What if you could remove all of the friction in your enterprise, allowing for a streamlined, perfectly aligned flow of information across both internal and external stakeholders? Manuel Sevilla — Chief Digital Officer of Business Services at Capgemini — recently shared his thoughts on this topic at CamundaCon LIVE 2020.2, identifying the framework businesses must adopt to embrace the frictionless attitude. Let’s take a closer look at the five fundamentals enterprises should consider when trying to increase efficiency, get to market faster, and provide users with an enhanced experience.
1. Hyperscale Automation
To improve your enterprise’s efficiency, focus on delivering a touchless process — one that uses automation in a way that makes it easier for the end users (and employees) to complete their tasks without unnecessary friction. With this in mind, augmenting your workforce should be one of your first priorities; the more you are able to enhance your employees’ efficiency, the more they can spend their time on higher-value tasks. Additionally, design or redesign your processes in a way that takes maximum advantage of automation, to help ease use and adoption.
To hyperscale automation, you must take advantage of architecture that supports touchless processes between your business, your vendors, and your customers. Microservices, application program interfaces (APIs), and blockchain will natively help you deliver efficiency in a way that works for all involved. In fact, Camunda’s The State of Process Automation report reveals that companies are stepping on the gas pedal and looking to increase investment in process automation as a business driver for growth and efficiency in near equal measure.
2. Cloud Agility
There’s no denying that cloud services have significantly (and positively) impacted the level of efficiency and agility available to organizations. But to reap all of the benefits of cloud agility, it’s important your business strategically and wholeheartedly adopt cloud technologies so that your business processes can become cloud-native; moving one application at a time can be costly in many ways.
Moving to the cloud is the first step in improving efficiency, but once you’re there, there are steps you should take to further leverage your investment. Specifically:
- Leverage cloud-native architecture that allows your business to scale as needed
- Embrace DevOps techniques that simplify the process of arriving at a digital solution
- Combine multiple clouds
- Leverage IoT, 5G, and edge computing as growth opportunities
3. Data Fluidity
Creating a frictionless enterprise goes beyond automation; to continually improve, it’s important that you are able to understand and analyze your processes in real-time. To make this happen, you must constantly gather and examine data to identify previously unforeseen issues or inefficiencies.
AI can offer enterprises a huge head start in identifying problems as they crop up, helping companies to avoid the consequences of spreading errors throughout the entire system. However, it’s important to remember that data silos are the enemy of efficiency; exploiting data lakes and warehouses will be key in improving data access and quality.
Data science (and data scientists) can offer keen insights, allowing you to find opportunities where you weren’t even looking. To get the most out of your data science investment, consider taking different approaches at different times, sometimes giving your team a clear order but other times presenting them your data with no constraints. The patterns they’re able to discern may open up new doors and lead you to new ways of doing business.
4. Sustainability
Along with your enterprise’s desire to increase efficiency and streamline processes should be a shared goal of becoming a more sustainable, inclusive organization. When you think about it, these goals go hand-in-hand; by improving your efficiency, you’re reducing the resources or energy you need. Not only is it the right thing to do, but it’s something more employees and customers are demanding.
Moving to the cloud from an on-premise data center is an excellent way to improve your energy efficiency, but it isn’t the only thing you can do. Focusing on technology that empowers corporate responsibility and sustainability (CR&S) is an area for improvement in many enterprises; auto-scaling, cloud-native solutions offer you the opportunity to not only reduce your costs but your carbon footprint. Data silos are an avoidable waste of energy and resources; instead, simplify your processes by taking advantage of a data lake.
And remember the importance of data inclusion, designing, and identifying application frameworks that provide unfettered access immediately. If your process is something that can only be consumed by part of society, it’s a sign that you’re missing part of your customers and need to simplify it.
5. Secure Business
Your enterprise doesn’t operate in a vacuum; you need suppliers, partners, and customers to survive. And while fixing internal frictions within your business is imperative, it’s important that you similarly address external frictions. To do this, you must develop trust throughout your ecosystem, collaborating to establish rules. And cybersecurity is just one aspect to consider.
Moving to the cloud gives enterprises an ideal opportunity to review and address solution security. By leveraging DevOps, enterprises can automate and execute testing tasks, improving security throughout the application — including the APIs that partners must have trust in. Technology also helps address compliance concerns, with blockchain offering an immutable proof of work that will give your partners and customers confidence.
Reduce Friction, Improve Insights
A frictionless enterprise empowers organizations to not only improve interactions within their business ecosystem but helps organizations quickly make more informed decisions. By understanding and embracing these fundamentals, businesses will be able to more effectively avoid potential issues and streamline their operations in a positive, meaningful way.
CamundaCon LIVE 2020.2 is available now on-demand. Plus you can download the State of Process Automation report completely free.
