The meteoric rise of process intelligence: Connecting people, processes, and data to transform businesses

Organizations are battling decades of technical and process complexities, a fight they must win in the digitally enabled economy where only enterprises with efficient operations will succeed. Manually examining processes to drive digital transformation isn’t enough. Enterprises must place data at the core of their transformation. To that end, a new technology category has emerged—process intelligence, where organizations can now gather and analyze detailed datasets to measure their process and task performance against target metrics. Process intelligence blends process mining (analyzing system event logs) and process discovery (analyzing an individual user’s work activities). Process intelligence tools give organizations complete transparency into their processes and act as a catalyst for transformation.

HFS, in partnership with Genpact, surveyed 400 executives from Forbes Global 2000 enterprises at different stages of process intelligence adoption. We tested the survey findings through interviews with senior industry executives. This cross-industry global research initiative uncovers enterprises’ enthusiasm about process intelligence, including their planned double-digit growth in associated spending. Additionally, we look beyond the hype, focusing on organizations that have struggled implementing process intelligence technologies to understand the challenges they face, and emerging best practices for this exciting new set of technologies. In particular, we highlight challenges around people, process, technology, data, and change management – with people emerging as the biggest hurdle to overcome for process intelligence adoption.

Key findings

Adoption

92% of respondents with a process intelligence center of excellence believe they are managing process alignment very well.

29% of process intelligence engagements are scaled up and industrialized at most – there’s room for adoption to grow.

Impact

50% of respondents expect to see impact from process intelligence within one year.

43% of respondents expect the impact of process intelligence to enable them to use data strategically to win in their markets within one year.

Challenges

79% of respondents ranked “people” as a top three challenge for process intelligence adoption.

67% of respondents reported the biggest challenge for process intelligence adoption as a lack of knowledge about which processes would benefit from the technology.

The Bottom Line: Despite early disappointments and the complexity of process intelligence, enterprise executives recognize the potential of these technologies to improve services and experiences, strengthen revenues, and reduce inefficiencies. However, to get there, teams must look beyond technology and focus on connecting people, processes, data, and change management to everything they do.

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