BrainBlog for Zoho by Jason Bloomberg
Digital process automation (DPA) is a hot buzzword today—but does it hold water as an important product category, or more importantly, a significant business priority?
There’s no question the process automation market has become crowded. To understand the importance of DPA, we must answer two questions: what makes a process digital, and how does DPA stand out from the crowd?
Understanding digitalization
The word “digital” is a slippery term. It originally differentiated computing with ones and zeroes from now-obsolete analog computation techniques. Today, however, the meaning has expanded to the point that it threatens to lose its significance.
Digitization, however, still retains this original context, as it represents the conversion of analog information into digital.
Digitalization, in contrast, represents the transformation of processes and roles within the organization, leveraging technology to accomplish it.
DPA focuses on digitalization. It goes beyond simple automation—taking manual steps and instead leveraging technology to execute them—into the area of transformation. In other words, digitalization changes how people work.
DPA represents the natural evolution of the earlier practice of business process management (BPM). While earlier generations of BPM supported process analysts and their efforts to transform processes, BPM as a technology category generally fell short of the sort of end-to-end, cross-application automation necessary to support process automation.
DPA addresses this limitation, empowering people across the organization to digitalize various organizational business processes by creating applications that deliver on the promise of digitalization.
Developing a DPA strategy
CIOs, line of business executives, and other business process leaders in the organization should understand the role DPA technologies play in supporting the overall digitalization of processes across the enterprise.
The most important consideration in developing such a strategy is to understand that DPA focuses as much on process transformation as it does on automation.
Process transformation can lead to straightforward efficiency gains, as it both streamlines existing processes (reducing the number of steps) as well as consolidates processes (reducing the number of processes overall).
Where efficiency gains offer cost reductions, the more strategic benefit of process transformation is delivering better customer value and hence profitability (or achievement of mission priorities in public sector organizations).
To deliver this strategic customer value, it’s important for process transformations to deliver differentiated capabilities, rather than simply delivering on efficiencies that every organization can take advantage of.
Such differentiation, in turn, requires a significant level of customizability among the processes the process transformation team is digitalizing. This team must bring both creativity and a strategic business focus to the table, in order to design and automate processes that will meet this differentiated business need.
Read the entire BrainBlog here.
