Unqork Create 2022 | Accelerating Digital Transformation Within the Public Sector

Unqork’s Kim Thompson, VP for Public Sector Sales, and Graeme Thomson, Senior Enterprise Account Executive, welcomed Ross Ball, Dev Ops Lead at The Workforce Group, to discuss the ways government agencies are leveraging Codeless as a Service (CaaS) to advance their mission. 

The Workforce Group provides post-disaster assistance to state and local governments, as well as industrial staffing for the Gulf Coast region. Ball and his team turned to Unqork’s Codeless-as-as-Service (CaaS) platform to handle extremely complex transactions related to the disbursement of financial and other services in the wake of disasters.

“When you’re serving an entire state trying to recover from a hurricane and dispersing tens of millions of dollars to people that have lost their homes and livelihoods, you very quickly come up against the limitations of low code software,” Ball said. “It was my responsibility to make up for the shortcomings of the low-code software that we were relying on.” 

In particular, Ball and his team had difficulty integrating multiple different systems of record and disparate applications across dozens of different processes in time to serve a public in urgent need of help. 

In response, the Workforce Group adopted Unqork’s codeless platform. “Now, we’re at the point where we’re struggling to figure out what the next thing we want to port over to Unqork, because there are just so many options and everything could work better with Unqork,” said Ball. 

Eliminating tech debt and controlling costs

Not only does CaaS help solve complex problems, but it also avoids costly code management in the future. 

“Agencies are really struggling with low-code solutions,” said Kim Thompson. “You have folks doing a little bit of a declarative configuration, and then you have others who are actually writing code, so get this hybrid sort of Frankenstein that is actually a lot harder to maintain than traditional code.” 

Ball concurred, saying that by removing coding altogether, his organization is also avoiding tech debt. For example, his organization can quickly train even non-developers on Unqork, rather than having to source talent able to develop multiple languages. 

“If you’re a program manager and you decide you want to go into development, you can learn the basics and then go straight into Unqork Academy and start building an application,” he said. 

Unqork’s consumption-based pricing model is also a potential boon to agencies looking to control costs. “Subscription licensing can be punitive,” said Graeme Thomsen. “When people are not consuming an application or workflow with Unqork, there is no cost.” 

Note that Unqork is listed as FedRAMP Moderate in-process on the FedRAMP Marketplace. You can read more about CaaS for government agencies here.