Nothing can dampen the Christmas spirit of a child opening a present from Santa—unless that gift comes with the dreaded “Some Assembly Required.” All you want to do is start playing, but you’re forced to wait for some grown-up to put the thing together. It’s quite the bummer.
The Christmas analogy is timely, of course, but it’s also a good way to describe the frustration many business leaders experience when their new software diverts a lot of IT’s time and focus before they can stand it up.
Software as a service (SaaS) is one way around this for many IT solutions. It offers substantial cost savings and efficiencies, and it comes in a variety of forms, for everything from desktops to smartphones, all accessed through an internet connection.
ServiceNow is just one of many solutions we implement for our clients, both commercial and government, precisely because of its low impact on IT. It has become one of the most robust low-code options available.
Low-code can bring high satisfaction
“Low-code” – or sometimes called “no-code” or “rapid application development” – platforms allow you to build the software you need quickly with very little coding. This means your people can bring value and talent to the project, and your developers don’t get bogged down in infrastructure.
It brings automation to those manual tasks that suck up too much of your developers’ time so they can focus on more important things. Instead of spending hours on the specialized work, they can put their creativity into the details to make the project uniquely “you.”
We recently worked with a client who needed several custom inspection forms created. By using ServiceNow solutions and taking advantage of the myriad of available templates, we were able to shrink what would have been a ridiculously time-consuming project into something much more manageable. This pre-built functionality was a game-changer for their team.
ServiceNow also recently expanded their capabilities with the acquisition of SkyGiraffe, a mobile application development firm, last fall. SkyGiraffe built a low-code platform for mobile apps, with a particular focus on allowing on-site data to speak freely with cloud-based applications. Writer Mike Wheatley broke down some of the details for SiliconANGLE:
“Its approach lets enterprises reduce the time it takes for cross-platform development to a matter of hours or days, rather than the months it would take to build a fully customized app from scratch … ServiceNow customers will be able to use SkyGiraffe’s technology for themselves in order to deliver a consumer-like mobile experience for applications built using its platform.”
Hours or days instead of months? That sounds like a nice Christmas gift to me.
Options tailor-made for you
Lest you assume these pre-built solutions look a little generic, a little too off-the-rack, remember that these are all easily customizable – and still low-code! – to allow you to adapt them to your specific needs and to build something that reflects your company style and the functionality you want.
And ServiceNow is just one of many products offering this kind of solution. Depending on the client, we often make recommendations from a whole suite of services from our emerging technology practice area, including LifeRay, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, etc. The important part is finding the puzzle piece that fits your situation, no forcing needed.
These solutions are perfect for implementing projects like a new service desk tool or a customer service management software, for example. Yet, the possibilities are nearly endless.
What I like is that the business retains the control, while adding flexibility across the enterprise and freeing up your internal teams to do what they do best.
Think of it as more “personalization,” less “some assembly required.” That’s a much better choice under the tree this year.
Mike Talbot is the vice president and chief technology officer at Veracity Consulting, a tech consulting team of problem-solvers and truth-tellers who deliver customized IT solutions for commercial and government clients across the U.S. Share your thoughts on Facebook or Twitter @engageveracity.
