What is low-code governance?
Low-code platform governance is the guideline used by professional and citizen developers within an organization to build applications on low-code. It is made to ensure that the platform’s value is maximized to the best extent and in a secure manner.
Citizen developers, business users, and professional developers should all follow these low-code guidelines to mitigate any risks of shadow IT, data loss, and unusable applications.
For developers, the governance assists them in maintaining security and compliance while leveraging the value of your low-code development platform throughout the software development lifecycle.
Why do you need governance for low-code adoption?
Despite the many benefits of low-code, using it without guidance also conceals many risks.
Let’s back it up with some statistics. According to Gartner’s Digital Friction, around 51% of employees consider themselves the one who produces technology for their team. Breaking the number down, we have:
- 5% are in the central IT department
- 5% resides in business unit IT and data departments
- Yet around 41% are in business units and corporate functions.
Why are a large proportion of technology producers out of IT? Being close to business out-front allows them to understand where it needs to be improved. If you want to build a sale automation tool, you must first understand your sales funnel and strategy.
Yet, this also prompts a huge loophole: Shadow IT. These tech solutions are being pitched and managed by business users more than IT departments. Known as a company’s tech manager, yet IT doesn’t have a clue about what their team members are using. Now with low-code, the rate can be pushed much higher. Without a proper set of rules on using low-code, you will face the risk of disconnected data and noncompliance.
Despite low-code is there to loosen the stress on the IT team, IT might have to deal with a much bigger issue. When a citizen developer builds an application that can’t scale and has tons of bugs, they hand them over to IT. At the same time, business users aren’t aware of security guidelines and even if they do, they might not know how to make the apps safe within those rules.
Yes, low-code is easy. But it’s only secure with a set of guidance. And this is why you need a low-code governance to keep everything under control.
Key principles for a good low-code government
As usual, governance determines the rules of goal achievement, risk monitoring, and performance optimization. Low-code governance also follows similar patterns. Applying them would retain users’ confidence, lay a concrete groundwork for excellent performance, and enable businesses to adjust well to constant change.
Here is something you should keep in mind:
Set minimum skills requirements
Even though a non-technical user can adopt low-code, that doesn’t mean anyone should have access to the platform. Unintentionally or not, they can cause disruptions among other apps. You should lay out specific criteria and provide training to ensure permitted users understand these:
- How the data is structured and organized in the low-code tool (to understand the foundation of how the app works)
- How the data affect workflow automation (so that they don’t mess up the process and negatively affect other applications)
- The willingness to learn more about the platform (to prevent someone from creating applications then dropping it midway)
Elevating management performance
Good low-code governance helps coordinate management-made decisions with the organization’s goals. By having one, corporates can properly assign responsibilities and tasks to their team. This would eventually produce low-code development programs for business success and release them on the market much faster.
Using technology to generate business value
A good low-code governance contributes a greater return on investment (ROI) through process automation and reduction of mistakes during development. Technical leaders should prepare a set of tools that can be used or should be integrated with your low-code system. Furthermore, there should be a support system for employees using those tools to lay the groundwork for building efficient applications.
Mitigating risk associated with technology
With the help of effective low-code platform governance, businesses can achieve best practices, take security into account, and get their deployed tools to meet all the regulatory requirements. Organizations frequently outsource their technological solutions to third-party providers specializing in risk reduction and management to improve these areas.
Prepare a sandbox
Setting up a separate environment for your underdeveloped application will protect your current data and active digital assets. Building and testing your apps in the sandbox is necessary before going live. This way, other users can’t mess with your project, and the app won’t impact the performance of existing low-code apps.
Some low-code platforms directly provide a sandbox for you to manipulate. Others might require integrating with a third-party sandbox.
How to create your low-code government
The way one company governs their low-code development platform is reflected in its success. The more time and effort spent on building a clear and concise low-code governance, the more enhanced application performance and ROI get.
Here’s our suggestion of which steps to take to establish a good governance of low-code.
Define low-code development program
A clear set of roles and responsibilities for low-code developers leads to successful app development. Low-code developers should receive the needed resources and support to build efficient apps. By receiving the necessary resources, they can minimize the likelihood of shadow IT becoming an issue.
Some questions will help businesses define their low-code governance better. For instance:
- Who is permitted to build low-code apps on the platform?
- What skills are developers required to have?
- What are developers allowed to build?
- How will other organizations use applications?
- Who takes charge of reviewing, approving, and supporting the low-code apps?
Develop a plan for program management
An effective low-code governance policy is built on clear guidelines and expectations among organization teams and stakeholders. There are multitudes of business risks and security issues when making apps and offering access controls and permissions. Take shadow IT as an example. The use of non-IT-approved tools can result in a lack of visibility into what developers are building. Another instance is organizations don’t know what their developers are doing with data due to the lack of access requirements.
To help prevent security breaches, you should implement user permissions and restrictions. IT department, business users and citizen developers are ensured not to make high-level decisions beyond their responsibility scope. IT professionals should also have the skills and experience to evaluate the code and assess whether the app connects to a site with inadequate governance or permissive access.
Also, the following steps are recommended for tackling risk mitigation:
- Protect mission-critical data by implementing data oversight in low-code development. By doing this, users must request certain data types and receive approval before they can be used in the apps they build;
- Low-code application providers must provide security audits, compliance certifications, and service level agreements when needed. This will result in transparency and help organizations decide which platform to choose for their business;
- Apply the same protection made for software development to low-code development to reduce security risk and data leaks
Build a training course for employees
Having your employees interested in low-code development is good, but that’s not enough without proper training. Before getting into work, employees should have basic technical knowledge to understand how low-code works. A proper training procedure should instruct employees how to:
- Use the designated low-code platform;
- Utilize best practices in building apps;
- Decide on the application they wish to create;
- Grasp the knowledge of security, compliance, access and permissions, and management practices.
Determine all security and compliance needs
Besides those stages above, low-code governance should include testing regulations and application checks. IT staff will take these steps to verify the apps’ quality before officially implementing them.
Most testing can be done within the low-code platforms. If custom code is used, additional testing may be carried out. API testing must be done regularly since APIs might be modified by their creators without the developer’s notice.
Also, code reviews are required to ensure that applications follow the established governance system. The procedure, carried out by professional developers, checks that low-code apps are adequate for the tasks and meets specified security criteria to reduce risk. Code reviews deliberately look for flaws that could expose sensitive data or result in a security breach.
The said policy establishes guidelines for data use, sharing, and retention. For example, low-code governance might declare that low-code developers are not permitted to create databases, thus preventing data duplication and potential exposure.
To enhance transparency in low-code development, developers should be required to construct their applications in the platform’s sandbox. This restricts their access to resources and ability to view, change, and share data.
Wrapping up
In the end, building low-code governance helps manage your chosen low-code platforms more securely, optimized, and orderly. Good low-code governance should optimize technology for making management easier and creating more business values while reducing risks. Establishing a set of concise rules should be done step by step and thoroughly by professionals, as we mentioned above.
Should you have further questions about low-code platform governance or development, Synodus is available to answer and give you any support. Keep up with us in the upcoming posts!
More related posts from Low-code blog you shouldn’t skip:
