Automation and low-code: Setting the stage for ongoing innovation

Digital transformation is a term you hear a lot these days, but it’s not always clear what a business means by it. For companies using the Now Platform to reinvent how they work, it has a pretty clear and compelling meaning.

ServiceNow customers are using the Now Platform to expand their automation initiatives beyond department-specific, isolated tasks to include processes that cross organizational boundaries. After all, the typical business process doesn’t stay within a single department. It affects other areas of the enterprise, feeds other workflows, and involves multiple systems.

Let’s take a look at some of the ways customers are integrating those islands of automation for greater efficiency and smoother workflows.

Prioritizing automation

Smart, qualified, and capable people are always in demand. One of the challenges for business leaders is how to create a rich and rewarding work environment that makes the best use of talent so that the business realizes the most value from employee skills.

Today’s workforce is often overwhelmed with routine and repetitive tasks that eat up a lot of the workday—leaving little time for creative problem-solving and innovative thinking. Automation tools can help teams and individuals accomplish more, fast by orchestrating people, processes, and systems across all areas of the business.

ServiceNow can bridge the incompatibilities between legacy systems and automate the manual and repetitive user actions that keep business processes running. With robotic process automation, for example, software robots can perform a repetitive sequence of actions across multiple apps on a Windows desktop and copy data from one system to another.

Technologies like these give the human workforce more time to serve customers, find new solutions to age-old problems, and develop new products that help a business stand out.

Empowering business with low-code

In every business, you’ll find people who are experts in how a process works and how their department functions. They know where the bottlenecks and inefficiencies are, and they have great ideas for how things could work better. But they don’t always have the technical skills to turn that expertise into a more efficient digital solution.

The burden of creating a new app or workflow falls to the IT team, which already has a long to-do list. As a result, the pace of innovation slows, leaving a business less efficient and less competitive.

With low-code application development tools, more people can turn their expertise into solutions on their own, without adding to IT’s workload.

Enforcing governance, encouraging transformation

It’s great to unlock creativity and equip more people in the enterprise to develop their own apps. But businesses also have a vested interest in maintaining standards, enforcing security, and staying in compliance. To be effective, low-code development and automation tools need guardrails and controls to help workers channel that creativity and innovation in a disciplined way.

Increasing innovation and creativity doesn’t have to mean increasing risk. With ServiceNow, you can centralize governance policies and deploy them across the entire enterprise, powered by a robust low-code and automation platform.

You get the best of both worlds: the freedom to open innovation opportunities to more people within the business and the ability to safeguard enterprise standards and compliance.

Find out more about how companies are creating a foundation for greater innovation and competitiveness in our Book of Knowledge: Hyperautomation and Low-Code.

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