将你的企业里最有创造力、最为勤奋的员工转化为有组织的全民开发者大军的五个步骤。

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DM_H_CitizenDecvelopers

全民程序员时代

欢迎来到生产力的黄金时代！如今，在很多人自己都没有意识到的情况下，每个人都在或多或少地创造着新的软件。从各式各样的网站生成器，到容易上手的应用程序构建套件，定制和搭建应用程序从未如此简单。一个由图书管理员组成的社区甚至使用 Google Forms 联合创造了<a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/15/21324558/google-forms-virtual-escape-rooms-librarians-games-puzzles-homeschooling" data-mce-href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/15/21324558/google-forms-virtual-escape-rooms-librarians-games-puzzles-homeschooling">线上版密室逃脱</a>，用来向被隔离的学生们传授历史和数学知识。这些 “全民开发者” 们正以自己的行动证明，想要创建软件，除了写代码以外还有其他途径。

长期以来扮演着工作流程艺术家们忠诚伙伴一角的 Excel 表格，现在也退居其次，进化为更加精致，更加大众的实用工具。这些平台为我们提供了功能强大的关系数据库，以及易于定制的用户界面，使得作为用户的我们摆脱了由格式化的行与列组成的海洋，转而获取了由专项输入、窗口工具和屏幕编织而成的 “应用程序”。

随着大型企业的员工逐渐习惯于依赖软件管理个人生活，这些低代码/无代码的软件工具也自然而然的出现在了工作场合。这种趋势不由让人联想起十年前大家自行携带办公设备的风潮。当时 iOS 和安卓系统驱动的智能手机突然占领了人们的工作场所，成为了我们不可或缺的通信力和生产力工具。起初，技术团队们争先恐后地对它们的使用场合提出限制 —— 那之后又迅速更改路线，将其拥护为辅助工作的必要工具。

大多数员工都希望能更好更快地完成工作，即花费更少的时间，享受更高的工作效率，而这对任何一家企业来说都是件好事。然而，除非是企业自身的 IT 部门所开发的软件，那些由外部人员开发的工具常常被称为 “影子” IT 或 “窃贼” IT，暗示了那些应用的使用者只是想投机取巧，并不是真心希望借助应用提高效率的勤劳员工。
 
想象一下，一位医疗机构的产品经理想要追踪一款全新远程医疗产品的供应商选择流程，并希望根据不同的标准对供应商进行评分，这样她就能在小组讨论的时候，通过展示各个供应商的综合评分，向团队里的其他成员解释自己的评估流程。尽管有多人编辑功能的电子表格也能做到这一点，但她希望通过向导式的工作流程图，在需要团队成员输入信息时，自动给他们发送通知。
 
随着企业里小规模、小范围项目的数量持续增加，能够满足定制软件开发需求的工程师也人手不足了起来。因此，由普通用户自行搭建的工具便出现了，并且逐渐发展成为我们日常工作中不可缺少的一部分。与之相对的是，这些应用通常只有一个维护人员，既没有历史版本追踪，也没有传统软件里可见的投资回报率。

低代码/无代码开发工具的出现，切实可行地填补了工程师的空白，但它们也存在一些需要注意的地方。与其将它们比作魔杖，不如说是乐高。专业的软件开发人员提供了创建应用程序所需的精度和深度：成百上千块可以重复使用的积木，方式一致的（有时也是以不可预测的方式）扣在一起。这些开发人员甚至会在开始时使用一些可以预知的预设代码，所以终端用户在创作时往往受限于开发人员的想象力，不是吗？

在你鼓励员工们成为全民开发者前，必须要为他们做好准备。在企业中对软件开发进行授权伴随着一定的风险 —— 文档丢失、安全性存疑、反复测试和重复劳动都是有可能发生的。即便如此，与其消灭 “影子” IT，不如培养、管理并支持低代码/无代码的工具和平台，从而让全民开发者成为一股对企业有益的力量，而不是潜在的负担。

以下是将你的企业里最有创造力、最为勤奋的员工转化为有组织的全民开发者大军的五个步骤 —— 无论他们是编程达人，还是仅想了解一些提高工作效率的手段：

<ol>
<li class="">目的：力求灵活敏捷，与最具创新精神的员工保持同步，倾听他们的需求和建议。</li>
<li class="">人才：识别并调动早期倡导者和领导者。为任何想要学习的人提供技能和实操培训。</li>
<li class="">流程：建立具有可视性和协作功能的流程，减少重复，鼓励知识的共享和迭代。</li>
<li class="">工具：将企业运作统一于一个平台，或使用相同的工具维护全民开发者的生态系统。让 IT 部门专注于构建、保护、维护和记录数据服务，从而为全民开发应用提供超级动力。</li>
<li class="">架构：创建灵活且高透明度的框架，从用户工具的构建到对安全、高效的全民开发提供技术支持，实现IT资源的再分配。</li>
</ol>

当我们想要利用全民开发者们的活力、创造力和智慧时，要时刻牢记以人为本的理念，在工具、人员和开发流程上赋能，改进关键技术并培养全新思维模式。虽然这很花功夫，但这笔投资有望为你的企业带来一波自下而上的创新风潮。

Michael Calfee

作者

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frog-author-michael-calfee

How can established players compete with disruptors? Start building products like them.

