Get a grip on how your enterprise processes work—before rushing to automate

The Situation: While process mining and discovery are increasingly bundled with robotic process automation (RPA), there’s a rapidly emerging need to take a step back and ask ourselves how we got in such a mess that we no longer know how work gets done in our organizations. It is time to take back control.

Mining, discovery, and process intelligence respond to the same basic need: We don’t know what we’re doing

The popularity of process mining, task mining, and process discovery, which HFS brings together under the umbrella of process intelligence, has rapidly grown. By our H1 Pulse 2021 study, 81%–94% of enterprises in Exhibit 1, depending on territory, had adopted it.

Exhibit 1: Process mining and discovery is widely adopted – a response to process debt concerns

Sample: HFS Pulse, 2021, n=800
Source: HFS Research, 2022

The increasing complexity of our processes was a known and growing problem—a process debt that comes with the territory of scale and globalization. What changed during the COVID pandemic was that processes suddenly had to be delivered by distributed teams working from anywhere—plus The Great Resignation.

Too much of the “way-things-get-done-around-here” has proven to be stored in people’s heads. That’s ok when your team is relatively stable and you have a clear view of who is doing what, how, and when. Much of that is out of sight when we opt to work from anywhere. The lack of visibility was compounded when the rush to the exit began, and with it, the dawning realization that people had left with undocumented, but vital, intelligence about the processes they worked on.

Back up, and view the bigger picture

One process intelligence startup’s CEO told us that when he made plans to enter the market with a solution to speed up the route to building RPA solutions, he found potential customers’ first response was to ask him to back up and view the bigger picture.
Those executives were less concerned with automation and more with first capturing a clear view of how their people were working: which applications they used, for how long, for what purpose, and what caused delays—in other words, a much more holistic view of workflow.
The industry may have been too fast to leap to automation before understanding all the human elements of an end-to-end process. Getting this basic understanding step right has never been more important. Imagine taking a poorly understood and replicated automated process into the cloud and across entire ecosystems. That looks like a fast track to failing at scale right now.
Meanwhile, the race to cloud native adds even greater complexity with its microservices and demands for orchestration across containers and hybrid-cloud servers. Add the additional demands of emerging edge computing, and we are on the cusp of introducing another collection of fail points for our processes if we do not invest in understanding them.

Value from automation relies on understanding processes beyond the screen

The pairing of process intelligence and RPA does offer a fast track to value, but only among those organizations that truly understand their processes beyond the screen, and even then, only when that understanding has been applied to rethink holistic ways of working before moving forward to automate elements of them.
It’s little wonder, therefore, that many enterprises feel they have yet to realize the value they would like from process intelligence. Few have scaled up and industrialized their use of it, as HFS confirmed in recent data gathered in March of this year. The data showed that even in leading use cases (working capital optimization, compliance and audit), only 28% of 400 enterprise leaders had scaled up and industrialized their use.
Now, in Exhibit 2, companies are telling us they expect to realize the value of their process intelligence investments in the next 12 months.

Exhibit 2: Many G2000 executives expect to realize process intelligence value within 12 months

Sample: n =400 G2000 executives
Source: HFS Research 2022

The Bottom Line: Your first goal with process intelligence must be to reclaim the visibility of the processes that comprise your enterprise.

To realize the value process intelligence can deliver, enterprise leaders must take a step back and apply it first to untangle and understand processes, with the primary ambition of reclaiming visibility across the enterprise rather than automating bits of it.

Failing to understand how your processes work, element by element and small piece by small piece, hugely diminishes the opportunity to reconfigure those processes to best meet end-user needs. This is already a challenge for those seeking to deliver end-to-end across the front, middle, and back offices—in line with HFS’ OneOffice vision.

The arrival of the HFS OneEcosystem amplifies that challenge further. Here, process understanding becomes even more critical because it offers the opportunity to reconfigure and hone processes beyond the enterprise and across an ecosystem of partners for the competitive advantage of delivering the optimum fit with end-user needs.