Creator Workflows powered by Now Platform® Scaling Low-Code App Development

in the Digital-First Era

Creator Workflows

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The world is increasingly digital, and the global pandemic and other natural disasters have reminded us of the importance and need for agility and speed of change. We’ve seen first-hand how these emergencies can transform entire industries and business models with consumers embracing telehealth, remote learning, digital banking, and other online alternatives in a matter of weeks or months. The trend is persisting. Even after the recent global pandemic, there has been a 20-40% net increase in intent for consumers to spend online. Organizations understand they need to foster agility and adapt quickly in the digital-first era.

Today’s digital environment makes rapid app development a necessity for organizations to remain competitive. Low-code app development platforms are rapidly lowering the technological barriers to building and launching new business applications quickly. Knowledge throughout the entire organization can be captured and directly leveraged in the design of new and innovative apps quickly, without needing to translate requirements from business units to IT teams. While these apps can truly transform the business, the challenge is enabling this new level of agility without sacrificing enterprise standards and operational efficiency.

In this eBook, we’ll explore both the challenges and the benefits of managing digital transformation initiatives with low-code app dev platforms in today’s rapidly changing business environment without inviting the application sprawl that plagues so many organizations. We’ll also discuss how organizations can foster agility and accelerate innovation by scaling experiences end-to-end, scaling app dev with guardrails, and scaling app delivery with the robust Now Platform.

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Digital transformation is a massive undertaking that can impact all areas of an organization. Business technologists using low-code platforms are playing an increasingly critical role during these digital transformation initiatives. With low-code, organizations can unlock resources outside of the IT department and align technological efforts more closely with business unit objectives. Both factors can accelerate digital transformation initiatives and introduce greater adaptability throughout the organization. The challenge for most business and operations leaders is balancing this new-found digital agility without hindering organizational growth or operational efficiencies.

Specialization is one of the ways modern businesses remain competitive, and today’s employees are more specialized than ever, often defined by the department in which they work.

If employees are too focused on only their direct initiatives, however, the resulting tunnel vision can result in organizational silos, fragmented toolsets, and a lack of resources that will ultimately inhibit the agility of any business.

Information silos occur when departments within an organization don’t communicate effectively. An example of a silo in business is when two departments are working on nearly identical projects, but neither team is aware of what the other is doing.

The Challenges of Managing Transformational Initiatives with Low-Code

Lack of End-to-End Visibility Leads to Silos

This kind of counterproductivity is outdated and creates business processes that are unfit for change.

With the right platform, however, anyone in your organization can turn business processes into apps that are delightful to use and connect end-to-end workflows that integrate and communicate across any systems, apps, and data.

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While low-code is critical for accelerating digital transformation and overcoming limited IT resources, a poor choice of a low-code platform or a mismanaged approach to app development can lead to app sprawl.

Moreover, with application development made easier from the use of low-code platforms, and with separate business lines now able to quickly launch their own custom apps, a lack of company-wide coordination often leads to data silos, overlapping functionality, and operational inefficiencies.

The resulting shadow IT, with little to no cross-organizational visibility, may contribute to redundant efforts, inefficient deployment of resources, and increased risk.

When organizations adopt the right approach to low-code, one that promotes proper guidance and rules of engagement between business and IT throughout the app development lifecycle, they can increase both speed and agility while improving efficiency at scale. We will explore this concept in greater detail in the section “Effectively Managing Low-Code App Development at Scale” below.

Wikipedia says: “In big organizations, shadow IT refers to information technology systems deployed by departments other than the central IT department, to work around the shortcomings of the central information systems.”

Shadow IT has grown exponentially in recent years with the adoption of cloud-based applications, services, and even entire platforms. While shadow IT can improve employee productivity and drive innovation, it can also introduce serious security risks to your organization through data leaks, potential compliance violations, and more.

Lack of IT-Business Alignment Leads to App Sprawl

What Is Shadow IT?

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Another possible challenge to managing transformational initiatives with low-code is that fragmented tech stacks can be difficult to govern, unfeasible to predict, impossible to operate, and hard to manage.

Some questions an organization should ask when considering a low-code platform:

All of these should be operational considerations. And with the wrong approach, you won’t get that, and it will be a hindrance to your low-code success.

