By: David Pickering, Director, Solution Engineering, APAC at Cherwell (acquired by Ivanti)
The spotlight on IT teams over the past year has pushed the no-code movement further among Australian organisations. If the distributed workforce and the strain on IT support has taught us anything, it’s the importance of enabling employees to manage their own environments and their own experiences—and to interact in a meaningful way with the work flows they manage.
Gartner predicts that by 2024, three out of four large enterprises will be using at least four different low-code tools, and that low-code app development will account for 65 percent of all application development activity.
Modern IT architectures and digital transformation initiatives are creating a wide variety of new use cases—mobile apps, new user experiences, new business processes. While Australian companies are generally quick to adopt new technologies, and the past year has certainly contributed to the need for greater agility and faster implementation, there exists a number of challenges preventing adoption of low- and no-code tools.
Is the caution warranted?
Low/ no-code tools allow greater ease of use, unmatched accessibility for professional and citizen developers alike, automation of repetitive manual tasks, faster implementation, and lower costs.
However, organisations are often deterred by existing legacy systems, concerns over governance and change control and the need to integrate any new technologies with outdated infrastructure.
Additionally, there is the underlying human resistance to change, particularly when it comes to internal developerswho prefer full stack development. Changing platforms without a proper change management approach can present risks to the delivery life cycle.
Empowering staff to do more with less
Organisations that incorporate low-code and no-code development empower users with intuitive tools that require little or no programming experience while reducing their dependence on often limited numbers of professional developers available.
It is a mindset shift, where the responsibility for app development and innovation in solving business problems moves from expensive programmers and engineers to business subject matter experts.
No-code platforms enable business units to solve their own business needs through application development. All that is needed to get started is for templates and agreed processes and logic to be established up-front and then organisations can expand capabilities enterprise wide.
Steven Lees-Smith, Animal Logic’s Business Systems Automation Lead, was given the opportunity to improve the off-boarding process and found a solution in Cherwell’s no-code IT Service Management platform
Animal Logic is one of the world’s leading independent creative digital studios and has been producing award winning design, visual effects and animation for over 30 years. The studio employs hundreds of artists and practitioners, scaling up and down in response to production schedules and they were looking for an off-boarding system that could meet these demands.
Animal Logic’s two studios, located in Sydney and Vancouver, needed to automate their system to increase efficiency and minimise challenges associated with different time zones. Through the use of the Cherwell CORE No-Code platform, Lees-Smith was able to entirely automate the process. By using drag-and-drop, ready-made elements he was able to build a new workflow, customised to Animal Logic’s unique environment.
Animal Logic’s off-boarding process is now completely automated, resulting in a near-zero margin for error and more importantly, significant time savings so the team can focus on making more award-winning work.
Opportunity to elevate experiences and drive better business outcomes
There is a clear path ahead in how technology will continue making organisations more efficient. Low/ no-code tools offer different team members the ability to create or improve workplace apps by themselves, without knowing how to code software and without relying on support from their help desks.
While we expect low/no-code to be carefully deliberated further by organisations before they become the new norm, the challenges of legacy issues and managing change can and should be addressed by open, transparent communication on the value proposition of the emerging tools. As organisations continue to shed outdated tools and automate their workflows, low/no-code adoption presents a tremendous opportunity for businesses to simplify their IT landscape, reinvigorate employee experiences and drive powerful innovation.
About the Author:
David Pickering is Director, Solution Engineering, APAC at Cherwell Software. With over 20 years in the IT industry, David has extensive experience with solutions consulting in SaaS, IT service management, cloud and automation technologies. David has a proven track record of building pre-sales capability for large organisations in ANZ and Asia Pacific. David’s focus in his current role is the continued expansion of Cherwell Software within APAC, the solutions engineering capability to support partners and customers in elevating their IT service delivery. David is well-regarded in the Service Management community and has presented at various ITSM conferences throughout Asia Pacific on ITIL, End User Experience, and driving successful Business and IT Value.
