Monolithic automation platforms experienced a boom in popularity in recent decades, but while they usually delivered initial gains, those gains haven’t always lasted. When you look at the speed of change today and the growing needs of organizations, it’s easy to see how there are many new challenges businesses face daily. In many cases these monolithic platforms are now not only failing to deliver the same results, but they may now be actively slowing you down. In this post, we’ll dig into what has changed and why.
What is a monolithic automation platform?
There are a number of monolithic automation platforms on the market today that you can use to automate business processes that involve automated tasks and/or manual tasks that are executed by knowledge workers. As the term “monolith” implies, these platforms are architected as a single, black-box application as opposed to a collection of loosely coupled components or microservices that can operate independently. They typically have an integrated, proprietary design environment where users can build processes, decisions or business rules, and basic user interfaces; as well as proprietary tooling or specific programming language requirements for implementing complex use cases.
Examples of monolithic automation platforms
Traditional monolithic automation platforms such as Pegasystems, Appian, IBM Business Process Manager, and Oracle BPM originated in the world of business process management suites (also known as BPMS or iBPMS). They promised to provide an all-in-one solution for designing, automating, and managing business processes, especially back-office processes for finance teams, HR departments, and IT help desks. As organizations across industries have transformed more and more of their business to be digital, they’ve tried to capitalize on their investment in these monoliths by applying them to the core processes that build and sell their products and services.
The rise of digital transformation has also led to an emerging set of modern monolithic monolithic automation platforms as vendors add lightweight process automation capabilities to products that were originally designed for purposes such as customer relationship management (CRM), IT service management (ITSM), and personal and team productivity. In some cases, these capabilities were built in-house; in other cases, process automation has been loosely integrated with the original product after various acquisitions. Examples of modern monoliths include offerings such as ServiceNow’s AppEngine, Salesforce Flow, and the Microsoft Power Apps suite of tools. These products also promise to be all-in-one solutions for business automation; however, they suffer from many of the same flaws that traditional automation monoliths do.
Why you’re fighting your monolithic automation platform
Automation tooling should help both business and IT teams deliver automated business processes faster so you can reduce operational costs, make your customers happy, and keep up with your competition. But if you find that your teams are fighting against an automation platform’s design instead of being enabled and empowered by it, chances are it’s due to one or more of the following challenges.
High development effort for complex processes
Complex business processes almost always require some amount of software development work to reach a high level of automation. Software developers are most productive when they can write code in the programming languages they know, using the development tooling and software delivery pipelines that they’ve already set up.
Automation monoliths don’t adhere to standard software development practices. Instead, they require users to use proprietary tools to build and implement processes, in the hopes of simplifying the design environment for low-code developers and business technologists. However, proprietary tooling has the opposite effect for software developers; it wastes their time as they have to learn to use that tooling instead of their normal development toolset and standards. In addition, developers have to continuously maintain this knowledge, which can lead to a lack of sufficiently skilled team members in the organization and the need to hire expensive consultants.
When working with automation monoliths, technical teams can’t see inside the black box to understand exactly how it executes processes, which means software developers are often stuck reverse-engineering automation code. Plus, connectors for automation monoliths tend to be built in a proprietary way, making it hard to customize or extend the way that processes interact with various enterprise tools.
Poor transparency and no portability for processes and decisions
Automation monoliths enable collaboration by providing drag-and-drop tools for building processes. However, visualization is only one piece of the puzzle; for a workflow engine to actually execute a process, it must contain code that can run. Some of this code is generated by the automation monolith itself, but it doesn’t take much complexity for a business process to require custom code as well.
When processes are built using proprietary tools, there’s little to no transparency for the software developers who need to make the process executable. It also means that processes can’t easily be exported from one tool and imported into another. In contrast, open modeling standards such as BPMN and DMN are fully transparent and portable, without sacrificing the type of user-friendly process visualization that enables cross-functional collaboration.
You’re paying too much to be struggling with an automation monolith
Automation monoliths lock you into a proprietary process automation design and execution environment. Organizations that adopt monolithic automation platforms require extensive training and consulting hours from specialists who know how to use the platform. This doesn’t just cost time and money up-front; it also creates maintenance headaches when business processes need to be updated or expanded.
If an automation monolith is delivering the process automation capabilities you need, that’s great! But if your teams are fighting against it, or if the return on your investment isn’t high enough, then you need to take action.
A composable automation solution is a better way
Camunda is an alternative to monolithic automation platforms that delivers transformational process orchestration. It offers the best of both worlds: loosely coupled components that fully integrate with one another, yet are designed to integrate seamlessly into an existing technical architecture to create a composable solution.
For additional flexibility, Camunda components can be deployed to on-premises infrastructure, to public or private clouds, or in a hybrid configuration. We also offer a hosted SaaS option that provides fast, massive scalability for high-volume, high-performance use cases.
Sign up for a free customized demonstration or a free 30-day trial to see how a new approach to process orchestration can help you achieve your business automation goals.
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