Top Trends in BPM & Process Automation in 2023 and the Way Beyond

Business Process Management (BPM) suites support end-to-end process improvement life cycle right from designing to improving the business processes, through the provision of cutting-edge application infrastructures. This ensures a more cohesive, in-sync, model driven and collaborative approach between IT professionals and the business professionals. On the other hand, business process automation (BPA) involves automating the critical and complex business functions and processes tailored explicitly for the specific organisational needs, by embedding artificial intelligence (AI) and making use of advanced technologies including machine learning (ML), robotic process automation (RPA), natural language processing (NLP), and predictive analytics. With the advent of – significant and path breaking digital transformation initiatives globally, COVID-19 and its ramifications, the post pandemic scenario and increased global competition – there have been interesting developments in the BPM & Process Automation space. Let’s find out more about where the market is heading, and the highlighting and direction defining trends for the year 2023 and beyond.

• Increasing focus on customer and employee experience, and systems of engagement

1. Adoption of BPM for effective dynamic monitoring of front-end processes as against the back-end systems would be the norm in the coming times, as organisations increasingly view the employee and customer experience as a significant competitive differentiator. Additionally, organisations would be focussing more on providing a ‘holistic & responsible automation’ which could be attached to employees roles – making them less repetitive in terms of task management, aiding reduced burden of overall workload, and eradicating time consuming and broken processes.
2. Adoption of Digital Desktop Assistants (DAA) would assist in relieving employees of the short comings of fragmented technology such that this new automation platform would act as a bridge between the existing business applications and the employees. Thus, these DAAs or ‘robots for one and all’ would add an additional layer of automation on the existing applications, assisting creation of fully automated value chains, and buffering the workflows against unforeseen events including sudden labour shortage.

• Rapid increase in the adoption of Business Process As A Service (BPaaS)

1. BPaaS is normally offered on a consumption-based or subscription pricing model and assists in drastically bringing down the total cost of ownership. It is generally referred to as a systematic delivery of end-to-end business process or outsourced services from the cloud and offers a variety of outsourcing models including a build-operate-transfer model and a managed captive model, amongst others. Organisations are implementing BPaaS to increasingly work towards their key goals including scaling of operations, precise adherence to compliance and controls, cost optimisation, and such others. Making use of a combination of human expertise and cloud-based computing, the multi-tenant BPaaS solutions enable organisations to deliver a cohesive digital experience, enhanced customer experience and greater efficiency without large investments.
2. The use of BPaaS in the coming times would increase exponentially since the addition of newer business processes or workflows wouldn’t require additional programming, enabling experimentation. BPaaS is essentially a process led model combining the benefits of IaaS, SaaS and the BPO models. It proves especially effective in reducing friction between multiple components of the organisational ecosystem, and makes use of data analytics, AI, ML, human expertise and process intelligence for seamless operations. BPaaS has opened up significant opportunities in various sectors including banking, governance, healthcare and start-ups which partner with the BPaaS providers making the businesses more scalable and agile.

• Process Excellence is driving Agile Businesses helping them scale exponentially.

1. Actual implementation capabilities of organisations will be exceedingly complementing the traditional control-oriented capabilities of the BPM Team. This will be a paradigm and significantly upgraded shift from BPM’s previous focus points which have been traditionally towards core documentation of business processes (which would still continue to be an important factor in the digital transformation of companies).
2. These crucial implementation capabilities particularly relating to usage of robotic process automation, process mining, and business process automation amongst other technologies, enables the agile BPM teams to efficiently deliver and implement key improvement areas and changes within the business process unit. It does so in a stipulated time frame in a real-time fashion (without the need to pause/ hold the project), exponentially increasing the impact of BPM across the business cycle. The resultant process optimisation would also enable businesses to efficiently adapt to newer conditions, turning around and making wise use of critical insights, causing business improvements and drastically reducing the time to market.
3. BPM would be serving as an end-to-end value creator towards suppliers, employees and customers by linking the resultant experience management with the operational process execution. This encourages decision makers to understand the dynamics of customer interactions with the business processes, enhancing their effectivity along with provision of a smoother customer experience.