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Piloting Your Way to Success

Companies across industries are vying for a competitive edge by getting innovative products into the hands of their customers—fast. However, when designing and piloting new digital products in the market, our clients in large, established organizations often face competition from lean startups that aren’t encumbered with legacy IT infrastructure. Entrenched software platforms with confusing acronyms are inevitably blamed as the limiters—the bottlenecks, the crushers of dreams. They shouldn’t be. Want to compete with the startups? Start building products like one.
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<h6>Pilot like a startup</h6>
A pilot is a way to test new or disruptive ideas in the market—ideally as quickly as possible. If the pilot is successful, then perhaps IT will need to solution some legacy integrations. Or not. Maybe the systems in question will be deprecated by the time the pilot ends. Maybe analytics captured from the pilot will cause a pivot in the experience design, changing the required integrations. The point is: Thinking too far ahead when piloting a product can get you stuck in the mud.
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<h6>Learn to embrace lean development</h6>
Our clients often dread the software development process, scarred by past large-scale integrations and cross-department rigor mortis. Don’t lose sight that a successful pilot is experimental and should be an auxiliary to your established operations and technology. If a planning conversation turns to, “But how will this product leverage [insert legacy system],” the point may be valid for widescale deployment, but probably not relevant to a pilot.
During pilot planning, our clients are often tempted to lean on existing platforms and vendors, thinking that it’ll be easier, more cost effective, or will save time. Depending on the requirements, failing to look outside the familiar toolbox could result in nailing a square peg in round hole, or killing an ant with a sledgehammer.
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<h6>Most of your product is already running in the cloud</h6>
Let’s face it, most software applications contend with the same set of functional hurdles: authentication, user communication (email, push, SMS) and payments. Technology teams also face a familiar set of tasks: server provisioning, automated testing, deployment, and monitoring.
The good news is that over the past decade an entire software industry has blossomed to solve the common functional needs of every type of digital product. These “cloud software” companies are really in the business of selling “the wheel” so that you don’t have to reinvent it for every project. Your product needs authentication? Auth0 or Okta. Send automated emails? SendGrid. Send SMS or push notifications? Twilio. Payments or subscriptions? Stripe or Braintree.
Application frameworks aimed at startups—namely, Amazon’s Amplify or Google’s Firebase—can accelerate development and DevOps tasks (i.e., getting to production). Both offer simple solutions for essential services like storage and analytics, plus a fast lane to deployment on AWS and Google Cloud, respectively.
With a smart approach to leveraging the vast ocean of cloud services to accomplish the fundamentals, developing custom software with venture speed is within reach. Define the requirements, and then look at all the functionality you can offload to a cloud service. You may find that 25 percent or 50 percent of the application can be developed following an implementation guide (just hooking the right wires together), leaving a much smaller core of custom development.
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<h6>Pilot on the cheap</h6>
Many cloud service offerings, including those from AWS, Twilio, or Stripe, use the popular pay-as-you-go model, which is perfect for pilots, where service utilization may be small or unknown. It’s little up-front investment—and that’s the point. The competition among these cloud service companies is fierce, and they want to provide every incentive for customers to try out their products. They’ve lowered the barrier to entry, creating a win-win for these companies and their clients.
Disruptive SaaS companies such as Stripe and Auth0 don’t sell their products with a huge marketing budget or over a round of golf with the CIO. They sell to developers (the folks that use the product) with no upfront cost, simple APIs, and awesome documentation. The hope is that their popularity will grow with the hobbyist and hacker crowd and then bubble up to the enterprises that employ them. So far the strategy has been successful (10 years in, Stripe services more than one million businesses). The point is, your developers probably know and use these platforms, further reducing the implementation hurdles.
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<h6>Focus on creating products people love</h6>
We know from experience with our own venture programs and pilots that many common software routines, like authenticating or sending SMS can be accomplished with a few dozen lines of code. So don’t be afraid of custom software. Much of the hard stuff has already been figured out. The real hurdle is designing a digital product that people will use—that’s sticky—and will ultimately provide measurable positive impact on the organization’s goals.
Remember, the goal in testing these innovative new products for impact is to see how (and if) people use the product. If the pilot is successful, then push for the long-term investments that pay off big. And if the pilot doesn’t gain traction? You’ve learned a lot with a little investment. The next pilot will be easier. Oh, and you don’t have to figure out how to undo that legacy integration.
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For more on getting innovative products to market fast

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Michael joined frog in 2017 as a Senior Solutions Architect, bringing 10 years of experience with large-scale enterprise technology solutions, as well as with nimble custom development and prototyping. Prior to frog, he was an architect at Razorfish, leading CMS re-platforms for BlackBerry and T-Mobile, an e-commerce re-platform for Hobby Lobby, and a custom white label wealth management portal for Stephens Inc. Michael brings a strong design sense to crafting technology solutions, from high-level roadmaps and conceptual exercises to hands-on software architecture and coding.

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