Jakob Freund is the CEO of Camunda, a software company innovating end-to-end process orchestration.
Many organizations choose to automate their processes in pursuit of a certain goal—whether that’s improving their internal efficiency, customer experience or other critical business outcomes. Over the past few years, we’ve seen the adoption of process automation tick upward. According to the 2023 State of Process Orchestration report, 91% of IT decision-makers plan to increase investment in process automation over the next 24 months.
Even as more automation technology is deployed in more places, many enterprises aren’t realizing the full value and potential of their efforts. A perfect storm of trends has led organizations down the path of automation, only to realize they haven’t hit their benchmarks around efficiency and business value. Let’s take a look at these trends and examine how organizations can improve their automation maturity to achieve their desired outcomes.
The Pandemic Accelerated Digital Transformation
It’s no surprise that the global economic shutdown led many businesses to get creative with their digital transformation efforts. As a result, many projects that may have taken more than five years happened within the span of 12 months or less. According to KPMG, CEOs believed their development progress had been accelerated by a matter of months or years in the following areas.
• 76% said digital operations and operating models.
• 70% said digital business models and revenue streams.
• 75% said a seamless digital customer experience.
• 66% said a new workforce model, with AI and automation augmenting human workers.
Even with these massive, short-term changes, many organizations were left with some tough decisions around their technology investments after lockdowns ended. This leads us to our next trend of exploring the resulting technical debt.
An Explosion Of Technology Investments
Software spending in this period outpaced the general inflation rate by 4x.
Specifically among enterprises with 1000+ employees, SaaS spending increased by 33% in just two years between 2020-2022. Many organizations were left with a mess of systems that didn’t necessarily interoperate or share data. The fallout for automated processes has been clear. Disjointed processes lead to poor customer experiences and inefficiency, which negates some of the reasons these technologies were purchased in the first place.
Artificial Intelligence Hit Prime-Time
In late 2022, the launch of ChatGPT captured the public’s interest in the business and consumer impact of AI. While large language models and AI have been around for years, the swift rise of generative AI unlocked a whole new conversation about how AI could be used to improve productivity, including automation outcomes.
In fact, McKinsey estimates that generative AI’s impact on productivity could add trillions of dollars in value to the global economy. Even though generative AI, alongside other types of AI, is highly valuable to automation, organizations need to take a step back from the hype. The goal should be to consider how AI fits in with their larger mix of software and automation investments so that all of these technologies work together seamlessly.
Inflation Caused Companies To Rethink Business Operations
Inflation and global macroeconomic conditions have caused organizations to reconsider their transformational debt. Nearly every area where IT investments haven’t performed as expected faced scrutiny and budget cuts. Many teams have been disappointed by the way their new systems and processes align with their business goals.
This is clear when you look at data around automation success rates. According to McKinsey, just 55% of larger organizations report success with automation. Keep in mind that may not mean they’ve made the wrong investments in automation technology. Often, organizations need to rethink how they approach automation holistically. Typically, discrete projects only go so far, while end-to-end automation remains the ultimate goal.
Addressing These Trends And Advancing Automation Maturity
When examining how these trends relate to automation, organizations need to think about the silos created by new software and digital transformation efforts. How do you get past these issues and advance automation maturity?
According to Deloitte, “92% of advanced automation adopters use end-to-end automation” as a part of their strategy now or plan to do so in the next three years. Technology can help set up and maintain complex end-to-end processes, helping teams work their existing people, systems and devices seamlessly into their automation. In addition, orchestrating processes gives organizations the agility they need to react to changes in their business operations or external compliance regulations and demands.
So, when organizations think about automation, they shouldn’t think of it in the context of a single project or process. Instead, set the organization up for success by involving both business and IT stakeholders in the planning process and aligning automation efforts directly with business goals. Orchestrate processes from end to end and measure the impact against these goals. Then, the organization can truly accelerate its automation maturity and reach desired outcomes.
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