Process Automation & Platform GovernanceSTRATEGY PAPERBy Dustin Grosse, Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer at Nintex

If the digital transformation imperative is based on the idea that companies must accelerate digitization to remain competitive, then the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the point. As the global economy slid into recession in April 2020 due to the pandemic, organizations in hard-hit sectors like hospitality, retail, and petroleum were forced to execute unprecedented operational scale downs, while enterprises in other industries face cuts on par with the Great Recession of 2008-2009.

Today’s enterprises must be prepared to do more with less.

Yet in critical ways, the pandemic only expedited transformative digital changes that were already well underway. Competitive enterprises were already working to level up remote work capabilities before the crisis. Similarly, industry-leading businesses have been strategizing for years to manage more agile IT governance. And finally, enterprises across sectors have been deploying digital process automation to eliminate cumbersome manual work.

In short, businesses were already preparing for a “new normal”. The pandemic just made this new normal a present reality - and introduced a special urgency for businesses to evolve their approach to governing and automating work.

How platform thinking will build enterprise resiliency in 2020 and beyond

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However, there are several cross-industry challenges that stand in the way of enterprises achieving the necessary level of digital resilience for 2020 and beyond. These hurdles include poor IT governance, a proliferation of manual processes, outmoded ways of developing software, and a lack of non-IT involvement in automation strategy. Companies with these shortcomings face serious risks in an uncertain economic climate.

In this paper we’ll explore how a process platform approach offers a way for businesses to address these challenges by thinking like Big Tech companies. As the strategy that underlies companies like Microsoft, Apple and Amazon, platform thinking is based on a modular, fail-fast approach to IT that empowers continuous innovation.

It’s time for enterprises beyond Big Tech to consider this approach.

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There are several key operational challenges enterprises across industries face that, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent recession, present more serious threats to business resiliency. These pain points include:

ABSENCE OF PROPER IT GOVERNANCE

LACK OF PROCESS AUTOMATION OVERSIGHT

Many companies suffer from “IT sprawl” and have not implemented comprehensive and effective corporate or IT governance practices to ensure sustained success. While most business leaders and employees accept the concept of good corporate and IT governance, many believe governance will prove rigid and restrictive. And so they avoid it: Deloitte found in a recent study that one-third of mid-market companies have no IT governance policy in place, instead managing IT ad hoc and without mechanisms to ensure consistency. When policies are in place, they frequently aren’t followed — mostly due to poor documentation and a lack of clear process ownership.

As a March 2019 McKinsey article reported, many IT departments continue to oversee processes that “remain highly manual and fragmented”. A huge obstacle to automating and streamlining these processes is a lack of communication — and therefore alignment — between IT and C-level leadership on key automation priorities. Without the proper oversight created by IT/C-level cooperation, enterprises can’t establish the prioritization roadmap needed for automation efforts to yield successful long-term results.

Challenges to enterprise resiliency

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OLD IT METHODS ILL-SUITED FOR CURRENT NEEDS

CHALLENGES OF EXISTING SOLUTIONS

A 2018 McKinsey & Company report found that while 80% of enterprises have attempted a digital transformation project, fewer than one-third have succeeded at improving company performance. While a 2019 Chaos Report from The Standish Group cites that 84% of technology projects “partially or completely fail”. One of the key reasons for this discrepancy is a fundamental mismatch between today’s business needs and the continued prevalence of old and inflexible IT methods.

The proliferation of SaaS solutions has solved some problems and created others. They enable rapid creation and adoption of new solutions, but these solutions are often narrow in scope and don’t always interoperate well. They can lead to application sprawl and undermine accountability, security, and effective IT administration.

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As enterprises adapt to the uncertain business climate introduced by the COVID-19 recession, they need a strategy for resiliency. That’s where a platform approach can provide a useful framework for reimagining IT governance and capturing new business value.

What is a process platform approach?

A process platform approach is based on the idea that, as a February 2019 McKinsey article stated, “IT is not a cumbersome estate ‘that gets in the way’, but an enabler and driver of continuous innovation and adaptation”.

As the McKinsey article points out, companies deploying a platform approach don’t implement one IT platform; they implement multiple platforms that connect easily with one another and can be centrally governed by a “Mission Control” unit, or what we think of as a Process Centre of Excellence (CoE) that spans and aligns both IT and business teams.

