Enterprises have been on a mission to automate business processes and functions for decades. This drive has been the foundation of almost everything we know about enterprise IT.
And from the very beginning, these automation efforts have almost exclusively been a siloed affair.
When the focus was solely on optimization and efficiency, this siloed approach worked well enough. After all, enterprise leaders had a wealth of opportunity for improvement within their respective silos.
As the focus has shifted to a broader need for digital transformation, however, this siloed approach has begun to come apart at the seams.
The need to deliver a differentiated customer experience and, as a result, execute transformation in a cross-functional manner throughout the organization has increased the demand for automation.
Ironically, however, as this demand has skyrocketed it has led organizations to adopt new technologies and approaches, such as robotic process automation (RPA) and digital process automation (DPA), as well as rekindle and revisit more established practices such as business process management (BPM) and enterprise content management (ECM).
But applying all of these distinct approaches — often in their own silos — may be making the situation worse.
To find a way forward, organizations need to step back and take an integrated and holistic approach to digital automation. As they do, they will need to put a relatively new class of tools on their radar: the digital automation platform.
At the Intersection of TLA Purgatory
The challenge, of course, is that enterprise leaders already have enough buzzwords and dreaded three-letter acronyms (TLAs) to last a lifetime.
Do we really need another?
While there is unquestionably a degree of marketeering going on, there’s also a legitimate need to reimagine the automation platform of the future.
RPA and DPA, not to mention BPM and ECM before them, evolved because they met specific enterprise needs. Particularly as organizations recognized that they needed to transform the way they functioned, they turned to these technologies to meet specific automation requirements.
Over time, these needs have been converging as organizations recognize that they must bring all of these efforts together to meet continually changing customer demands and market expectations — the essence of digital transformation.
These trends are continuing at a breakneck pace.
As the application of various artificial intelligence (AI) based technologies mature, and as organizations move toward more cloud-native architectures, the situation only becomes more complicated.
This increasing complexity, when combined with an escalating rate of change, distinct technologies, and siloed automation efforts, has become a recipe for failure as organizations attempt to execute their digital transformation initiatives.
The Digital Automation Platform as a Transformational Engine
The challenge with real digital transformation is that it requires an unrelenting focus on the customer experience and cross-functional business transformation.
In the context of automation, this holistic, customer-focused need requires a solution that is greater than the sum of its parts.
It’s not enough to simply have a collection of disparate automation tools at your disposal. You must have a way to integrate and operate them as a holistic whole. This gap is what digital automation platforms seek to fill.
While still in their early stages, these platforms typically combine the attributes of traditional BPM and ECM systems, and then incorporate qualities usually found in more modern RPA and DPA solutions. Increasingly, they are also incorporating AI capabilities and are built upon modern, cloud-native architectures.
On top of all of this, they generally employ low-code development capabilities, which enable business users to take on much of the automation creation and deployment function, while ensuring that the resulting applications hang together as an integrated whole.
The result is an automation platform that democratizes development activities, pushing them deep into the organization, and closer to the point of customer or employee engagement. Moreover, they give non-technical users simplified and controlled access to advanced AI-powered capabilities.
In many cases, this new generation of digital automation platforms is being born out of existing solutions that trace their roots back to one or more of the converging technologies. While this often means that you will see greatly varying capabilities that belie the platform’s technology roots, it is the forward progress towards this ideal that is most important as you select your partners.
The Intellyx Take: Adaptability in an Uncertain World
We are in the midst of a fundamental shift in how organizations function. The rules are changing, and the only thing that enterprise leaders can be sure of is that nothing is certain.
This uncertainty makes organizational adaptability an essential enterprise capability.
The importance of that adaptability may be no more apparent than within the enterprise technology stack. In fact, it is often the rigidity and siloed nature of past automation efforts that play a significant role in the failure of today’s digital transformation efforts — or at least the unwillingness of organizations to undertake them in earnest.
The flexibility and holistic nature of digital automation platforms should make them an essential part of your technology strategy as you select the core components of your architecture and execute your digital transformation initiatives. (To dig more deeply into this topic, download our recent report, Empowering Digital Transformation with a Digital Automation Platform.)
As the need to automate increases, and the broad-based demands of digital transformation accelerate, companies are increasingly turning to the players in the digital automation platform space, such as Newgen. In them, they are finding willing partners who are focused on helping them break through silos and deliver the adaptability they need to create a competitive advantage in a dynamic and continuously changing world.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. At the time of this writing, Newgen is an Intellyx client. Intellyx retains full editorial control over the content of this paper.