Lack of a robust platform can introduce issues around scalability, availability, security, or performance

• How can you guarantee the system architecture will provide the most efficiency in operations?

• How do you ensure service level agreement is guaranteed for your apps?

• Are the apps being developed compliant?

• Is the infrastructure designed and architected so you can scale from tens of users to tens of thousands of users?

• Do you have consistent reporting and the ability to measure results?

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Enterprises should consider a three-pronged approach to address these challenges and transform how their organization can adapt to today’s digital business environment. This approach begins with the ability to scale process orchestration and app experiences from simple personal productivity tasks to cross-functional workflows end-to-end. Next, businesses should embrace an organizational framework in which they can define and formalize a process for onboarding, engaging, and training citizen developers throughout the enterprise across each line of business. And finally, an effective low-code development initiative should include a robust platform with plenty of built-in, off-the-shelf capabilities.

ServiceNow’s customer, a Fortune 500 Energy & Utilities company, achieved 90 percent time savings on development efforts by leveraging ServiceNow’ Creator Workflow products,

What used to take us a few weeks now takes a few hours; we often end up saving 90% of our development effort.

Effectively Managing Low-Code App Development at Scale

Mediocre experiences are no longer sufficient for employees, especially when compared to what they get as consumers in their personal lives (e.g. communication, shopping, travel, and entertainment apps). But this is changing. ServiceNow set forth brand-new standards and expectations for business workflows in 2018 with ITSM (Information Technology Service Management). Since then, we have extended these delightful consumer-grade experiences beyond IT to all aspects of the business including sales, marketing, HR, finance, procurement, legal, and even facilities management and logistics.

Low-code is not just about elegant software that’s easy to use, it is also about providing a superior end-to-end experience to each business user on a “platform of engagement”. With ServiceNow Creator Workflow products, customers can make that experience richer, simpler, and more intuitive than ever. With experience components across all UX channels and AI-augmented interactions, everyday processes become non-disruptive, natural, and intelligent. Furthermore, Creator Workflows products seamlessly connect ServiceNow with other 3rd party source systems, apps, and data to engage users end-to-end across the entire workflow cycle.

With Creator Workflows, it’s now possible to unchain workers from their desks, allowing employees to be connected to work from anywhere and through any device. Employees can now get support 24/7 through Virtual Agents, which in turn allows IT to focus on strategic priorities while they let the Virtual Agent or chatbot respond to the more routine questions from employees. The chatbot is smart enough to seamlessly handoff to a human agent when needed.

Scale App Experiences with End-to-End Workflows

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App Engine’s flexibility provides a consistent user experience and very powerful features like list filtering/management, form creation, workflow generation with Flow designer and IntegrationHub, etc. It’s easy to integrate.

Scaling low-code app development efficiently from an organizational standpoint is different for every business, but there are common factors that organizations should consider. Establishing a Center of Excellence (CoE) team and rolling out a citizen developer initiative are both great ways to approach low-code strategically.

A CoE is a centralized unit of dedicated people (which can include representatives from both

IT and business units) with a common mission to streamline access to scarce, high-demand

capabilities for rapid execution across the business. This group hones expertise in a specific

subject area, standardizes best practices for wide-scale adoption, and provides thought

leadership and strategic direction. The CoE can guide and help manage the citizen developer

program by determining its scope and complexity, defining the needed guardrails, establishing

relevant goals and metrics, and allocating sufficient resources to ensure a successful outcome.—VP, Business Operations, Finance Industry

Design an Integrated Organizational Framework to Safely Scale Apps

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From an IT and business perspective, creating a CoE team is a great way to gain oversight while becoming that trusted partner for business units throughout the low-code app development process. For example, a centralized team can develop formalized demand intake process for vetting all custom app proposals from individual lines of businesses as they come in. That way, the low-code program becomes a company-wide effort with clearly defined roles and responsibilities for designing, building, testing, and deploying new applications while establishing mutually agreed upon milestones for moving through the development process (see Figure 1)

• App Engine Studio (AES) - Brings business- critical Creator Workflow apps to production in no time, with best-practice guidance and templates, all without leaving a holistic low- code dev experience.

• Mobile studio. Captivate users in moments that matter, with a modern, unified multichannel experience that’s easy to understand and use. Build and deploy mobile-first experiences using our intuitive, no-code designer. Rapidly create engaging mobile experiences for employees, without a single line of code. Build the mobile apps your business needs—without an army of developers.

