Hey there! I’m Khoi Pham, and I lead the IT team at Coda. Recently, I’ve observed that my friends and colleagues in IT share a misconception.
When I tell them I work at Coda, I often hear: “Some of our teams use Coda, but I don’t use it. It’s not for IT, so I don’t know much about it.” But once they start using Coda, they sound like the CIO at one of our enterprise customers:
Every time someone wants to bring on a new software vendor, our procurement team asks, “Could this be done in Coda instead?”
—Enterprise CIO, Fintech industry
The true beauty of Coda is that it supports every team, in almost every use case. Alongside our Head of Engineering, Oliver Heckmann, I’ve helped many customer IT teams get started in Coda. And I wanted to share my thoughts on why Coda is perfect for IT teams.
With Coda, IT teams transform from reactive, service teams to proactive, business units within their organization.
This guide will go into more detail about how IT teams can make this progression, but to set expectations, the purpose of this guide is two-fold:
Share how I’ve seen IT teams elevate their function by using Coda,
Show how Coda can help you consolidate tools across your org, saving you money.
Top 3 reasons IT teams use Coda.
Without further ado, here are the top three reasons I’ve found IT teams use Coda.
1. Be a better business partner.
For context, we’re at 650 SaaS tools. We're running out of applications to even sign up for. There's so much need for us to be able to like pull all this into one place.
It will make my life much easier. So I’m totally sold for that.
— Head of IT, Enterprise company
One insight that I hear again and again from IT teams and other functions running on Coda is that we offer a feeling of organization and alignment at work.
Most teams start using Coda because they need a single source of truth. They recognize that their work is spread across dozens of apps, and Coda is able to consolidate everything into one place.
For IT teams, being organized is the difference between acting as a service organization and being a proactive business unit. Instead of reacting to support tickets and vendor renewals, you can focus your time on your organization’s highest priorities.
Organization is a first order benefit of Coda, with increased productivity for you and your business partners. The first step in turning IT into a proactive business unit is having the tools to move faster.
The more efficient you are, the faster the teams around you can move. In
Our entire team adopted Coda, and the cost savings were huge.
Since we replaced much of our tool stack with Coda, we’ve been able to successfully grow our team to 65 people and raise a Series A round.
—Quang Hoang, CEO at Plato
Your tools can accelerate your work or they can force you to be reactive.
What separates Coda from other apps is that you can build anything quickly, without code: support ticketing apps, IT knowledge management hubs, vendor renewal apps, and more.
When your tool of choice is a flexible, customizable canvas, you aren’t wasting time trying to fit everything into a spreadsheet, Google doc, or project tracker. You can take the best of each tool and create your ideal workflow—and the same is true for your business partners.
Because Coda is what you make of it, you can completely replace many of the applications you’re paying for today with Coda, saving you time, money, and overhead costs.
Again, this doesn’t solely apply to IT teams. Every function in your org can get more done by consolidating their tools to one doc that can support every job. See what Coda can do—and help you replace—by clicking the card below.
Last but not least, from my personal experience, when I’m able to take repetitive, “run the business” tasks off of my plate, I’m suddenly freed up to do the things that support my organization most.
When demo-ing my workflows for my friends in IT, what turns them from skeptics to proponents is automations.
By freeing up your IT team from repetitive tasks, you can take your process automations into partner teams and move IT from being a service organization into being a consultive business partner adding value to company transformation.
Coda’s tables and Packs let you centralize your data into one place. And then you can use native, no-code automations to take actions when something changes.
For instance, my go-to example is sharing out Coda-all Zoom recordings each Friday afternoon. Instead of manually collecting the links, putting them in a table, and sending an email or Slack, I use the Zoom Pack to retrieve each recording and add the link to my Coda-all table. Once those are added, the Slack Pack automatically sends out the link to our Coda-all Slack channel so anyone can take a look.
This is just one example, but if you don’t use Zoom, don’t worry. You can build custom integrations in hours, not weeks thanks to the Pack Studio. I’ll cover automations and more in the