• Significant growth in the investment in Citizen Development and demand for low-code/no-code technologies

1. No-code integration primarily offers a barrier less experience empowering businesses for building, manipulating and employing data-driven applications for performing the required work. Thus, by shifting to a code-less BPA platform (a method enabling businesses to design solutions without any actual knowledge of programming languages of coding), non-technical end-users could successfully create automated workflows and customised business applications.
2. Such an approach would directly result in improved agility across and within the organisation since the expense of waiting for the professional developers for building an application would be reduced along with the associated time to action. It would also enable reduced training time of the non-technical workforce, bringing in visual cues and mechanisms for users in form of drag-and-drop and point-and-click features – ultimately enabling companies to develop and deploy integrations efficiently.
3. Since the demand for readymade solutions capable of being instantly personalised is on the rise, adoption of low-code solutions would result in sustained and continued business partner relationships. Vendors would also focus on aligning their products with process-focussed low-code platform capabilities, which would assist in speedy implementation of citizen development programs, ultimately leveraging the learnings for development of effective governance programs for the enterprises.
4. Ultimately, the BPM as an approach is radically evolving. From being the point of interest of specific BPM professionals and experts driving high-cost BPM solutions to solving problems involving IT complexity and related implementation challenges, to encouraging process participants and empowering the business users to actively participate in the BPM projects – BPM has come a long way. Thus, a much needed ‘Democratization of BPM’ is underway with the underlying emphasis being on providing an accessible BPM through collaborative features, automated process insights and easy to execute mapping functionalities.

• Hyperautomation leading to an exponential growth of existing business models and leading to a creation of innovative business models of the future.

1. Hyperautomation would work towards accelerating the pace of innovation which assumes special significance during the times of crisis, since in such times customer query handling and query resolution assume more criticality across fields of operation for organisations. Hyper automation essentially would facilitate the creation of digital twins within the organisation since it would allow organisations to visualise how critical processes, key performing indicators (KPIs) and functions would interact with each other for generation of value. The digital twin would form an intrinsic part of the Hyperautomation process providing real-time and continuous intelligence and furthering the business opportunities by creating digital representatives of every element, service and process of the organisation.
2. Hyperautomation would also lead to extensive rejigging of the existing team structure, since the repetitive processes and even complex real-time tasks would be performed by sophisticated and automated technologies. Thus, the employees would have ample time to perform their tasks, working in extensive collaboration with each other, promoting the ‘human touch’ to every task they would undertake. Organisations of the coming times would work as hybrid teams comprising of the automation and human efforts, taking the business possibilities and potential to another level.

• Increasing implementation of the ‘DevOps Automation Culture’ in modern businesses

1. DevOps is a development strategy focussing on bridging the gap between the IT Operations team and the software development teams, focussing on fast-tracked IT delivery by adopting lean and agile practices. It aims at improving the collaboration between the development and operations teams, by acting as an intermediary between the two, aiming to shorten the time required for software development (including tasks such as software updates, bug fixes and added capabilities), thus adopting a holistic system-oriented approach. The DevOps implementation makes use of sophisticated automation tools leveraging increasingly complex, dynamic and programmable infrastructures, and laying a thorough emphasis on the culture and people in an end-to-end lifecycle perspective.
2. Adoption of automation in the context of DevOps also provides consistency for repetitive tasks, reducing the uncertainties due to human error. Additionally, it would reduce errors due to miscommunication, create a reliable and improved system of collaboration, and increase the overall speed of operation from integration of code to the deployment of application. Users can also automate multiple processes simultaneously while scaling them, providing greater control and consistency in understanding, which results in ability to develop real-time strategy for solving pain points (if any).
3. In order to tackle the security concerns in the current age of digitalisation, organisations are integrating the DevSecOps lifecycle for streamlining observability and governance, thus incorporating a ‘security component’ in the DevOps process. With the increased remote working in recent times and heightened security concerns, (instead of being an after-thought) security is now becoming a default ‘shift-left-approach’.
4. Furthermore, the adoption of AIOps in the DevOps cycle assists in extensive automation of the IT operations and processes, helping organisations in identifying the primary cause/ issues that directly affect the operational productivity. Due to a sustained and seamless automated operational feedback, and with automated fixing of the relevant bugs, the human intervention and associated risks would be completely eliminated as well. DevOps initiatives are also employing predictive analytics for accelerating the application delivery capabilities in the context of security, tracking and performance – thus addressing potential issues beforehand, promoting the reliability of DevOps for automating and configuring processes.

Conclusion :

In the post pandemic world, the concept of the ‘Digital Imperative’ (explained as the immediate need for businesses globally to take their majority operations ‘Digital’) is now gaining traction more than ever. Business organisations must make the transition from ‘Digital Transformation’ to ‘Digital Imperative’ soon enough. Continued scientific investments in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, embedding of the ‘automation mind-set’ across the organization, and an absolute trust in the existing data alongside a solid data fabric for making informed inferences – are some of the key essentials which would further drive the automation initiatives in 2023 ahead. Ultimately, inculcating the ‘responsible automation’ approach which promotes the end-to-end employee empowerment and well-being by automating their mundane tasks and eradicating the broken processes, thus enabling employees to focus on their core domain areas – is the need of the hour.

Author

Apoorva Dawalbhakta, Associate Director of Research, Quadrant Knowledge Solutions.