Pega Low-Code App Factory introduction

Adopting a low-code platform or a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution to solve for a single business requirement is relatively simple. The difficulty comes when you multiply these business requirements to enterprise scale.  

Adoption of disparate solutions and technologies can lead to integration maintenance, technical debt, compatibility issues, and conflicting experiences between applications.

Beyond these issues, business users might attempt to onboard an application or platform independently without the awareness or sign-off of the IT group. These other systems — dubbed Shadow IT — bring with them several risks:

• Security – The IT group has a protocol to protect company and personal information, which employees may not consider when onboarding and sharing data with a new tool.    
• Reliability/Maintainability – Trained engineers have systems in place for testing, bug fixing, uptime, disaster recovery, and upgrading everything that comes after the development and deployment of a new solution. Business users may not think about these processes or the time and costs involved.
• Compliance – IT has certifications to adhere to depending on the dataset (SOC, GDPR, HIPAA, and so on). These certifications must be planned for and tested as part of solution onboarding.
• Costs/Ecosystem – IT picks and chooses the tools to bring on or develop intently to optimize licensing costs, integrations, scalability, and control against frankenstacks. A business user looking to solve for a use case may have a more siloed view of the solution ecosystem they want and may not think about the big picture.

Pega Low-Code App Factory addresses these issues by giving employees the freedom and confidence to build the apps necessary to succeed and IT the control to ensure every application is created within organizational guardrails.
 

App Studio is Pega's low-code development environment that allows business users and IT alike to capture business requirements and accelerate application development. Pega App Factory is an application platform that enables the use of App Studio to scale quickly and seamlessly within an enterprise.

Pega App Factory allows IT to set all low-code application development projects up for success by giving them tools and frameworks in a few key areas:

At its core, Pega App Factory is a lightweight framework that runs on the Pega Platform and includes features for a number of stakeholders:

• For application end users:
  • Application discovery portal – A launchpad for discovering and accessing applications from across the organization. Provides users a single portal to review application descriptions, request access to applications, launch into applications, and provide application ratings and feedback.
• For application makers:
  • Application management tools – Allows developers (citizen and professional) to submit new application requests, launch into development environments, manage go-lives and retirements, and monitor usage metrics.
  • Spaces collaboration –Topic and application-based forums for asking and answering questions and sharing knowledge with other developers, coaches, admins, and end-users.
• For IT / admins:
  • Application governance portal – Manage all applications in the factory; review all application statuses and approve/deny requests for new apps, go-lives, and application access requests.
  • Application life cycle customization – Personalize the out-of-the-box application life cycle to fit organizational standards or preferences.  Add or remove reviews, approval steps, automated checks, information capture, and integrations.
  • Reuse setup – Configure application templates to jump start developer productivity. Create and share foundational components for use in any application.
  • DevOps configuration – Enable application auto-provisioning and pipelines. Establish pipeline templates based on application criticality or purpose.
  • Collaboration settings – Identify coaches for newly approved applications and change default space members & configurations.