
What is DevOps?
DevOps is the continuous delivery of prioritised value to an organisation. For more click here.

Citizen development can replace Shadow IT
DevOps injects urgency into the delivery of business value through software. DevOps theory is focussed on optimising processes but what happens you have optimised the hell of out of your processes and the bottleneck is lack of people?
Typical answers are;
1. Outsourcing, insourcing, offshoring, nearshoring … basically using third parties to supplement or replace inhouse teams.
2. Prioritising by value and allowing the backlog to build
3. More SaaS either packaged or configurable workflow tools such as Jira Work Management.
4. Shadow IT
The first three solutions have their pros and cons and are not a focus for this blog.
Shadow IT is generally more closely aligned with answer 3. End users get so frustrated with IT they buy their own package to solve a problem but what if you could blend these end users domain knowledge with a well run IT function?
This is the Citizen Development promise. It is a set of low code/no code tools that business people use to build applications in partnership with IT.
It sounded too good to be true so I decided to try it out for myself and you can read about my weekend long experiment in this recently published article on DevOps.com