Enhancing ServiceNow's Low-Code Capabilities with xtype

In recent years, the rise of low-code platforms has empowered businesses to accelerate digital transformation, enabling organizations to build applications and automate workflows with minimal coding effort. ServiceNow has embraced this trend by expanding its low-code and no-code offerings with GenAI. As they said at Knowledge 2024, the best programming language will be English. These capabilities allow non-developers to create powerful applications and processes without needing deep technical expertise, allowing businesses to innovate faster.

However, while low-code platforms offer incredible benefits in terms of speed and accessibility, they also introduce unique challenges. Managing a new input stream to your delivery pipeline across multiple ServiceNow instances has just become more complex as low-code applications proliferate the enterprise application portfolio. This is where xtype comes in. xtype's Instance Management Platform helps businesses enhance the value of ServiceNow's GenAI-empowered low-code capabilities by providing real-time multi-instance visibility, governance, and automation.

Streamlining Development Across Multiple Instances

Low-code platforms are designed to make development more accessible. As more users across various departments and functions leverage ServiceNow's low-code tools to build custom applications, the number of development instances may quickly grow. This growth, combined with developer-illiterate personnel producing apps, compounds existing backlogs and further misaligns sub-prod instances from production.

xtype's multi-instance management platform offers real-time, multi-instance visibility, governance, and automation to help teams manage this complexity. By providing a live view of all ServiceNow instances, xtype ensures that low-code applications are properly tracked across all instances. xtype will also ensure these same apps are deployed consistently against your policies, ensuring the proper scans, test automation, and approvals take place.

For example, developers and admins can instantly identify which updates have been pushed to production and by whom and see which are still in development or testing. With this level of insight, teams can avoid the common pitfalls associated with managing multiple instances, such as deploying an untested application or skipping established policies.

Automating Governance and Compliance

One of the challenges of low-code development is ensuring that all applications and processes adhere to the organization's governance and compliance standards. The risk of bypassing governance protocols is higher in a low-code environment, where development is democratized, and developer-illiterate users create solutions.

xtype addresses this challenge by offering enhanced governance that ensures every application follows the organization's policies, even in a low-code SLDC pattern. With xtype, governance is built into the development and deployment processes, meaning that all changes, updates, and applications are subject to the same approval workflows, security checks, and quality gates no matter if a ServiceNow developer, a partner developer, or a citizen developer authors these changes.

This level of governance is critical, especially for organizations in highly regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, and government. xtype ensures that all low-code applications meet regulatory requirements, providing audit trails and detailed logs of who made changes, when, and in what environment. This reduces non-compliance risk and helps organizations maintain security and control, even as low-code development increases.

Reducing Manual Effort and Boosting Developer Capacity

While low-code platforms are designed to make development accessible to a broader audience, managing the progressive deployment of low-code applications across multiple instances still requires significant effort and oversight. Developers and administrators often spend valuable time troubleshooting deployment errors, ensuring policy compliance, or planning production releases that must include low-code apps in the deployment payload. Just because low-code makes it easier to develop apps doesn't mean these apps get ungated access to production, nor does it imply these apps circumvent established controls.

xtype's automation capabilities help reduce, streamline, and govern this effort with deployment policies, automating quality checks, instance scans, and automated approval gates. xtype frees up ServiceNow developers and administrators to focus on higher-value work, increasing the team's overall innovation capacity.

Conclusion

Low-code platforms like ServiceNow enable organizations to innovate faster by making development more accessible to a broader range of users. However, as the complexity of managing multiple ServiceNow instances grows, organizations need a robust solution to ensure governance, speed, and safety.

xtype enhances ServiceNow's low-code capabilities by providing real-time multi-instance visibility, governance, and automation across all instances. By reducing manual effort, ensuring consistency across instances, and supporting faster deployments, xtype empowers organizations to scale their low-code development efforts while maintaining control and compliance. In today's fast-paced business environment, xtype is the key to unlocking the full potential of ServiceNow's low-code platform.