Low-code automation: Lessons learned

After hosting All Access: Low Code Automation, a three-day webinar series that spanned the globe and included speakers from North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, PEX Network can share the universal lessons that emerged. Low-code or no-code applications allow people with either minimal or no coding skills to create their own automations.

Most of the speakers recognized similar trends and patterns as presented in their case studies, research and firsthand experiences. As they answered PEX Network community questions about low-code and no-code technology, the following became clear.

1. Join the low-code evolution

Take note of the fact that a number of speakers refer to low-code and no-code trends as evolutionary rather than revolutionary. The point is that low-code and no-code apps have been around for a while now, and while they are changing swiftly, they are being adapted in a more thoughtful way (or at least they should be). For starters, an evolution is less jarring and can help with change management. It also suggests that the change is continuous and requires constant adaptation. 

“The platforms are evolving,” said Vinod Srinivasa, assistant VP - operational excellence at America's leading multinational bank. “But is the organization also evolving and continuously revamping its code? If it is a low-code angle, parameters will have changed, the business scenarios will have changed.”

WATCH: Srinivasa and Das on the opening panel of low code automation APAC

2. PEX leaders need a strategy for automation

When technology suddenly advances in the way low-code and no-code apps have with the arrival of generative artificial intelligence (AI), business leaders sometimes buy into the savior mentality. They believe tech will solve their problems, and they invest to be on the cutting edge only to fail to properly strategize for the long term.

“I think strategy is really important and it depends on the type of company. I usually work with solo founders and startups. They're pretty much just doing everything. Everyone's wearing different hats. They're going to be more receptive to change at times,” said Doc Williams, a content creator who makes videos about low-code apps. 

He added that change management is a big part of automation because people need to get comfortable with both the technology and a machine doing their job. 

“Also, I think of how you're positioning low-code; it's not going to be a cure all,” said Williams. “But if you're trying to implement or do something rapidly in empowering other teams...Now, people can understand you're not going to break anything, or it's not going to be crashing the company.”

WATCH: Williams and Turner on the opening panel

3. Integration into legacy IT is key

“We can leverage the integration and automation capability to deliver integration with any third party systems that you have and, overall, this will actually help us to elevate the experience for the user and the developers,” explained Davis Ng, director creator workflows solution consulting at ServiceNow APAC. 

In fact, many of the speakers talked about how integrating past technology with new automation capabilities showed respect for the work people had previously accomplished while also modernizing efforts and allowing for more efficient processes. Taking advantage of the technology while leaving an older system that people know and understand in place also helps them more easily transition into more automated processes.

WATCH: Ng and fellow panelist Carmen Man, sdvisory solution consultant at ServiceNow 

4. Determine projects ripe for automation

What leaders are learning is that not every step in a process is right for automation. Some steps are better off remaining manual. Some companies have a system for determining which processes are automation-viable and which are not.

John Joseph, VP solutions at Tray.io, shared a customer story that depicted an ideal situation for automation that leveraged AI. 

“We were working with a digital marketing agency, and we help them scale their business by infusing AI using Tray. This particular digital marketing agency was a sort of resource. They were struggling to scale without significant cost increases, and they were struggling with handling things like lead management, client reporting and customer demand operations. By infusing AI into these processes, leveraging that [composable] architecture that I shared earlier, and that lead processing example that I showed earlier, they were able to save about $600,000.”

WATCH: Joseph talks about digital workflows

5. Gain a competitive advantage

Low-code automation is a way to stay on the cutting edge and grow more productive than competitors. 

“We want to share this advice from Forrester, who said businesses must drive automation to levels that will stretch their creativity and staff efforts, which will pay off for those who double down on automation to reach a competitive advantage. That's really what automation delivers – a huge, competitive advantage,” said Dermot Sweeney, digitilization expert at FlowForma.

WATCH: Sweeney and fellow panelist Suzy Pinsent, director of Banister Consulting Partners, talk about a no-code roadmap

6. Know the best applications of low-code automation

People are using low-code in a wide swath of industries for everything from automatic document delivery to managing content publication. However, there are some obvious places where low-code can make a significant impact. 

“All organizations are different, but we see the most significant value coming from automation in the three areas of process-centric tasks in customer [service], onboarding and compliance,” said Liam Woods, account executive UK&I at Bizagi. “In these areas, it's really critical to join people and teams to make sure that they see an end-to-end view of these complex processes across the enterprise.”

WATCH: Woods and Hailey discuss operational efficiencies

7. Excel spreadsheets breed errors

So many leaders in tech realize that people are wedded to Excel spreadsheets and still tend to use them as their default for big data sets. Technology like low-code apps can make these spreadsheets, and the errors that often occur when using them, obsolete.

Andrew Hayden, senior product manager at Precisely, explained that Excel spreadsheets can be error prone. The data might not be validated, and various data could end up being placed in silos, rather than being brought together as it would in a dashboard or platform, where people can see the big picture. The consensus is that Excel is what provides comfort to people, but it is not the best choice with the advanced technology that is available.

WATCH: Hayden shares about hyperautomation when leveraging AI and machine learning

8. Security must be a top priority

The point of low-code automation is that the workers are empowered to create their own automation to simplify their workload. However, having what are known as citizen developers in charge puts an organization at greater risk of cyber security breaches. There are ways to use low-code and no-code automation responsibly. 

“There are new regulations coming through all the time,” said Vikki Hailey, UK&I sales director at Bizagi. “There's privacy acts that we have to adhere to. There's compliance and security. So a standardized approach to ensure that everyone is following that same process [is important]. There [must be] auditability and accountability of that process.”

9. Helping citizen developers is a must

To begin, organizations must determine who the best citizen developers among them would be. People who are interested in learning, willing to be trained and embrace both new technology and change make good candidates. Then, they must be trained to properly apply the automation in an organized way.

WATCH: Amorelli talk about Shell's citizen development program

“People from the business have these abilities and this curiosity [to choose the citizen developers],” said May Linn Liao Amorelli, IT projects business analyst at Shell. “People start small by using small automations that they do for their own line of work. For example, I always receive these documentations from mailbox, and I always need to save this document in a folder. So I will automatize this, and I will save my time to address with more important topics and then they keep learning about the tools and feel excited about what they achieved on their own.”

REGISTER: All Access: Change Management for Business Transformation

10. Training programs are part of change management

Companies like Shell are creating citizen developer hubs in different regions of the world. They host hackathons and coordinate their efforts to ensure people are not doubling up on their automation or choosing the wrong projects. Through all this, Amorelli serves as a coach to help people get on baord with citizen development. 

This kind of training is necessary. Even if employees do not need to know coding, they must have parameters within which they should work. The organization should have standards about how and when to automate, and they should create a system for applying low-code to processes or parts of processes. This is long-term thinking at its finest, and it's important, particularly with this technology. 

“There's a very, very different level of entry and technology skills for people who are essentially performing the same function as the IT team in the past,” said Jeff Turner, national manager for business strategy and solutions. “I think that has a lot of implications in the future as well. How do you prepare people for jobs and technology? How do you guide their career path? What skills do they need to learn? Also, what's the combination of technological and non-technological skills that will afford a person a really rich and constantly developing career? That's a totally different picture now than it was 20 years ago, and as low-code and no-code continues to evolve, that impact on what you need for your career is going to continue to change.”

11. Automation reduces costs

One of the obvious benefits of low-code or no-code automation is bringing down expenses. In a session on process orchestration, this advantage was confirmed. 

“Firstly, [process orchestration allows] the overall operational costs to be reduced significantly. It also helps enterprises to enhance the operational efficiency of the business processes as well as with its audit and different processes,” said Santhosh Kumar, practice director at Everest Group, when presenting with Marc Stromberg, co-founder and key account manager at GBTEC.

WATCH: Kumar and Stromberg converse about turbocharging business processes

12. Low-code automation breaks down silos

In the past, businesses often had an IT department and the rest of the business. IT just helped people when the computer was fussy or broken down, when a website was spitting out errors or when an internal system had to be built. Today, business people must be well-versed in the technology and the technologists must be well-versed in the business. More departments must connect with one another and everyone has to be on the same page about the business results they are trying to achieve.

“How can companies foster a culture of innovation and agility by leveraging this low-code?” asked Debasmita Das, manager, data scientist at Mastercard. “I think the first thing is encouraging collaboration, breaking down the silos between IT and non-IT stuff to leverage diverse perspective and skills.”

13. Low-code is empowering

Automation does not have to mean a loss of work for humans. It can mean helping humans be more efficient, so they have time for something else. 

“We wanted to flip the switch and have the machine subservient to us, and we look to this age to do that. We thought we were going to be driving around in our flying cars, having a bunch of leisure time, going for the arts, athletics, poetry...while the robots worked for us...But it seems like sometimes history may have just repeated itself, and we swapped the assembly line for the cubicle,” said Sam Merrill, manager product strategy at Appian.

WATCH: Learn about case management modernization from Merrill

“That's not entirely true. I guess sometimes at work we can feel like that, like the node in the business process where we're doing the same task-based work day in and day out. A good culture and a good organization should look like...where we come to work feeling empowered,” continued Merrill. “A big part of that, of course, is the culture, but it's the technology stack that an organization adopts that can really help empower its end users.”

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