When empowering users to transform their business processes and organization activities digitally, how can you ensure that the results are in line with your organizational standards? By enabling your App Factory with a set of guardrails, you can quickly determine if applications are moving towards a successful outcome or are diverging from best practices. There are many different types of guardrail that can be enabled to help App makers succeed in launching an application. Guardrails can be as simple as ensuring that all participants have an agreed-upon understanding or measurable criteria like the applications Guardrail score. Use Pega App Factory to onboard makers in a way that ensure that Apps are are actually a good fit for citizen development. And use templates in Pega App Factory to ensure that access to features and data are role-appropriate.  Implementing a combination of guardrails is recommended to maximize maker success.

Make sure that business and IT are aligned

Alignment between business and IT is crucial to the long-term success of a Low-Code App Factory program. A well-run app factory earns the trust of IT as guardrails are mutually determined and enforced automatically through Pega App Factory. It leverages practice managers to assess an App’s fit for citizen development and to validate that business problems being addressed are not already addressed by existing solutions. And it relies on professional development resources in IT to build components into the reuse layer so that makers can do more work without the need for ad hoc development requests.

An App Factory should serve as a complement to IT through its ability to produce hundreds and thousands of simple applications in a way that decreases IT backlogs and automates guardrail compliance. Risks of poor alignment between business and IT include:

• Increased spend from redundancy and lost economies of scale
• Increased security risks from misconfiguration
• Regulatory fines from non-compliance with laws and policies
• Lack of communication and cooperation across departments because of differences in technology ecosystems
• Unforeseen support issues since corporate IT may not be aware of, or trained on, shadow technologies
• Decreased agility to respond to threats and opportunities due to lack of transparency and data silos
• Increased maintenance problems from apps orphaned through staffing changes and lack of ownership