Kicking off the New Year, Camunda is releasing the 2024 State of Process Orchestration Report. Unlike past surveys, this version of our annual report is the first to examine organizations’ process orchestration maturity, which starts as early as the process design and modeling stage. The key takeaway? Organizations that lack process orchestration take longer to achieve end-to-end automation success and reach their automation goals. Their overall percentages of automated processes stagnate, they only create point solutions for automation, they face challenges with stakeholder collaboration, and they are often unable to align their automation efforts with larger business objectives.
There is a silver lining. Despite economic challenges, automation investments are still expected to increase over the next two years. With a proper focus on stakeholder alignment and goal-setting, process visibility, orchestrated end-to-end processes, and continuous improvement, teams can enhance their process orchestration maturity. Doing so accelerates digital transformation, and helps automation meet and exceed critical business goals—improving customer experience, employee efficiency and retention, bottom line revenue, and overall operational excellence. Let’s take a closer look at some of this year’s most interesting findings.
Leaders see strong ROI, yet percentage of automated processes lingers at 50%
This year’s survey finds that IT and business leaders are experiencing exceptional business outcomes from automation. Almost all IT decision-makers and business leaders (96%) say automation is vital to digital transformation, consistent with previous years’ reports. 90% of IT decision-makers say their organization will increase investment in automation in the next 24 months (vs. 88% in 2023).
- 91% say they’ve seen increased business growth due to process automation within the last year.
- 95% say automation has helped achieve operational efficiency.
- 93% say automation has helped improve customer experiences.
However, the percentage of business processes automated decreased slightly from 52% in 2023 to 50% in 2024. If businesses are experiencing such strong ROI from automation, why aren’t they automating more?
Process orchestration’s role in accelerating automation maturity
Here’s the answer to that question: Teams could alleviate many of their current challenges with a proper process orchestration strategy. Challenges in 2024 include:
- 51% of respondents see an increase in complexity due to processes spanning multiple systems, up from 45% in 2023.
- 39% say legacy systems are difficult to connect to. 62% agree legacy tech is standing in the way of achieving their hyperautomation and automation fabric goals.
- Over half (58%) point to a disconnect between IT decision-makers and business leaders around their processes.
On the positive side, most (94%) IT and business leaders agree that process orchestration plays a role in digital transformation. They’ve made strong moves to increase their process orchestration adoption, and in turn improve their automation outcomes.
- 25% have incorporated process orchestration into a single use case.
- 47% have incorporated it across multiple use cases and several functional areas/departments.
- 22% have incorporated it organization-wide.
Accelerating process orchestration in 2024
As processes get more complex, with more people, systems and devices entering the picture, process orchestration becomes even more imperative in order to progress beyond point solutions and towards holistic automation success. From the very first process design phases, process orchestration can help IT and business stakeholders align on common goals. From there, automated processes can be orchestrated seamlessly among process endpoints. IT teams and architects can gain visibility into their processes, so they can continuously improve and ensure that automation is meeting business needs.
To help accelerate process orchestration maturity in 2024, we’ve introduced a new maturity model for organizations to benchmark and set goals for improvement. With it come practical tips that will help organizations overcome the very challenges with automation growth they’ve indicated in our survey. We’re optimistic that in 2024, organizations will experience the newfound business success that goes hand in hand with process orchestration maturity.
Learn more about the State of Process Orchestration
Download the full 2024 State of Process Orchestration report for more insights.
Understand the broader impact of Process Orchestration
Forrester also confirmed the importance of Process Orchestration in The Forrester Wave™: Digital Process Automation Software, Q4 2023. Read more about Forrester’s report here.
