IT teams may recognize this story:
We have web apps supporting business processes. They are aging, quirky, built on different technologies, hard to update, and brittle when processes or personnel change. Demand is high for more, but we are out of capacity. Remote staff means that coordinating work and workflows within teams is only going to become more important.
Yet many processes have similar needs: web forms & file uploads, parallel and serial approvals, rules-based automations, email nudging, dashboards, state management, structured data output, integrations with University and unit-level services, etc.
A generalized workflow solution is not a new idea, and we have spent time and money chasing this dream with various products. In recent years, home-grown Google AppScripts are a frequent choice for whipping together workflows, yet those solutions have almost all the drawbacks above. Nobody is satisfied.
But it's 2021, and — maybe — both the marketplace and our users have matured to where a workflow-focused product or SaaS can actually provide what we've all been wanting: solutions that solve problems — and — are sustainably supportable.
From AirTable to Zoho, the SaaS marketplace is flooded with products that claim to solve all your problems forever. We'll discuss the market, our solution requirements, fit-gap evaluations of selected tools, and possible paths forward.
Low-code or 'walk-up-and-use' solutions will play a role, but so will more advanced tools for IT. We suspect we are not alone on this.