IT leaders today face a common challenge: their teams are stretched thin, more so than ever before, often spending valuable time on tasks and activities that could easily be automated.
But many organizations are stuck with complex and expensive legacy IT Service Management (ITSM) platforms that require deep coding and scripting to manage services and automate, creating a heavy administrative burden.
As organizations look at refreshing their ITSM platforms, the choice often boils down to maintaining the status quo of dev-heavy complexity or moving toward a no-code, lower-overhead solution that offers tremendous power without unnecessary maintenance.
The experiences of major organizations moving away from overly complex tools reveal clear benefits in cost, agility, and empowerment that make no-code ITSM the crucial accelerator for genuine digital transformation.
The High Cost of Complexity and Delay
When an ITSM tool is heavily dependent on code and scripting, the impact on organizational agility is immediate and profound.
In previous environments, institutions often required a dedicated group of developers supporting the tool. The necessity of relying on these specialized resources meant that the lead time for any changes—even simple updates to request forms—was extremely long.
As Rhain Copeland, IT Operations Director at the University of Michigan, noted, before switching to a no-code solution, updating a form was a “weeks-long, if not months-long effort”, leading to “incredible frustration” for everyone involved.
“Now [using TeamDynamix], we can make those same changes a thousand times quicker,” Copeland said.
Beyond the frustrating delays, complex tools simply cost more, often providing poor value for the dollar. For both the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota, moving to TeamDynamix’s no-code ITSM platform from ServiceNow resulted in immediate savings because the cost of TeamDynamix was less expensive.
“We absolutely had immediate savings,” Susan McKinnell, service owner or user experience support at the University of Minnesota, said.
Moving off of legacy systems not only cuts tool costs but also frees up staff who were previously consumed by maintaining the platform. In fact, the University of Minnesota was able to reinvest savings to expand its workforce.
“The cost for [TeamDynamix] was less expensive, and not having licensing fees has allowed us to expand,” McKinnell explained. “We’ve pretty much doubled the number of technicians we have, which has really helped with a university initiative to centralize various services. We are now running HR and Finance operations out of TeamDynamix – this is something that would not have been possible with the previous system.”
Agility and Empowerment: The No-Code Difference
The transition to a no-code platform fundamentally alters how IT operates and how quickly the business can respond to change.
For Copeland and the University of Michigan, IT has been able to train up other departments on TeamDynamix and empower them to set up their own applications.
“We love the idea of distributed administration,” she said. “So these teams that we previously had to do all this development for can now be trained up to use [TeamDynamix] so they can develop and run their own applications. That was a great relief and gave my team more bandwidth to be able to train other groups that were interested in using the platform.”
According to Copeland, there are now more than 50 groups across campus with their own applications. And because the university has a site license for the product, they are able to offer the tool to anyone at the university at no additional cost.
“With [ServiceNow] we had to be rather stingy with our licenses,” she said. “We’ve been able to flip that now, and I think, overall, it has really helped our service delivery.”
Speed and Adaptability
No-code ITSM solutions, like TeamDynamix, allow organizations to deploy faster and be more agile. Changes that once took months can now be delivered as same-day service in most cases.
At Faith Regional Health Services, they were relying on a third-party vendor to administer IT support, Emily Krohn, director of IT, explained.
“It made the process of making changes a bit more difficult,” she said. “They had to do a lot of development work in order to do any changes or enhancements for us – this took a lot of time and a lot of back and forth between our team and the vendor.”
And when your team is strapped for resources, Krohn explained, those delays piled up.
By switching to a no-code platform, Faith Regional Health Services was able to bring ITSM in-house and build out automations that helped save time and resources, while also making the IT team more agile.
This agility is essential because business processes are constantly changing, and having a no-code platform allows organizations to quickly spin up new workflows and automations without delay.
“One of our best automations was developed by one of our leaders in IT who doesn’t have a technical background, but more of a clinical background,” Krohn said. “The ability to have people jump right in and make immediate process improvements has been tremendous for our organization and our IT department.”
Democratized Administration
Perhaps the most significant benefit is the shift from dependence on developers to empowerment for departments. The low-code/no-code environment eliminates the need for team members to have a coding background.
