There is so much more to automation than robotic process automation (RPA). Sorry, I don’t mean to start this off with a rant, but it seems that too many enterprise leaders have begun to conflate automation with RPA.
But as Jason Bloomberg points out in his recent white paper, Don’t Expect Robots to Transform Your Business, and as I covered recently in my article, Breaking Through the RPA Distortion Field and Choosing the Right Automation Tool for the Job, RPA is only a piece of the significantly larger automation puzzle.
While RPA has gained traction because it delivers a needed solution for enterprises that need to integrate API-less systems into their modern application stack, as Bloomberg points out, it also comes with a whole host of limitations and constraints. More importantly, however, allowing RPA to suck all the air out of the automation conversation limits and constrains your ability to see it from the perspective that will drive transformational value for your organization.
In short, if the goal is process transformation — or better yet, business transformation — then you’re going to need to start with transforming your view of automation.
That journey begins with two things: seeing automation from an end-to-end perspective and embracing low-code as your pathway to automation acceleration.
Why End-to-End is the Critical Automation Perspective
My biggest beef with the RPA-centric view of automation that seems to have taken hold is that it obscures automation’s greatest potential: to enable fundamental transformation.
The most significant inhibitor to most organizations’ growth is structural constraints. These constraints can come in many forms, but most are based on the limits of human interaction. The more complex any process, the more we must break it down and add in controls to ensure it doesn’t fall apart as it passes between people.
This fact is part of why RPA has been successful. By decomposing a complex business process and applying task-focused automation to several of these broken-down components (typically those done by humans), we can speed the overall process. But the underlying challenge —and the decomposed structure, technical debt, and now codified rigidity that it resulted in — remains.
However, new generations of automation tools are offering us a new way to look at these problems. With the ability to orchestrate multiple types of automation, you now can look at a business process from a complete end-to-end perspective — and, in so doing, you gain the opportunity to completely reimagine it.
When you bring this end-to-end perspective to your automation efforts, it becomes transformative — in part because it forces you to break through the process and functional silos that are often the greatest inhibitors to realizing exponential gains.
It’s analogous to what happened in the early days of physical automation. Initial efforts simply automated a specific task on an assembly line. Eventually, however, process experts realized that this new technology allowed them to completely reimagine and reinvent the production process itself.
An end-to-end view of automation allows you to do the same thing for virtually any knowledge-centric business process — as long as you’re willing to change your perspective.
How Low-code Changes the Automation Game
There is a reason, however, that most enterprises (and tech companies, for that matter) have shied away from this type of end-to-end approach to automation: it’s a landmine.
Across the entire end-to-end landscape of a business process, there are hundreds (sometimes thousands) of ways that the process may change — not to mention countless applications, databases and other systems involved. This potential for volatility is only increasing as various forms of disruption are driving increasingly high rates of change in organizations.
And all of that volatility can be a death knell for automation efforts as organizations have to code all that automation into the systems — and then recode it every time something changes.
This volatility and the automation instability it can bring is why so many organizations have instead stuck with the process deconstruction approaches of the past.
However, the evolution of low-code development approaches and their application to end-to-end automation efforts are changing this dynamic.
Low-code platforms allow organizations to rapidly and more easily adapt automations according to changing business needs and demands. Moreover, many of them enable organizations to pull non-technical team members into the process — increasing the speed of change and ensuring that those closest to the business processes are changing the automations supporting them.
Suddenly, incorporating low-code approaches significantly de-risks the end-to-end automation effort and makes it much more palatable to even the most risk-averse decision-maker.
The Intellyx Take: A Transformed Organization Starts with a Transformed Point of View
Applying automation on a task or piecemeal basis will unquestionably drive efficiency gains and cost savings. But no organization can compete and thrive in a disruption-driven market merely by reducing costs.
The only pathway to a sustainable future is continually transforming core business and operating models, while continually reducing costs, improving efficiency, and investing those savings in new growth opportunities.
To accomplish this feat of balance requires that you start with transforming your view of where and how you apply automation. That perspective must shift from a pure focus on task- or human-centric optimization to one in which business process transformation is the primary objective.
From this perspective, it becomes clear that you must take an end-to-end view of automation and that low-code approaches are the vehicle that makes this perspective workable.
And, you will realize that you must seek out modern automation tools, such as Workato, that have the scale and sophistication necessary to support this new paradigm.
Put together, it becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. By shifting your view of automation, you enable your organization to reimagine how it functions so that it can transform itself for the future. And in so doing, you will ensure that you never look at automation the same way again.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Workato is an Intellyx client. None of the other companies mentioned in this article are Intellyx clients. Intellyx retains full editorial control over the content of this paper. Image credit: Adi Goldstein.
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