• Delegated Development. Enable builders of all skills to participate harmoniously in a shared environment. Empower business creators to build apps while safeguarding app quality and platform stability.

• Process Automation Designer. Automates processes fast and show value quickly with native integration and low-code. Scale from simple to complex cross-enterprise workflows with consistency at scale.

• Seamlessly embed AI and analytics in every app. Work smarter and make better business decisions with Now Intelligence. Powered by the Now Platform, Now Intelligence surfaces information, makes predictions, and automates repetitive tasks so you can focus on strategic work. Predict issues, make smarter business decisions, and help people get work done easier and faster.

• Work smarter and make better business decisions with Now Intelligence. Powered by the Now Platform, Now Intelligence surfaces information, makes predictions, and automates repetitive tasks so you can focus on strategic work.

• Virtual Agent: Make it easy for employees and customers to resolve issues quickly and get what they need, when they need it, with an enterprise conversational experience powered by AI.

• Predictive Intelligence: Allow employees to focus more on meaningful work by powering your workflows with machine learning to automate routine tasks and get to resolution faster.

• Performance Analytics: Put the power of data into the hands of the stakeholders and subject matter experts who are responsible for successful service delivery.

• Flow Designer. Easily create end-to-end digital workflows. Automate any process—from simple productivity to complex transformation—in a no-code, natural language environment.

• IntegrationHub. Simplifies cross-enterprise automation, reduce cost and complexity for ServiceNow integrations. Quickly connect to critical business systems and assemble and manage multi-system workflows without a single line of code.

• The growing list of prebuilt Spokes. Empower citizen integrators and enable more people to connect in minutes with prebuilt, no-code spokes for 150+ external systems. Simplify credential management with the connection’s dashboard.

Empower more Creators: Delight with superior experiences:

Collaborate with no friction:

Accelerate process automation:

Infuse with AI and insights:

A Complete Platform That Supports All Scales of Low-Code:

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Compared to our legacy IT platforms, ServiceNow has offered us a platform, which is very versatile and fast to create new business applications in an agile way. Most business requirements for process support can be fulfilled, generating very high business value.

Enterprises should also establish formalized processes for engaging and training their citizen developers (i.e., Creators across lines of business) throughout the organization. The CoE can define the guardrails that let Creators know what they can and cannot do and when they should reach out for support or guidance. It is also critical to foster a sense of community with all Creators, providing them with ongoing learning programs, certifications, mentorships, technical reviews, and other resources. By focusing on community rather than heavy-handed governance, citizen developers can start to view IT as a partner rather than a roadblock.

The CoE team can define which training and certification requirements for citizen developers to

complete before getting access to certain tools or citizen development capabilities. The CoE

team can easily set proper access controls that enable in-depth auditing and logging to meet

enterprise change management requirements. Guided templates, shared app data and logic,

and clearly defined delegated development roles can help IT teams manage the scope of apps

without limiting innovation. Finally, automated testing and granular control over deployment will

ensure enterprises are delivering high-quality low-code apps.

—VP, Business Operations, Finance Industry

Figure 1. A formalized process for engaging and training citizen developers will typically include these steps.

Enroll

Submitidea

Connectwith IT

Follow learning path & earn badges

Build & testeasily

Safely push to production

Evaluate Enable Develop Deploy

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Effective low-code development should include robust capabilities throughout every phase of the app development lifecycle from design, build, test, to delivery of enterprise-grade apps at scale.

IT teams can feel confident in making low-code apps as bullet-proof

as possible through Creator Workflows products (e.g., App Engine,

IntegrationHub). ServiceNow Creators can build low-code apps in a

ring-fenced environment by assembling and configuring full-featured

components that are battle-tested and already proven in ServiceNow’s IT,

customer, and employee workflow products.

Powered by the Now Platform, ServiceNow Creator Workflows apps run

on our non-stop cloud infrastructure with dedicated tenants and the

robustness, reliability, security guaranteed in our cloud SLA.

Our customer, a global biomedical company, rolled out its own Citizen Developer 101 program to formalize onboarding for ServiceNow App Engine.