With a no-code ITSM platform like TeamDynamix, you can enjoy:
- Distributed Control: Organizations that adopt this model embrace “distributed administration,” allowing internal groups to be trained to do their own development and manage their own applications. At the University of Michigan, teams previously requiring central development support quickly learned how to administer their own applications.
- Non-Technical Value: Non-IT staff, such as business analysts (BAs) in HR and finance, or even leaders with clinical backgrounds, are able to jump right in and make immediate process improvements. As Krohn mentioned, one of best automations in use by Faith Regional Health Services was built by a leader with a more clinical background versus a technical one.
Driving True Digital Transformation via ESM
No-code ITSM makes Enterprise Service Management (ESM) – expanding service management beyond IT to areas like HR, finance, facilities, and legal – a reality rather than just a goal.
Historically, while most IT leaders want to embrace ESM, they often lack the ability to support, configure, and maintain those configurations across multiple departments. The no-code component is a big part of solving this problem.
At the University of Michigan, the ease of use allowed them to rapidly expand, integrating over 50 groups on campus with their own applications. This expansion simplifies the customer experience, as all tickets are visible in one portal, regardless of whether they are with HR, IT, or another school.
The simplicity also enabled the University of Minnesota to centralize various HR and finance services, running an HR and finance operations center out of the system—an opportunity that “would not have been possible” otherwise, McKinnell said. Non-IT groups, like finance and HR BAs, are now doing their own development, creating dynamic forms and helping to lighten the configuration burden on the central IT team.
Automation: Eliminating Mundane Toil
No-code ITSM tools, especially when combined with an integration/automation layer, directly address the staggering amount of time staff waste on repetitive tasks. A study commissioned by TeamDynamix found that the vast majority (58%) of team members spend 2 to 3 months a year on tasks that could be automated.
By using a no-code approach to service management and automation, organizations can target quick wins that generate trust and momentum.
Key areas of automation include:
- Provisioning (Onboarding/Offboarding): This is commonly a first target for automation, driven by the convenience of onboarding and the necessity of security and compliance in offboarding.
- Complex Asset Management: Automation is critical for handling tasks like software asset management (SAM). Organizations can set up asset applications to track licenses, automatically assigning a license key upon request, and then regaining that asset when the user leaves the organization. This process saves dollars by ensuring licenses are reused and significantly reduces the risk associated with unretrieved hardware.
- HR Workflows: Automation can eliminate manual processes, such as the annual review process. Using iPass forms, the University of Michigan automated its annual review process, pulling in employee data (like supervisor and ID) and automatically routing the review comments through the approval chain.
By moving people out of the “day-to-day grind” of repetitive work, no-code automation allows teams to focus on activities that add more strategic value, leading to greater job satisfaction.
“People are better suited to doing things that use their brains; they are more satisfied with their job,” McKinnell said. “So freeing up people to be able to do that kind of work is critical.”
Future-Proofing with Integration and AI
The long-term value of a no-code approach lies in its ability to quickly integrate with new technologies, particularly Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The real power of AI emerges when it is combined with integration and automation, allowing AI to gather information from multiple systems and actually take action in another system to fulfill a request. Integration is the enabling force for AI going forward.
By adopting a flexible, low-overhead platform like TeamDynamix, organizations are ready to integrate capabilities like conversational AI (virtual service agents) with automation workflows – a key functionality of TeamDynamix AI ITSM. For instance, a virtual service agent can automatically perform a password reset by integrating with the organization’s Azure ID account, providing the user with an instant link.
Choosing a no-code/low-code platform today ensures that, as AI evolves, your team will already be tooled and up to speed on the integration and automation capabilities required to take advantage of this evolution.
A highly complex, dev-heavy ITSM tool can appeal to many highly mature IT teams, but requires a full team to administer and days or weeks of manual effort just to make a single change.
With a no-code ITSM platform like TeamDynamix, you canenable immediate changes and expansions without requiring engineers to build out new processes.
Want to hear more from the University of Minnesota, Faith Regional Health Services, and the University of Michigan? Check out the webinar below: