okay our next session is called scaling low code without giving up oversight and control with us is Chris Greer he's the creator of workflow's technical director for services now Federal customers he has been supporting the federal government for 15 years as both the contractor and Technology partner he spent the last five plus years demonstrating how low code platforms can help agencies achieve Mission value and more efficiently Chris you there yes you're there we'll get your presentation up take it away all right sounds good so hey thanks for having me today as Mike said I you know I got a background as a technologist right I come from a background software development uh and software architecture and looking at software development from that perspective I've you know made the migration over to the low code no code world and the reason I made the transition was because as a technologist I saw the benefit that I could bring to me and my organization so now I'm on this side of the table you know talking about evangelizing hey what can it do for a federal agencies and when we look at it you know we want to look at it holistically not only all the benefits but how do you gain those benefits while still maintaining control so we're going to talk a little bit about today and so just real kind of kicking things off when we look at the trends right you know I think Trace talked a little bit about this you know we're trying to do things quickly we're trying to be efficient we're letting our staff be more efficient and we want to provide good experiences to not only our Workforce but also to our uh constituents as well the folks that we serve and when we do that right there's some challenges with that you know Tech you know shortage of tech skills and talent um which is another which is an area where generative AI for example has some really you know it has some interest is how do we you know provide how do we do more with less with less people another area that hey we've got a lot of silos out there we've got a lot of applications that have been around for a long time that we can't just replace but weren't really built to be modernized weren't really built to be integrated with and then we have the idea of skyrocketing digital expectations when we look at our Workforce the workforce is changing the expectation of that Workforce is changing so how do we adapt to that while still maintaining speed and efficiency and so when we talk with customers a lot of the questions we hear and allow the asks that we hear are hey how do I Empower more technologists um you know as the previous presenter talked about hey using AI is a way but we're looking at it more how do we Empower more technologists within an organization how do we use the domain knowledge and the the human capital that exists and allow them to contribute to the delivery of systems how do I modernize core systems without replacing them and then how do I do this all at scale and really what this comes down to is this really comes down to hyper Automation and this is probably a term that you've heard if you've read in the analyst reports but hyper automation is really a business driven disciplined approach that organizations use to rapidly identify that and automate as many business and I.T processes as possible so far in all the conversations that I've had with cios and ctOS you know no one has raised their hands and no I don't want that right we all want this this is what you know this is the Holy Grail of getting to being able to provide efficiency and speed in our organizations is being able to automate as much as possible but also as safely as possible and how do we do that you know it's interesting you know there was a recent Gardener quote that came out that hyper automation is irreversible and inevitable everything that could can and should be automated will be automated and that's what we're preparing for and working with customers and our partners and how do we you know how do we prepare for this inevitable automation of as much as possible and what does that mean to you well simply that means your organizations are going to be building applications probably lots of applications and potentially with lots of iterations and I know some of you just got a little nervous when I said that right because this can be a little bit scary but I say hey it doesn't need to scare you this doesn't need to be a scary proposition and immediately people start thinking about well what about apps for all right after all what about data leaks what about lack of training how do I get my organization ready and prepared to feel safe that I can use a low code or no code tool and platform to be able to address some of these concerns and really I love the fact that Trace touched on this one of her you know that's one of the things she ended with it comes down to guard rails it comes down to establishing the right guard rails and defining the application life cycle for how you want to build applications in your organization and coming from a software development background this makes total sense to me right you've got a devops process you've got CI CD you've got Source control you've got all of that stuff that you would do with a traditional software development approach and a lot of people look at low code and they think hey this is great I can do all this cool stuff in production just because you can do it in production doesn't mean that you should and when we look at low code and no code development we believe that a having good Garden rails and having a good software development practice and following good software development practices is still very much needed and so what I want to do I want to look at this I want to look at the software application lifecycle and talk about hey what what should you be looking for in low code vendors so that they can address places in the software life cycle for you that you can feel comfortable with this and I'm going to use ionic service now is the example of where we're making investments in each of these areas as well and so when we look at it right what we've tried to do looking at you know in addressing the the asks from our customers is providing um tools and capabilities that address every step in the software development life cycle we're going to take a second to kind of look through what that looks like and depending on where your organization is and your maturity and what you're looking to use low code and no code systems for different aspects of this are going to be more or less important to you but I want to kind of give you our perspective on what this looks like for your consideration and so depending again depending on where you're at and what you're looking to use or low code no code four one of the first things you have to address is intake how do we know what needs to be built in the organization what are the applications that even need to be built what are the needs that need to be met for us to potentially address with a lower low code solution and it's what it comes down to intake um and we think intake's really important because there's very few organizations who are just like Hey we're going to open it up and let people build whatever they want uh you know we there needs to be a process to evaluate what are the needs how are they prioritized and what do we want to position as a know and low code app versus position with some other technology and so you know it comes down to simple intake prioritization and processing and so one example is just a simple way to be able to intake ideas whether this be just an idea intake or you're collecting input from people that want to be citizen developers uh in your organization some way to be able to take that input and prioritize it and make decisions now if you've got something like this and you are interested in a you know expanding lower no code into more of a citizen development type model some of the great benefits that you can get from having an intake process is the ability to do things like automatically provision users in your Dev environment with uh you know with the application created based on their idea or provide other Automation and traceability all the way from idea to production and so having that co-located on your system makes a lot of sense and it gives you a lot of value right and so I mean that's a simple way to look at intake and obviously you know with intake comes prioritization review which we'll talk about in a minute but when we look at build you know every low code and no code platform's got a capability to build with us we have app engine Studio that's the tool you know that we talk about with our customers which provides that single kind of home for you to build applications on top of a platform and you know what again depending on your needs you're going to be looking for different things one of the things that you know we like to look at and like to talk to customers about is collaboration and Trace talked about this as well is how do you use low code and no code as a way for people to be able to collaborate together to get a better result than they would have individually and so one of the things we've invested in is the ability for developers to ask for help or to collaborate with others and whether that be asking for help say hey I need help with an integration I don't have that skill set can you please you know can you provide someone to help me with that or just to invite other people to collaborate with them on their application building this into your low code platform allows you to be able to again get that traceability and see everything that's going on and it also makes it easier for the developers of those applications because they don't have to go to a secondary means normally email or chat to you know collaborate with users they're able to have that all within context but the other part that comes with this as well is just because you want someone to be able to collaborate with you on an application doesn't mean that it should be a free-for-all from that perspective and so you know giving you know giving organizations the ability to allow users to collaborate on existing approved applications without also giving them the ability to just go off and create as many new applications as they want and we understand that this has always been a concern of low and no code systems is that apps for all and so that's another thing you know when you're looking at uh doing development is do you have the ability to control what your users are able to do foreign those just a couple of examples of things that might be in the bill Arena but what happens in validate and deploy and maintain and so when we look at that just like you would in a traditional software development uh project you're going to be looking at how do you automate as much as possible and in traditional software development you've probably heard of cicd continuous integration continuous deployment the same model applies for low code as well on top of the servicenow platform we refer to that as pipelines and you're able to set up you know pipelines that allow you to say hey I've got a Dev test staging production environment however many different instances that you might have and you're able to set up a pipeline between them to be able to migrate applications as they go through the different Gates and so in your development environment folks are developing applications and they're able to hit the submit button and when they hit the submit button it triggers what you know a deployment request where someone is able to look at that and you can either automate the fact that hey that deployment request gets approved an application automatically moves to test or you can make that a manual or some other human enhanced uh process where someone needs to look at it and manually approve an application moving from deployment to test for example based on some criteria that your organization might have and then with that you know you're able to run your test again automated testing has always been a big thing in in traditional development it's also a big thing in low code and no code development when you want to scale and this is all about scaling how to use how do you scale this and so automated testing whether it's using an automated testing framework on the platform or using other some other uh open source product or third-party tool you're able to do that in doing instant scans and being able to do all the automated stuff that you want to test whether or not that application is going to meet your standards is really important and so through the pipelines capability you've got the ability to automate that just like you would in a traditional environment and again in your organization you can go deep into this or you can stay very light just depending on what your needs are and what and what you think your risk profile is and so that pipelines and it's going to take it all the way through production because what you want to do and what you want to alleviate again especially at scale is the human mistake the human error of manually moving an application from a Dev environment to a test environment from a test environment to a production environment by automating that process you eliminate the potential of human error and you're able to feel more confident that the application that makes it into production is the exact version of the application that you just tested and so with that when you've got applications that are now going to be in your production environment you know how do you track that how do you look at that well you know how does that all come together and so really you need to have a comprehensive monitoring capability and then also the ability to retire applications should you deem that they're no longer necessary and so when we look about it you know one of the things that we've invested very heavily in that we think is very important to our customers is a centralized view of everything that is going on in your entire stack so your your entire environment which would be Dev test staging however many environments all the way through production giving your um administrators giving your CIO giving your ciso the insight into everything that's going on in that environment so that they can feel comfortable that what's going on is within