MyLegal Technology Spotlight: Runtime Management

When selecting a Low Code/No Code platform, we often find customers enamored with the application composition or builder element of their LC/NC tool.  It is the eye candy which quickly captures their attention. This is easy to understand why, as historically, many of these legal departments have struggled for years to build applications through traditional methods like their IT team or third-party developers. Unfortunately, this focus often leads to the wrong technology selection. 

It is important to recognize that glaring differences between LC/NC platforms tend to show up after the solutions are deployed in production. Once an application has been rolled out, it is likely that an issue will arise with one of the users, and thus the administrator will need to triage the problem. Due to limitations with most platforms, this is when they quickly realize there isn’t much they can do.  

Most platforms don’t allow a rollback if there is a simple input error while building an app. Additionally, most platforms don’t allow skipping steps if the process activities are not applicable to that particular running instance. Most of the time, the user is told they must start their request over from the beginning.  

What’s worse, if the application is the problem and if it was built using platform-compiled code, a brand-new development cycle must be started to correct what isn’t quite right with the application. 

What you will come to understand quickly is that most platforms only support a small number of process patterns. The examples mentioned above are just a few. It is important to understand that the less process patterns the platform supports, the more code is required to achieve ideal functionality, and the more difficult the app is to support. 

What the ideal platform looks like – A true test of platform capability is, can it run multiple versions of the same application without conflict? An example of how critical this is: the application has been deployed, and the department is currently running five hundred instances. You decide to roll out an enhancement. What happens to the running instances when the new version is deployed? Most workflow app builders do not have a solution to address this. They likely don’t have a mechanism for having the two versions peacefully coexist, and rarely do they have the capabilities to migrate the running in-flight instances to the new version. 

Impact 

The department can’t be burdened by maintaining the solutions it deploys, there will be user errors. When that occurs, the platform needs to be supported efficiently, using a more sophisticated set of runtime management capabilities. The difference in platform selection will impact support costs and user satisfaction.  

In our experience, the number of applications that are deployed on a platform levels off after the first few, at which point the users are negatively impacted, and/or the applications are too burdensome to manage. 

In summary, if you are conducting platform reviews of LC/NC solutions, be sure to thoroughly vet them to understand if they have the runtime management capabilities needed to manage hundreds of process instances which result at scale once the application is deployed.  

Learn how robust the MyLegal automation platform runtime management capabilities are by booking a demo here

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