Through their program, citizen developers are successfully onboarded. Then, as they complete training, they are certified at three levels: no-code, low-code, and pro-code. Each certification level gives citizen developers additional privileges and access rights on the ServiceNow platform. This ensures citizen developers have the prerequisite knowledge for any actions they take within the ServiceNow platform.

Beyond onboarding, this global biomedical company established a CoE team with a formalized demand intake process that facilitates new apps from initial demand intake through to design, development, testing, and deployment. The CoE team has checks at each stage along the way to ensure the quality and integrity of the application before it is released into the next phase.

The global biomedical company’s citizen developer program has created a close partnership between their IT team and business units. Today, they have 25 citizen developers across their enterprise. With their help, they estimate citizen developers now account for 44% of all changes across the three ServiceNow production instances that the company maintains, and the team has increased development throughput by 56% thus enabling the organization to launch numerous successful enterprise-grade apps across business units.

Scale Low-Code App Deployment Using a Robust Platform

Organizational Methodology in Action

Great technical support and quality of the platform for process-oriented applications. We’re using it for commercial application development. We needed a platform to build our governance product which would provide scale, rapid deployment, customization per-client, integrate with many different systems at our client sites.

—CTO, Services Industry

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Organizations can rely on access to IT and business data and services for their continued operation and success. ServiceNow Advanced High Availability (AHA) architecture is a key element in delivering an enterprise-grade cloud service. The unique, multi-instance architecture not only meets but exceeds stringent requirements surrounding data sovereignty, availability, and performance.

ServiceNow provides a cloud-based platform and solutions that deliver digital experiences and help people do their best work. Having a single product, platform, and support infrastructure means that ServiceNow can employ extensive security without the need to balance security over a highly diverse estate.

ServiceNow customers gain the benefits of a common, highly standardized cloud infrastructure while realizing the security benefits of customer-specific isolation at the application and data layers. In addition to the security features that come as standard within the platform, customers can leverage additional security capabilities within their ServiceNow instances.

Security is embedded from the ground up in both ServiceNow software and infrastructure. The Now Platform incorporates both in house and external security testing as a continuous process through the entire software development lifecycle, coupled with active, ongoing penetration testing. The Security Ops team uses modern vulnerability management techniques to assure compliance to all major industry certifications (ISO, FedRAMP, etc.)

Figure 2. Instances of the Now Platform are deployed on an advanced, multi-instance architecture that provides separate application nodes and database processes for each customer.

Figure 4. ServiceNow provides a real availability dashboard that displays availability information for all of a customer’s instances, providing a true measure of customer availability.

Figure 3. Global data center pairs ServiceNow’s data centers are arranged in pairs. There are 10 support centers and 11 data center pairs, spanning five continents: Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America.

APP NODES

DATABASE

SH

AR

ED

HA

RD

WA

RE

INSTANCE(customer1.service-now.com)

APP NODES

DATABASE

INSTANCE(customer2.service-now.com)

APP NODES

DATABASE

INSTANCE(customer3.service-now.com)

10 Support Centers

U.S.

CANADA

U.S.FEDERAL

BRAZIL

SWITZERLANDEMEA

ASIA

JAPAN

AUSTRALIA

11 Data Center Pairs

GERMANYU.K.

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Leveraging the Now Platform’s world-class infrastructure and intelligent, high-capacity, and proven platform ensures enterprises can run large scale workflows without interruptions. Out-of-the-box capabilities have been built and tested so that both IT and line of business technologists can confidently deliver enterprise-grade low-code apps. In addition, strong organizational guardrails within ServiceNow Creator Workflows products ensure citizen developers are only exposed to features and components that are well-governed and quality-controlled so that every low-code app meets the necessary enterprise requirements for release. ServiceNow Creator Workflows products are the strategic foundation for delivering low-code apps across the enterprise without sprawl.

Learn more about Creator Workflows and scaling low-code apps without sprawl at ServiceNow.

A platform for the entire enterprise

ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) is the fastest-growing enterprise cloud software company in the world above $1 billion. Founded in 2004 to make work easier for people, ServiceNow is making the world of work, work better for people. ServiceNow App Engine, built on the Now Platform® is a comprehensive low-code application platform for the entire enterprise so anyone, from low-code creators to professional developers, can digitize their workflows. For more information, visit www.servicenow.com.

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