the guardrails that you're trying to establish and so again on top of our platform we've developed a capability called app engine management center which gives you that centralized view into all of your new intake requests all of your collaboration requests all your deployment requests all of your pipelines and all of the application usage once it's in production as a starting point for that main that primary single pane of glass View and all of the application development that's going on in the platform when you dig into it a little bit further um especially when you want to see what's coming again we hear the term app sprawl all the time hey I'm concerned about apps brawl I don't want to be surprised by all these applications in my environment well again we've tried to you know provide tooling um that addresses that concern and so when we look at it we look at hey how do you manage applications that are coming up through that environment and how do you manage your developers to make sure that the developers are living up to the standards that you set for them and so when we look at this um you know application and developer monitoring again through this single pane of glass you're able to dig into not only what's in production but you're able to dig in what's in my test environment and what's in my development environment are there new applications in development that haven't made it into production yet and what should I be expecting once I get there are there applications that are in production but I see there's a new version currently in tests okay great I see that's in tests I see that it's going through that process I can see if there's any back and forth with that and so when that makes it into production I'm not surprised by it I understood that it was coming and I was prepared for it and so it gives you insight into that whole flow and exactly hey what's the back and forth between um you know the number of iterations between development and tests is our your applications passing on the first try are they having to iterate a lot to make it through the testing scenarios you get the insight into that um also with this is developer tracking you know one again one of the trends and one of the asks that we talked about earlier was we have a lot of organizations that are asking how do I Empower more people to contribute to this you know this development approach because I've got more people in my organization that can contribute to application development than maybe just the traditional development teams and so with that you've got developer tracking you're able to see exactly hey who are all of the people that are approved developers in our developer instance um and what applications are they working on you know do we have a bunch of full-time people that are working on lots of applications do we have a bunch of people that you know are working on an application occasionally they're being brought in as collaborators and they're in there and they're working what's their training level have they passed all the certifications that we asked in the past or have they done all the training requirements that we've asked them to do training for it's something you know that's an area that we're looking to invest in in the future as well you know in coming down from the you know from the perspective of of how does this you know how does this all come together so that I've got a handle on not only all the applications but who is it in my organization that is developing the applications and are they the right people are the right people involved in those decisions and the last piece with this is really hey once it's in production how do I keep tabs on it did I just deploy an Enterprise application that was you know that my requirements doc said was going to be servicing a thousand users every day with tens of thousands of transactions per month and it makes it into production and I see three users that use it on a daily basis or do I see that application that citizen development application that we approve you know from Bob that he built over the weekend is suddenly being used by 8 000 people in our organization because it adds value to their daily workflow you know and maybe we need to you know take that on and enhance it and provide more support for it having that insight into all of the applications in the environment and the usage metrics that go alongside with them isn't an you know is an area that's just as important for low code and no code as it is for traditional software development you know Enterprise applications and so having capability to look into that and see what's going on is critical to the success of your low code and no code development capability the other part that goes with this is how do I identify applications that I'm able to retire how do I look at it and understand hey it's just not being used enough to justify it still being out there that has always been a challenge in the application development you know Arena from the beginning of time how do I know what's being used and what's not um because you want to retire applications that are no longer providing the value that they originally did and so this gives you the insight into that as well you're able to see the trends and understand hey this isn't being used as much as it used to be maybe it's a candidate to be retired you know you have these capabilities been replaced somewhere else or can we add these capabilities that are still being used somewhere else so that we can retire this application and consolidate over time and so with that you know and we kind of revisit the software development life cycle this is what we look at right hey how do you support all the way from ideation all the way to retirement with a set of tools so that yourself as either an administrator or as an I.T leader or as a business leader you have insight into what's going on in your environment and are you getting the value that you expected from the applications that are being built and when we look at it right you know we look at it from the perspective of um you know all of the torn and all the capabilities that come together and we really believe that the more you do on your low code no code platform the the more benefits that you ultimately are going to see and so when we drill into it um and one of the reasons we believe that is when you move from manual processes to automated processes and you digitize those that's great but that's really only the first step where you can take that next is into optimization and when you look at the ability on a low and no code System since you've got a consistent user experience that you've got a consistent data model under the cover since you have consistent development tools you can also have consistent process optimization in the process mining capabilities that are on top of that you're able to look at all of the applications that have been built and you're able to understand how are they being used what are all of the different you know iterations and different types of data that are flowing through it where are the bottlenecks how can we improve those applications better yet what are what