Information technology teams have transformed into critical and strategic business partners across their organizations. But with these new responsibilities come a new challenge: supply and demand. Like a traffic jam, IT teams consistently get stuck in the congestion of requests and backlogs from other teams, which can keep them from focusing on their own work.

No- and low-code automation has helped address some of these issues. However, historically IT has been the only driver of its implementation. When so many business functions require implementation support, and there aren’t enough technical skills or IT people to address everyone’s needs, many companies are stuck in stop-and-go business patterns. As the demand for automation increases, IT leaders should take a new approach to scaling it across their functions — one that’s composable, accessible, and user-driven.

Break down one-size-fits-all solutions

Getting work done never follows a single process across all use cases and needs. For example, a marketing function may need a complex workflow to direct internal creative requests to the right place based on the conditions of the inputs, while a sales rep needs a workflow to alert them of new leads.

Automation that’s broken into “building blocks” — such as the ability to drag and drop pieces of an app into a workflow — solves these needs without IT intervention. Any user can remix, reuse and swap these blocks “LEGO-style” to create unique experiences to meet their needs. More custom solutions like this can greatly benefit employee engagement, like this streaming service that reported their productivity increased by 40%.

Make automation a natural part of the way people work

If an automated workflow is created, but nobody knows about it, is it that useful? Many low-code products sit on a platform outside of where employees spend most of their working hours, which can be a massive barrier to entry for many users. Consider how cumbersome it might be for a new employee to log into a separate portal or website to access an onboarding workflow. Now consider how cumbersome it was for the IT team to build that workflow, socialize it and try to get people to use it.

Instead, engage teams right where they are. Making it easier for users to access, use, and distribute the automations most relevant to their work — where they’re already working — can do wonders to scale automation across business functions and free up valuable IT resources.

Move from an IT-driven model to an end-user-driven model

When people think of low-code automation, they often think of the “citizen developer” or a job more focused on processes. But the further you get from the nontechnical end user, the further you get from the actual problems that automation can solve. When you turn over more controls to end users, they can build their own processes and solutions for the problems they know best.

For example, say 100 new employees were just hired at your company, all of whom are starting at the same time. Onboarding that many people requires hours of weekly orientation meetings, onboarding documents and more.

If your systems and processes are even remotely slow or unorganized, then you have a severe traffic jam on your hands. Putting an easy-to-use and accessible automation tool directly into the hands of the human resources operations team, which knows exactly what it needs to do to streamline onboarding efforts, will save everyone time and energy and give users the confidence to address their own needs, no matter their technical experience.

Start empowering your team with automation

Scaling composable, accessible and user-driven automation can empower every employee to drive their own productivity and unlock exponential efficiency gains, while giving IT teams back time to focus on the work that matters to them. So fasten your seatbelts, check your mirrors, and prepare to cruise toward a much more effective way to work.

Rukmini Reddy is senior vice president of engineering for platform at Slack. She wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

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