Over the back half of 2020, my team at Tonkean surveyed 500 enterprise business operations and IT professionals about the potential of—and excitement around—technology such as no-code automation. The results blew us away.
Of the 500 professionals surveyed, 95% reported that their teams had already invested in or were about to invest in a no-code/low-code platform. 80%, meanwhile, agreed that “No-code/low-code would empower my operations team to get more work done.”
The results solidified what we already sensed to be true: excitement in the enterprise over technology like no-code automation is real, and here to stay. It’s no secret why. The SaaS landscape is changing. We’re approaching something like full digital transformation, democratizing not just who can access software, but who can build it. For a while now, the idea of buying software on a CD-rom, or of not outsourcing data storage to the cloud, has felt patently ridiculous. Well, now the idea of using platforms that aren’t customizable—composed of dynamic software elements that can be pieced together, as needed, by businesses themselves—feels equally preposterous.
No-code technology likewise promises to address many of the problems that for too long have held enterprises—and, more specifically, the business operations and business technology teams that power them—back. On the one hand, business operations teams lack the resources they need to solve process challenges in the holistic, cross-functional, cross-systems manner those problems demand. (Today, they’re generally limited to either buying packaged applications to solve problems on a point-by-point basis, which is inadequate and can create shadow IT, or asking IT to write custom code solutions, which takes too long, and leads to a long backlog.) Business technology teams, meanwhile, lack the means to scalably bridge the gaps that exist between the business and IT—empowering business operations teams to create or implement their own solutions, for example, while ensuring IT maintains proper governance over the tech stack.
That’s where no-code automation comes in. Certain no-code automation platforms—such as Tonkean—provide business technology teams with an alternative to apps by allowing the creation of an enterprise model for rapidly, flexibly, and scalably delivering end-to-end, cross-functional business process solutions. Tonkean can be used to extend business technology capabilities to business operations teams while maintaining governance (they come fully integrated with your company’s existing technology stack). Those are just a few examples of what’s possible, but it encapsulates well the direction the world is moving in.
Exciting though all this is, make no mistake: no-code automation is not a silver bullet. Your company’s capacity for using it effectively will depend on your implementation strategy. And that’s what we’ll be covering in our session at this year’s iBPM conference. Among other things, attendees will walk away with an understanding of:
* The types of no-code/low-code technologies and their key differences
* How to use no-code automation to rapidly drive efficiency and adaptability in business
processes
* How an enterprise no-code platform can help bridge IT and business teams
The opportunity of no-code automation to help us manifest a more efficient, effective, and enjoyable future of work in the enterprise is real. The requisite technology is here. Now, it’s on us to think seriously about how to use it appropriately.