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Automate Business Operations to Scale

Your Digital Business
Published 26 November 2019 - ID G00451347 - 15 min read
By Analysts Rob Dunie, Saikat Ray

Emerging technologies like robotic process automation and AI

promise a new era of business process automation. Application
leaders must focus on investments that deliver short-term value
but also provide a sustainable basis for continuous optimization
and transformation of business operations.

Overview
Key Challenges
■ Many business processes are suboptimal (often manual), but it is
difficult for application leaders to know where to start investing in
automation.

■ Scaling business operations cost-effectively, while increasing

productivity, is challenging because of a lack of automation and
integration.

■ The long-term ROI from business process automation is limited by

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■ Despite their promise of rapid ROI and increased digital dexterity, it

is harder than expected to implement and measure the benefits of
technologies like robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial
intelligence (AI), which, ultimately, may not deliver sustainable
results.

Recommendations
Application leaders responsible for application and product portfolio
governance should:

■ Identify the right mix of business process optimization and

transformation opportunities by using the Gartner digital ambition
framework.

■ Combine RPA and low-code platforms to optimize and transform

business operations.

■ Maximize ROI by working with business stakeholders to redesign

or reimage business processes.

■ Enable business agility at scale by fostering a “DigitalOps”

mindset, with a combined focus on hyperautomation and
augmentation.

Strategic Planning Assumptions

By 2021, 50% of robotic process automation (RPA) implementations
will fail to deliver a sustainable ROI.

By 2022, 80%
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Introduction
As application leaders look to optimize and transform digital
business operations, they face a dizzying array of choices. Questions
abound. What processes should I automate or reinvent first? How
can I deliver value quickly? How can I deliver value sustainably?
Technologies such as RPA and AI promise to unlock new
opportunities for optimizing the current way of delivering value, as
well as for enabling new value streams. However, application leaders
must be careful not to get caught up in the hype surrounding these
technologies.

Given the mounting growth of business process and IT debt, how can
application leaders fulfill their digital ambitions both quickly and
sustainably? They must:

■ Implement “quick win” tools, such as RPA (see “Magic Quadrant for
Robotic Process Automation Software”), low- or no-code
application platforms (see “Low-Code Development Technologies
Evaluation Guide”) and integration platform as a service (iPaaS;
see “Choosing Application Integration Platform Technology”). This
will increase productivity tactically and enable rapid
experimentation.

■ Look beyond the quick ROI and seize opportunities to gain deeper
insight into where additional investment should be made. They
must reduce the risk of business process redesign and application
modernization by proving the value of automation.

■ Create a more comprehensive hyperautomation toolbox (see “Top

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use a variety of methodologies and tools. They should not assume

that any one approach will enable them to achieve all their digital
ambitions.

Ultimately, application leaders need to change how they look at

digital optimization and transformation with a view to shifting from
stand-alone efforts to an integrated set of synergistic investments
(see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Seeing Differently to Optimize and

Transform Continuously

Analysis
Identify the Right Mix of Business Process Optimization
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Application leaders and business outcome owners must collaborate

to set a vision for their digital business initiatives — their digital
ambitions (see “Digital Business Ambition: Transform or Optimize?”)
Achieving digital ambitions is not just a matter of optimizing current
value chains but also of enabling the rapid scaling of novel ones.
Application leaders must support a mix of optimization and
transformation efforts. This can be enabled by technologies that
automate routine business operations and increase the digital
dexterity of knowledge workers by offering better collaboration and
decision support.

Assess. Application leaders should work with business stakeholders

to validate digital ambitions. They should collaboratively identify
areas for further optimization, as well as opportunities to innovate.
Optimization and transformation need not be mutually exclusive. On
the contrary, the digital ambitions of a business often require a
combination of both.

Optimize to Improve Efficacy and Efficiency

For optimization-oriented ambitions, automation amplifies the value
generated from existing operating models by using business process
and decision automation technologies.

Optimization of existing business operations puts a focus on

maximizing efficiency as well as efficacy: increasing productivity,
reducing errors, avoiding known risks. To reduce business process
debt, application leaders should work with business stakeholders to
standardize processes and decisions. However, not all variations of a
process can be standardized (easily or at all), so they must put
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application leaders enable the business to focus its attention on the

exceptions that still require a human touch.

Enable. Application leaders should focus on enabling rapid ROI and

incremental improvements to business processes by introducing
basic automation technologies to business processes. They should
automate routine predictable decisions and tasks using less-invasive
technologies first — they could, for example, automate one or more
routine tasks using RPA. Application leaders can then check the
impact of automation on business outcomes without significant
disruption to the existing business process or related applications.

Improve. Application leaders should redesign the process by

enabling new digital services first, and then recompose them in a
better way. Application leaders should be ready to support a variety
of process improvement methodologies, such as Kanban, Six Sigma
and House of Quality. They must support those methodologies with
business activity monitoring, process analysis, modeling, process
mining and simulation capabilities.

Amplify. Application leaders should then undertake a transition to

more sustainable and scalable technologies (such as intelligent
business process management suites, hybrid integration platforms,
decision management suites and content analytics services). They
should add intelligence to existing apps and services for work that is
still performed manually (due to user experience requirements, gaps
or deficiencies in data, and regulatory or policy considerations, for
example). They must focus on providing the most relevant operations
intelligence and provide insights from that data using visualizations
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introducing additional operations intelligence and next-best-contact

recommendations).

