Automation tools can empower employees to reimagine their business processes.
This simple—yet powerful—idea has, unfortunately, often been ignored.
Instead, automation tools have been used to streamline basic tasks, such as copying and pasting data between applications and sending emails to colleagues. And while these task automations come with benefits, like time savings and accuracy improvements, they fail to impact the broader workflows they’re part of.
So how has this task-based approach to automation gained widespread adoption? Why is it problematic? And what can your organization do to put employees and customers at the center of your automation strategy?
Jason Bloomberg, the Founder and President of Intellyx, a digital transformation analyst firm, shares his answers in the ebook, “Don’t Expect Robots to Transform Your Business.”
You can read on to find out what he shared.
Want to learn more?
Read Bloomberg’s full ebook to better understand why organizations need to lean on enterprise automation to drive true business transformation.
A focus on tools over business processes
A proliferation of automation tools have hit the market over the past few decades: business process management (BPM) software, intelligent business process management suites (iBPMS), digital process automation (DPA), robotic process automation (RPA), etc.
Given this wide-swath of tools, organizations have been tempted to switch from one to the next. However, each merely attempts to make existing processes run more efficiently, while ignoring the very nature of the process itself.
As a result, processes are kept stale, detrimental ones continue to hurt the business, and employees remain dissatisfied with the way things are run.
Related: Where robotic process automation fails
The limitations of RPA software
Bloomberg pointed out that RPA software, a popular automation solution today, is not only task-oriented but also comes with other drawbacks.
- Brittleness: any changes to your business processes, data formats, or application interfaces can cause the bots to break, which requires extensive rework from your team, either in the form of reconfiguring your bots or rebuilding them
- Complexity: the majority of RPA software solutions, even those claiming to be low-code, involve extensive coding from your developers in order for the bots to behave as needed; this takes your most valuable technical resources away from the work they’re best suited to perform, hurting both your business and your customers in the long run
- Technical debt: while a bot’s ability to work in legacy systems that lack an API is valuable, it does little to address the technical debt from these systems; in fact, according to Bloomberg, this ability “kicks the technical debt can down the road”
Related: How to integrate legacy systems with your modern applications
How Workato addresses these drawbacks
Bloomberg cited several Workato features that, taken together, address the drawbacks he mentioned.
- Business process-centric: our platform focuses on helping users automate processes end-to-end, across use cases
- Resilience: by building automations with APIs as the foundation—versus applications’ UIs—, Workato’s connections and automations are significantly more durable
- Low-code/no-code: allowing citizen integrators to build automations with Workato’s low-code UX can free up your developers’ time, while allowing your citizen integrators a chance to tap into their business expertise and creativity when building automations
- Working with RPA: Using Workato, you can leverage RPA as part of an end-to-end automation, all but ensuring you get the most from both technologies. Need an example? Here’s how the two can work together to automate order processing
