Common Self Service Reporting Risks and Mitigation

The article Reasons CIOS Worry About Citizen Developers Building Enterprise Apps discussed 13 reasons CIOS worry about the self service approach promoted and used by the GIFT templates.

The issues raised are valid risks and worth discussing in more detail. The GIFT project is working hard to enable self service on data projects. The metaphor we use is a deli. Customers typically operate in the deli and IT operates in the kitchen. With GIFT we are creating some cook at home managed templates that allow self service so that customers can perform all aspects of the data work, elt and reporting self-service. They must do this work following proper rules and templates/recipes that require registering all pertinent meta-data/data dictionary are registered to our central repository. Our core services handle logging, devops, etc, while citizens can still do what they do best without IT trying to be subject matter experts. We enable all aspects of the elt and reporting through declarative sql, meta-data or other declarative programming method so that citizen subject matter experts do not ever have to write procedural code to create and deliver reports. The current state of development is far from ideal and there is a huge gap for vendors to provide guidance on how to enable self service IT.

Risks and Mitigation

13. Apprenticeship is lost
14. Deploying and managing platforms is no different
15. Separation of duties
16. Economics
17. Security posture
18. Control and governance
19. Citizens don’t want to do it
20. Task orientation – the opposite of the big picture
21. Makes Transformation Harder
22. Production outages are difficult to triage
23. Most low-code tools oversell capabilities
24. Businesses already have too many apps
25. A productive “citizen developer” is a “developer”