Software

Are Citizen Developers the Future of Agencies’ Digital Transformations?

ServiceNow and Salesforce offer low-code/no-code app development tools for quick deployment that the military seeks.

Greg Wheeler

Greg Wheeler is intelligent platforms portfolio manager for government at CDW.

Keith Demma

Keith Demma is field solution architect at CDW.

Steve Horvath

Steve Horvath is sales solution executive for SLED and federal at CDW.

Citizen development of low-code/no-code applications offers agencies a digital transformation vehicle as they mull what to do with legacy software that is less secure and lacks interoperability.

LCNC development lets nontechnologists quickly build quality web and mobile apps by presenting them with a tidy, visual interface where they can choose from pre-existing templates and drag and drop desired components rather than writing thousands of lines of code by hand.

Defense agencies want the ability to rapidly build and deploy apps from the field as they emphasize battle readiness ahead of a potential conflict in the Asia-Pacific region by 2027. Already, ServiceNow is assisting the Army in developing mobile apps around use cases such as after-action reports with its App Engine, and Salesforce boasts its own LCNC solution.

Such offerings also have tremendous potential to leverage automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to modernize manual processes and streamline workflows across defense and civilian agencies alike.

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A Standard Method for Rapidly Deploying Apps

ServiceNow’s App Engine provides users with a standardized methodology to rapidly deploy apps using tables and workflows. If users want to personalize fields and view them on a form, they can.

The Navy used App Engine to quickly develop its Chap.App, which its chaplains use to process sailors’ request and conduct checkups while protecting anonymity and ensuring mental health and wellness. Because sailors are completely disconnected from the outside world when they ship out and still need to do their jobs, the Chap.App is not only important for suicide prevention but could become a critical tool in assessing individual readiness.

CDW Government’s Naval Innovation Center is developing ServiceNow in a box, a ruggedized case that can be plugged into ships and used to access App Engine to quickly gather data, build and deploy new apps.

ServiceNow provides the tool, and CDW Government provides the ability to make it successful in the long term.

This article is part of FedTech’s CapITal blog series.