Notebook

Self-Service Web Applications

15 Sep 2010 at 7 PM

Since starting as a web developer at Purdue University over ten years ago my department has built applications that could easily be "instanced" for multi-departmental use. Now we're taking the next step, self service instancing.

Generally, if a department contracts with my group to build a tool to manage some aspect of their operations they could care less if anyone else used the resulting system, and they sure as hell aren't interested in paying us to generalize something for others to use. Luckily, my superiors have seen the value in this and have allowed us to take the necessary time to build applications capable of servicing not only the paying client or our college, but the entire university.

For years, we've used this approach. When someone wants to use our systems, they send in a request, we initialize a new instance, and off they go.

Great eh? Not really. This results in busy work for us, increased start up time for users, and perhaps under-utilization of our services.

Solution, 100% self-service applications. Recently, we've created a handful of applications where anyone with an account at the University can get started without administrator interaction.

Come on, do we really care if you want to use our system to reserve a piece of equipment in your lab? or setup a committee review of a job applicant? have we ever told anyone no? The answer to all three is NO!

The result is a more viral spreading web application that anyone can try out. We launched our PASS system for scheduling advisor appointments with a single e-mail. Nine months later, with no interaction, over 700 appointments have been scheduled across over 50 calendars!

That's 50 calendars I didn't have to created and 50 people who didn't have to wait for me to create them and that sounds like a win-win to me!