University IT teams are caught in an impossible position. Every department on campus needs workflow automation. Admissions wants a better application review system. Financial aid needs automated eligibility checks. The registrar wants digital transcript processing. Facilities is asking for work order management. HR needs faculty onboarding workflows. And the research office wants grant compliance tracking.
But IT cannot build all of it. Not with the team they have, not in the timeline departments expect, and not with traditional development approaches that take months per project.
This is the core tension driving universities toward low-code platforms: the demand for digital workflows is growing far faster than IT's ability to deliver them through conventional means.
The challenge is not a lack of ambition. The 2024 Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Survey found that 83 percent of higher education CIOs ranked improving stakeholder experience as their top priority for digital investments. But ambition without execution capacity creates frustration.
Most university IT departments are small relative to the scope of what they support. A mid-sized university with 15,000 students might have an IT team of 50 to 100 people, responsible for networking, security, help desk, system administration, and development. The development team within that group might be just five to ten people, all of whom are already maintaining existing systems.
When departments cannot get what they need from IT, they improvise. Across industries, only 12 percent of IT departments can keep up with new technology requests. The rest ends up as shadow IT, with departments adopting their own tools, building spreadsheet-based workarounds, and creating processes that no one else can see or govern.
Traditional software development requires specialized skills, significant time, and substantial budgets. Building a custom admissions workflow from scratch could take six months of developer time, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and still require ongoing maintenance.
Universities also face unique constraints that make traditional development even harder. Academic calendars create fixed deadlines that cannot slip. Regulatory requirements like FERPA add complexity. And the decentralized nature of university governance means that requirements change frequently as different stakeholders weigh in.
SaaS solutions can address some needs, but they introduce new problems. Each new SaaS tool creates another data silo. Faculty and staff end up switching between multiple disconnected systems. And IT loses visibility into where institutional data is flowing and how it is being used.
Low-code platforms address these challenges by dramatically lowering the barrier to building workflow applications. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 70 percent of new applications developed by organizations will use low-code or no-code technologies. The reasons are clear.
First, speed. Low-code platforms enable workflows to be built in days or weeks rather than months. A procurement approval workflow that would take a developer six weeks to code can be assembled visually in a few days, tested, and deployed.
Second, cost efficiency. Forrester research shows that using low-code platforms reduces the average cost of developing an application by 74 percent. For universities operating under budget pressure, this is a significant advantage.
Third, accessibility. Low-code platforms are designed so that non-developers, often called citizen developers, can build applications with minimal training. This means that an admissions coordinator or a research administrator can build their own workflow, under IT governance, without needing to write code.
Fourth, integration. The best low-code platforms connect with existing enterprise systems through APIs and prebuilt connectors. This means workflows built on the platform can pull data from the SIS, push updates to the ERP, and sync with the LMS without requiring custom integration work.
The highest-impact use cases for low-code in higher education are the ones where manual processes are causing the most visible pain. Admissions and enrollment workflows that involve multi-stage review and document collection. Faculty onboarding processes that require credential verification across multiple departments. Student service requests like financial aid applications, housing requests, and academic petitions. Procurement and purchase order approvals that currently run through email. Grant application workflows with complex compliance requirements.
Each of these processes has clear inputs, defined approval steps, compliance requirements, and measurable outcomes, making them ideal candidates for low-code automation.
Kissflow is the low-code platform designed for institution-wide workflow automation. It provides a visual drag-and-drop workflow builder that both IT teams and departmental staff can use, with robust governance controls that keep IT in charge of security, integrations, and platform standards.
Kissflow connects with existing SIS, LMS, ERP, and HRMS systems through prebuilt connectors and flexible APIs, so universities can automate workflows without replacing their core infrastructure. Its built-in analytics, approval routing, and audit trails meet the compliance requirements that higher education demands.
From admissions to research administration, Kissflow gives universities the speed, flexibility, and governance they need to automate campus operations without overwhelming IT.
Stop waiting in the IT queue for workflow solutions. Book a demo with Kissflow today.
Related Topics:
Digital Transformation in Higher Education: A CIO's Guide to Low-Code Automation
Citizen Development in Higher Education: Empowering Staff to Build Campus Solutions
How to Eliminate Data Silos in Higher Education with a Unified Automation Platform
ROI of Workflow Automation in Higher Education: Metrics That Matter for University Leaders
Building a Digital-First Student Experience: How Universities Can Automate Student-Facing Processes