It’s an undeniable fact of life that most organisations today run and are reliant on software. The difference between success and failure can often be the speed at which companies can adapt the ways they work and how they present their offerings, and their technology and software.

That’s where problems can stem from, too: most organisations use many different applications, and too many everyday tasks involve editing and moving data from application to application. Software automation can’t easily be achieved because every company’s workflow is unique and draws on data from specific sources.

Of course, there’s always the option to create software from scratch designed to automate workflows, but that’s typically slow and expensive to undertake. Off-the-shelf automation solutions also have the effect of carving into stone the company’s processes – something that goes against the need for fast adaptability and flexibility in dynamic business markets.

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A low-code automation solution offers any organisation a way through the impasse. It allows individual line-of-business experts to create the efficient systems needed to do their work more effectively and offer customers the experiences they demand.

Answering the data questions

At the core of the modern business are the troves of information that grow daily as the company operates. In most cases, data gets stored in discrete silos defined by the software applications used in the different parts of the business (and it’s worth noting that each business function might use a single common application in very different ways).

Half the battle in automation is locating, adapting, and amalgamating information from different sources to be used in joined-up workflows. At a low level, software platforms can communicate with one another and exchange data via APIs (application programming interfaces), but negotiating APIs is usually done at the level of software code, which is not a skill in most people’s wheelhouses. API connections are also fragile due to their tendency to break when one of the platforms they belong to is updated or patched.

It’s essential, therefore, that any low-code automation platform can auto-negotiate with the low-level interfaces that each application presents, creating a reliable connection between each instance of siloed data. By doing so, the automation platform creates an up-to-date resource for its users of a unified data fabric.

Sewing with the data fabric

The technology buzzphrase of the last 18 months has been AI, which is highly relevant here but needs breaking down in this context. Platforms like ChatGPT work off public data, which has been ingested over many months. What’s much more useful in a business setting is to give an AI access to the organisation’s private data so the algorithms can produce answers that are relevant to business operations. The same dedicated algorithms will learn the company’s workflows too, and be able to suggest connections and optimisations to human operators to speed up the process of building automations.

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Even without the help of an in-house AI, the presentation of a data fabric offers so-called ‘citizen automators’ the full choice of information available to them from even the furthest reaches of the business’s data resources.

Armed with this and tools to build automated processes, the people at the coal face can create optimised workflows that benefit them, their organisation, and the organisation’s users or customers.

Messages from the coal face

“Using low-code, businesses can deploy solutions 10 to 20 times faster than traditional coding methods,” Luke Thomas told us. He’s the Area Vice President, Asia Pacific & Japan, at Appian, a company whose low-code automation platform is transforming how private companies and public institutions run their organisations.

The public sector is, of course, particularly sensitive to data regulation and security. Appian’s platform carefully trains its AIs with built-in guardrails that protect information from being used in the wrong contexts. It’s possible, therefore, to have a line-of-business expert build an application (or series of automations) that can access a large system like a company-wide ERP but only be able to see and use data appropriate to the task and within preset constraints.

The benefits of automating workflows become quickly apparent, especially when news of the efficiency gains spreads through the organisation. “A recent partnership we’re really proud of is working with the Office of Public Prosecutions in Victoria on a new case management system that is expected to save around 66,000 hours per year through process automation,” Mr Thomas said.

It’s often in the customer-facing applications that process automation can differentiate one business from another. Lenders’ mortgage insurance company Helia automated its claims management workflows with the Appian AI Process Platform and reduced claim processing time from two days to less than 10 minutes. The dramatic improvement in customer experience gave the company a market advantage and massively reduced its internal costs for each claim.

And while the buzz around artificial intelligence continues in the mainstream media, it’s in the data sets that AI works with that will likely change how organisations work. “I’d suggest that the real value in AI will eventually lie with those who own unique and original data, not necessarily those who create AI technologies,” Mr Thomas told us. Because work processes and data resources are specific to each organisation, using a dedicated AI has the potential to drive efficiency and thereby reduce cost, as well as create the kind of agility that safeguards a business’s future.

Head over to the company’s site to learn more about low-code automation and the Appian AI Process Platform.