Episode 7 - Balancing the Scales: Citizen Developers and Centralized Orchestration

Dan has returned from Italy where he participated in an HCL Automation customer event focused on orchestration of business processes as an integrated element of a centralized automation solution. HCL has embraced orchestration as encompassing business process automation as an extension of traditional job scheduling and workload automation, leveraging the centralized automation team and controls that exist in many organizations. HCL announced the 2nd generation of their Universal Orchestrator product, integrating with the other elements of their Automation Orchestrator Suite. Key Ideas: - Automation continues to increase in strategic importance, over 40% of IT executives are now measured on automation expansion (up from 30%) - Use of automation tools by _citizen developers_ outside of the centralized automation team continues to increase as well, allowing the process experts to shape the automations they rely on and expanding the number of processes that are automated. - The empowerment of citizen developers raise challenges with change control and governance, sometimes interfering with the automation team's efforts to maintain reliability and resilience   - 28% of enterprises have significant citizen developer contributions   - 52% limit citizen developers to experimental work   - 20% use citizen developers primarily for requirements definition - Automation tools need additional work to support citizen development effectively Show Links: - HCL Universal Orchestrator: https://www.hcl-software.com/automation-orchestration/uno