How a process platform approach will help

Under a process platform model, the IT team is flexible and modular, basing its organization around a series of separate platforms each with its own dedicated activities, team, and business goal. The individual management of these platforms creates a fail-fast atmosphere that enables rapid innovation and expedient idea-to-market capabilities. This approach has been the modus operandi of Big Tech for years, and it’s enabled companies like Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook to scale with peerless speed.

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Extending platform thinking beyond Big Tech

For most companies, a process platform approach hasn’t been possible until fairly recently. It has been enabled by several related technological developments: near-universal network connectivity; the availability of APIs that facilitate communication among functional solutions; rapid cloud deployment; flexible new programming languages; modular solution architectures instead of monolithic “spaghetti code”; and low/no-code visual software development tools.

Taken together, these developments foster the creation of functional teams that build solutions tailored to specific business goals. The Process CoE adopts standards to ensure interoperation among these solutions and provides a systematic way to resolve conflicts that may arise.

This modular, business-focused approach provides several key benefits, including:

Automation should — and can — be driven by these same fundamentals. It’s crucial to take a process platform approach with broad capabilities that provide value individually, but also function together seamlessly to automate entire processes, end to end. It’s equally crucial to adopt tools that support rapid development and deployment — in other words, low- and no-code solutions that allow IT experts and operations professionals alike to quickly create and deploy sophisticated solutions with intuitive drag-and-drop visual design environments.

Simplifying the alignment of technologies with business goals

Clarifying which applications are contributing to results, and which are not

Accelerating the pace of solution development and cloud enablement

Enabling easier identification and management of risk and compliance

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We’ve established what a process platform approach is and how it can help — but how can businesses get started? We have five key recommendations:

Putting a process platform approach into practice

1 Embrace systematic governance based on a Centre of Excellence model that ensures strong alignment between IT and the business.

Document your processes using collaborative process design tools that are accessible to all and create a forum for frontline employees to offer improvement suggestions.

Use the resulting process maps to decide what and how best to automate by identifying and optimizing painful processes rather than automating bad processes.

Take a platform approach to automation. Use platforms that support sophisticated end-to-end process digitization and let you choose the best form of automation for each step.

Ensure your automation tools provide visibility and mechanisms for tracking, reporting, and continuous optimization.

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Traditional, code-centric methods of business process management and automation deliver powerful solutions, but slowly. And large enterprises often have many thousands of processes that need to be automated to keep up with stakeholder demands.

To keep pace with competitors, they need process platform solutions that can rapidly automate hundreds or thousands of processes each year. There simply aren’t enough developers to accomplish all this work: Forrester estimates that US enterprises face a shortage of about 10 million developers over the next decade. To succeed, enterprises need powerful, low- and no-code solutions which business analysts and operations professionals can easily use to deliver process and automation improvements in days or weeks, not months and years.

But these tools must also be trusted and governed by IT — that is, they can’t introduce security risks or incompatibilities that threaten operational stability.

In short, the mismatch between today’s business needs and older IT methods drives home the need for a new partnership between IT and the business. In this new partnership, IT retains its central role in selecting a versatile process platform, maintaining security and defining the rules by which all departments operate, and also retains responsibility for enterprise-wide solution implementations. Business units, meanwhile, have autonomy to use the process platform to choose and implement solutions that meet functional needs as well as the security and compatibility standards that IT has defined. If conflicts arise, they can be escalated to an executive committee with the combination of technical and business expertise to arrive at effective answers.

Establishing a deeper partnership between IT and the business

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The takeawayToday’s enterprises face a “new normal”. While the need for next-level digital transformation existed before the pandemic, the COVID-19 crisis makes it critical. Without IT governance that helps rapidly deliver business strategy, technology that empowers frontline efficiency, and automation capabilities that offload human workloads, companies will see their business models challenged in unprecedented and potentially crippling ways.

But this uncertain business climate also presents an opportunity for businesses to reevaluate and refocus their strategies for aligning business and IT teams. If the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent recession have shifted long-term goals into tomorrow’s action items, then a process platform approach will empower organizations with the agility to move forward quickly. But adopting a process platform approach demands more than cross-team cooperation and resolve; it requires a shift in mindset away from IT as a “cumbersome estate” and toward IT as a true engine for continuous adaptation and strategic support across the entire enterprise.

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Nintex is the global standard for process management and automation. Today more than 8,000 public and private sector clients across 90 countries turn to the Nintex Platform to accelerate progress on their digital transformation journeys by quickly and easily managing, automating and optimizing business processes. Learn more by visiting www.nintex.com and experience how Nintex and its global partner network are shaping the future of Intelligent Process Automation (IPA).

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