 15 developers, and I can turn those into 100 quasi-developers.

[W]e launched a citizen development strategy at BMC because we have latent talent in our organization that can help us be more productive, responsive, and innovative in IT. Unleashing that talent seemed to be the best way to innovate and be productive at the level the Fourth Industrial Revolution demands.

 

The key to successfully introducing citizen development to your organization? Good governance.

Sudheer: Many IT departments are running as fast as they can just to keep the lights on. But they’re scared to implement a Citizen Development strategy — something that might give them capacity to do more than just keep those lights on — because they’re worried it might break their enterprise data models.

That’s why governance is so crucial. A light-weight governance structure ensures that we don’t break our architecture or interrupt our services. But equally, it doesn’t put so many restrictions on people that they can’t actually do anything.

For us, we approach the training, development, and governance of citizen developers like a driving instructor works with learner drivers. Those learners sit with the driving instructor, who checks that they know how to drive and can pass the test before they’re given the keys to go drive on their own.

 

Developing a roster of citizen developers allows traditional developers to focus on more complex, challenging, high-value problems.

David: As a company we’re going to be able to refocus our high-dollar IT resources — those traditional developers — on the more complex projects we have, the harder problems. 

The analogy is that of the highly skilled craftsman. You don’t necessarily want them sitting there carving out block stones for a building. That’s not a good use of their time or the value that they can add.

So if you can teach someone else how to do those simpler tasks, then the craftsman can work on the architecture of the building, or maybe one of the fine complicated aspects.

 

You can read the full interview with David Riggan and Sudheer Sura here. David and Sudheer are two of the thought leaders we’ve been talking to about citizen developers, low code development, and the IT skills gap in the run-up to our TrailheaDX event  on March 28–29, San Francisco.

For more on this topic, check out Anna Rodriguez of Slalom on her journey to becoming a citizen developer, Damien O’Farrill of Autodesk on how naivete fuels innovation, and these articles on the power of low code and the next frontier of IT innovation.