Survey: IT and Engineering Teams Spend 40% Of Their Time Building and Maintaining Internal Tools and Workflows, Distracting From Building Products That Actually Drive Business Revenue

Internal Unveils All-in-One Platform to Streamline Internal Tool Development and Enable Teams to Focus on Building Products 

Internal, the internal tools development platform, announced the results of a third-party survey of 500 US-based IT and engineering leaders regarding their views on internal tools and workflow development. The company also launched their all-in-one platform for internal tools, a comprehensive solution for custom app development, task management, and workflow automation on top of databases and APIs.

The survey findings reveal that IT and Engineering teams build an average of 6.7 internal applications per year in-house or invest in 7.7 separate app building platforms to support their internal tooling needs, with 40% of time being spent building and maintaining these internal tools and workflows. In addition, 76% said that while this work is necessary, it is a distraction from building products that actually drive business revenue.

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When it comes to internal tools, companies want an all-in-one solution that provides flexibility and customization for cross-company collaboration.

• 94% of IT and Engineering leaders want a more collaborative platform that would enable technical and non-technical users to build internal tools/workflows faster together
• 82% of IT and Engineering leaders say that a lack of true flexibility and customization within internal tool/workflow building software is a top driver of time spent on building and managing internal tools and workflows
• 91% of IT and Engineering leaders say that an internal tool/workflow platform that encompasses app building, workflow acceleration, and workflow automation would save their development teams time

“Teams are spending way too much time developing and maintaining internal tools. Imagine what they can do by freeing up 40% of their time,” said Bob Remeika, Co-founder and CTO of Internal. “They need a more comprehensive solution that encompasses app building, workflow automation, and tasks – one that’s flexible enough for technical and non-technical teams to contribute.”

The New All-in-One Platform

With many teams juggling multiple systems and in-house development projects to meet their internal tooling needs, Internal has launched its new all-in-one platform to help teams streamline the development of internal tools and drastically reduce developer time spent. This, in return, allows IT and Engineering leaders to focus developer time on products that drive revenue and increase capacity.

In addition to empowering teams to build bespoke internal applications, workflows, tasks, and automations, the next generation platform marries an easy-to-use interface with advanced customization capabilities – making it the only platform where technical and non-technical teams can collaborate to build otherwise highly technical internal tools on top of databases and APIs.

Companies across various industries, including technology startups, manufacturing and distribution, and healthcare, are using Internal to solve these challenges.

“Developers are really expensive and developers solve important business problems. But, I didn’t want our developers spending time on building Internal tools – I need them focused on building the product,” said Ethan Kellough, Co-Founder and Chief Product Technology Officer, Highlight. “That’s why no-code tools, like Internal, are great because we don’t have to throw a bunch of money at reinventing a wheel that’s been invented 1,000 times before.”

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Key features of the new all-in-one platform include:

• Design and build apps in Spaces: Spaces is an app builder with a drag-and-drop interface to quickly build custom applications on top of any database and API. The Internal platform provides a wide range of components to build and customize a UI for internal tools without requiring any code.
• Improve efficiencies in task management with Queues: Queues enables teams to customize every detail of each step and action, and have thorough oversight into the status of every task and workflow distribution.
• Customize automated workflows with Automations: Teams can create multi-step automations, schedule recurring jobs, and chain together database queries, API calls, and custom logic.
• Manage development changes with Source Control Management (SCM) integration: Engineering teams can manage and control changes to Internal apps using source control management providers like GitHub to customize development processes across multiple environments.
• Enterprise-grade security: The platform, which is SOC 2 compliant, includes field level permissions, audit logs, SSO, and more to bring enterprise-level security to internal tools. Internal also offers a self-hosted version.

“With Internal I’m able to create custom business apps that pull in data from different sources five times faster than existing technology,” said Jesse Robbins, Director of IT, Peerless Beverage Co. “And the best part is that I don’t need to know a lot of code to do it.”