In the digital
Today’s modern enterprise is under persistent threat of digital disruption. Many current industry leaders can fall from grace and perhaps fail unless they consistently reconsider how they conduct business. Digital transformation has emerged as strategic means to exploit innovative technologies that improve the customer experience, increase operational efficiency, craft new digital business models, and adapt when threatened by rivals and new market entrants.
Common to all attributes of digital business is the need to improve, transform and automate intelligent and adaptable business processes. The traditional vehicles to do so were business process management (BPM) suites, enterprise content management (ECM) software, and other specialized platforms designed to automate workflows, manage workgroups and document
All these tools crafted new applications, many of which included a flood of forms for data capture and other information-rich documents that required manual retrieval, review, updates
As these trends played out, BPM, ECM suites and other application development environments began to transform and converge into
DAPs include new efficiencies that allow business and IT teams to collaborate to rapidly automate business processes, improve developer productivity, and support enterprise DevOps strategies. However, they do little to resolve highly repetitive manual operations, and their abilities to automate many
Robotic process automation (RPA) crafts software robots (bots) that can automate repetitive manual activities within business processes, helping reduce errors, cost and cycle times. In some cases they use machine learning (ML) technology to interpret context and make relevant recommendations to users, thus easing the burden on customer service organizations while enabling scale. But doing so is not a simple matter. Proper analysis of manual operations is required; without this, RPA projects can just replace old inefficiencies with new ones, or worse – frustrate customers with bad recommendations.
A class of IT analytic tools has been under development for many years attempting to automate, with checkered success, the tasks needed to accurately visualize and understand how current business processes and manual tasks execute and perform. Process mining technology (PMT – also referred to as process discovery) has recently matured in response to the emergence of DAP and RPA platforms. It now makes practical the examination of process hierarchies, decisions, policies, rules
This Technology & Business Insight report on automation and digital business