are the use cases where users are spanning multiple applications in a a process flow and how do we look at that process flow holistically across multiple applications and how do we improve that and so we're big Believers in low code no code and you know in looking at it not only from some of the benefits we talked you know were mentioned earlier and Trace mentioned hey greater benefits you know faster you know faster time to Value uh lower cost overall but also as you start to grow the number of applications and the and the numbers uh systems on your platform the more value you get out of tools like looking from a process optimization perspective as well and with that Mike I'll stop there and we if there's any questions we can address them or we can move on thank you great presentation um yeah I have a question you know and we briefly discussed this uh at the beginning on the security uh you know there's been a lot of talk you know going into late last year with the administration and securing the software supply chain you know what are you guys seeing at servicenow and is that a common question that comes up with your uh clients yeah I mean that's always you know that's always a question come up and when you look at supply chain I mean obviously that's something that we've invested in to make sure that you know we've secured our supply chain you know we try and meet all the federal compliance standards with fin Grant or you know DOD standards when it comes to that um but when it comes to building applications right especially you know in this environment one of the advantages uh you know again kind of Trace kind of touched on this when you look at it you know building no code or as much no code as possible it's a lot of drug it's a lot of drag and drop on the on the system so you're not having to leave that system and bring third-party code into your system to achieve those sorts of results and so you know the from a supply chain perspective it simplifies that conversation to some degree um but you know when you are more in a low code environment and you are bringing you know and maybe you are bringing in examples or whatever else uh you know being able to look at it you know from that perspective which is also you know being able to look at it from security perspective it is important which is also why we like to talk about this establishing guard rails in these governance models because as you have this and you're not just building low code Solutions in your production environment you're doing them in a Dev environment and you're promoting it it gives you the place to put in those checks and balances to make sure that not only is the system working the way it should but if you are bringing in third party you know uh libraries or whatever else it might be in a low code Type scenario that you've got the checks and the ability in there to validate that those are coming from the right sources before they make it into your production environment yeah I I thought I'd share with the audience here and you know get your input I I took a picture of it so on the poll results and you know for the poll question we started Chris um it was 28 now are using it this year 22 yes but they're just getting started so that's a little higher than last year and then 28 are currently evaluating it moving forward so my question is uh is there uh when when potential clients come to you do they have in mind what they'd like to incorporate a low code platform are they looking you know for an industry leader like servicenow to you know look at the applications they have and look at what some of their goals are and and you recommend hey this would be a great place to start can you elaborate on that yeah people really come from all different aspects right you know there's some you know organizations out there that have done a lot of research they have you know they've come to the table with a low code or no code development strategy for their agency and they're looking for you know best and breed tools to help them execute that strategy right you know and so you know they come with a certain you know mindset they come with a certain set of requirements that they're look that they're looking to fulfill um and then we have other you know customers that come to us more from uh aspirational perspective of hey you know this is how maybe we've traditionally done it or here are some applications that we have that we've struggled to modernize over the years is there a way that we can do it with a low code and no Code system and we're able to approach it more from a methodology or from a use case perspective um you know and then there's other organizations hey you know I met with a great customer last week uh who is a net development shop and they were looking at you know looking at it from you know this is how we build code this is this is how we do it and you know we're talking with them about you know adding in a low code and no Code system as another tool in their development toolbox right it's not going to be a replacement for pro code development you know or for traditional software development but it's an additional tool that they can have in the toolbox to use when appropriate to get the benefits from it um but you know to free them up to actually be able to address a larger backlog than they could have before you know spending their time in traditional software development methodologies and a lot of the hesitation that we see from customers and I'm curious you know for the folks to say hey we're evaluating we're not quite there yet a lot of the hesitation we see from customers is around this guard rails or around this governance aspect it's like hey I like it I like the idea I like the benefits I see how it can apply to my my organization but I just don't get the warm and fuzzy that I can do it at scale securely and safely and I'm not going to lose control right they're concerned about apps right this is why we like having these conversations because you know that's one of the number one I'll say roadblocks or at least conceptual roadblocks that we hear from customers that are kind of looking at it but are still kind of on the fence but you know the number of applications has been uh you know uh well you know it's a big thing in Enterprise architecture application rationalization you know I've been in many advisory committees where you know the agency Personnel are just saying they can't get their arms around all the applications they have um and you know this sounds like this could potentially be a solution uh moving forward uh thank you for uh participating today and thank you for that uh great presentation we're going to go to our poll question now thanks Chris thank you so uh this is your opportunity out in the audience where you have an opportunity schedule a follow-up meeting or appointment with the servicenow subject matter expert to continue the discussion on scaling low code without giving up oversight and control if you'd like to have someone contact you you could say yes or the other answer is not at this time again thank you Chris and servicenow for that thought leadership on that presentation