Business automation best practices

Hi, I’m Sandy Kemsley of column2.com. I’m here for the Trisotech blog with the first in a series on best practices in business automation application development.

I want to set the stage for this series by talking today about what I call the automation imperative. We have a lot of cool technology now, that can be applied to automating business processes and decisions:

• We have process automation with Business Process Management (BPM) and case management)
• We have task automation with robotic process automation (RPA) as well as direct service API calls
• Decision management for automated decisions
• and then more intelligent broader Technologies such as AI and machine learning to make the processes and decisions even smarter

Now, all this technology makes more automation possible. These newer technologies let us automate things faster and better, and in fact automate things that were never possible before. But this has a downside. Yours isn’t the only organization with access to these technologies and everyone else is trying to automate their businesses using the same methods and the same technologies. That means whatever market you’re in it’s become more competitive. Since that rising tide of new technology is floating all the boats, not just yours. More nimble competitors will force you to automate in order to compete, or you’ll die in the marketplace. This is the automation imperative. It’s essential that you leverage automation in your business, or you just won’t be able to survive.

So easy right? Just plug in some of these new technologies and off you go? Sadly not that easy. A study done by Boston Consulting Group, showed that 70% of “digital transformation projects” don’t meet their targets. 70! 7-0, that’s a big number. Well okay, digital transformation is one of those loose terms that gets applied to pretty much any IT project these days, so let’s focus that down a little bit. Ernst & Young looked at RPA projects. Now, robotic process automation vendors claim that you’ll have your return on investment before they even get driven all the way out of your parking lot.

Now, what E&Y found though, is that 30 to 50 percent of initial RPA projects fail. So, if organizations aren’t succeeding with a technology that’s supposed to be the most risk-free way to improve your business through automation, then there might be some problems with the technology, but probably, someone is doing something wrong with how they’re implementing these projects as well. We have billions of dollars being spent on technology projects that fail. A lot of companies are failing at business automation. You don’t have to be one of them.

Now, this series of videos is focusing on best practices, that will help you to maximize your chances of success in application development for business automation. Or if you want to look at it in a more negative light, they will minimize your chances of failure.

I’m going to split the series into three parts:

• First, and this will be in the next video, best practices in strategic vision. And again, it’s a strategic vision around process automation, business automation, and the application development that goes along with it.
• Secondly, best practices in design. This is a really important thing when you’re doing a lot of the application development internally. This is going to occupy a couple of videos. I do a lot of technical design in my own works and there’s a lot to cover here.
• And then lastly, we’ll be looking at best practices in methodology. What are the ways in which you create and run these application development projects and how do things get rolled out into the into the business.

So we’re going to be covering quite a bit of territory and looking at a number of things.

Now, in each of these videos, I’m going to discuss a couple of things you should be doing. So those best practices and also some of the indicators that you might be failing. So some of these anti-patterns that you can be looking for as you were going through your projects to figure out if something’s going off the rails maybe before you have a serious failure. So stay tuned for the coming videos in this series.

That’s it for today. You can find more of my writing and videos on the Trisotech blog or on my own blog at column2.com. See you next time.