Transform to Innovate
For transformation-oriented ambitions, automation enables the ability
to experiment with new ways of delivering value. New opportunities
for value generation can be harvested from the exceptions to
standardized processes. Determining the best way to generate new
value is more experimental. Application leaders must employ
technologies that enable the organization to pivot and iterate quickly
as new ideas are tested. Application leaders must accelerate the
identification of value chains that deliver better results, so that they
can scale net new value streams (see “Enterprise Architects Combine
Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile to Drive Digital Innovation”
and “How to Build an Innovation Lab”).

Initially, this requirement relies heavily on a well-informed and

collaborative labor force that has the information its needs to make
better decisions about what action to perform next. Decision
management is also an essential component of the modern
continuous-intelligence systems that are found in most digital
business transformation projects (see “How Companies Succeed at
Decision Management”). Application leaders must always provide
intelligent collaboration tools that enable knowledge workers to
connect with each other more quickly, or with partners within an
ecosystem that can help them make a decision or perform some
action on their behalf (see “Drive Better Digital Workplace Employee
Collaboration Using AI, Chatbots and Advanced Analytics”).
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services and data are made accessible, application leaders can

accelerate the exploration of new value streams (such as new
customer experiences, operating models and business models).

Experiment. Through rapid experimentation and machine-assisted

analysis of behaviors and their outcomes, application leaders should
identify the patterns of behaviors that deliver the best results. This
experimental process may be applied to existing business and
technology capabilities. Until the value of a reimagined capability is
proven, application leaders should create forks of existing services
that can be incrementally and independently evolved.

Adapt. Once the optimal behavior has been discovered, application

leaders should assess the extensibility of existing applications and
services. Enhancing the capabilities of existing apps or services
often results in a faster ROI. They should determine what type of
algorithms and/or data must be added to the existing apps or
services, along with the related digital enablement activities that may
be required to fully implement the proposed changes. However,
speed to ROI must also be balanced with sustainable ROI.

For data and services that are not digitally enabled, the use of rapid
development tools (like RPA, low-code/no-code app/service
development tools) should be considered, even if only as a short-
term fix. This will enable application leaders to assess feasibility and
efficacy in a relatively noninvasive way, so that they can reduce the
longer-term risk of failure.

Scale. Application leaders must balance agility and repeatability.

They must
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follow an optimization strategy to continuously improve efficiency

and efficacy. They should focus initially on quick wins — high-volume
activities that require less intelligence (for example, those involving
fewer variations and requiring simpler decisions). For those
capabilities that rely on human judgment or human interaction, they
should use augmented analytics to accelerate and improve insights
(see “When to Automate or Augment Decision Making”).

Combine RPA and Low-Code Platforms to Optimize and

Transform Business Operations
Use RPA to create pseudo-APIs. Ideally, application leaders should
pursue an API-oriented strategy for business process automation and
application integration, but this is not always possible. Legacy
applications may not be easy to change. Third-party applications and
services may lack or have insufficient APIs. In these scenarios, RPA
can be used to isolate and encapsulate data and application services,
so that they can be recomposed in applications as you would
traditional APIs.

RPA can be used in combination with other automation and

integration technologies to bridge the gap between legacy and
modern applications and services. It provides a less invasive way of
getting at data and/or services locked away in legacy applications, so
that you can realize much of the value of what would be delivered
through modernization with less upfront effort, cost and time to
value.

RPA provides additional benefits, in comparison with direct access to

application data stores, as the UI ensures that data consistency and
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access to the data store may break the behavior of the related
application.

Use low-code platforms alongside RPA to increase digital dexterity.

Although RPA promises to be a less-invasive and more business-
accessible approach to automation, application leaders should
complement RPA with alternatives (see “Comparing Digital Process
Automation Technologies Including RPA, BPM and Low-Code”). Low-
code platforms enable those with fewer technical skills to automate
business processes. Low-code application platforms, particularly
those that are business-process-centric, can automate business
processes that involve a combination of human- and machine-
performed tasks. Similarly, low-code integration platforms automate
business processes that require little or no human interaction. By
combining RPA with low-code application and integration platforms,
application leaders can increase the degree of automation while
adding less IT debt (see “Choose the Best Integration Tool for Your
Needs Based on the Three Basic Patterns of Integration”).

Maximize ROI by Redesigning Business Processes

Simply automating a manual process, without redesigning it for high
performance when automated, delivers suboptimal results. A tedious
data collection and reporting process may be a great candidate for
achieving efficiencies from automation, but if some of the process
steps require human intelligence or there are many variations, RPA
will struggle to deliver value. An automated but poorly designed
process is still a bad process. Moreover, automation of a suboptimal
process can generate even more waste in terms of increased
business process
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conditions and bugs in back-end systems that were not visible when
the system was operated at human speed (see “Redesign Processes
for Better Automation”).

Application leaders should support business process outcome

owners to optimize business processes using process improvement
methodologies (for example, Lean). They must identify opportunities
for process simplification and standardization by working with
business subject matter experts (see “Deliver ERP Value by Using
Both Process Standardization and Best Practices”).

Further, they should adopt a DigitalOps mindset to connect

technology investments to operational and strategic business
outcomes. They should identify shared business and technology
capabilities within each phase of a customer journey, so that they can
be more easily reused and recomposed in new value chains (see
“How to Industrialize and Reuse Core Product Capabilities and
Processes With DigitalOps Initiatives”).

Application leaders should:

■ Assess whether the organization has the required process

knowledge: Determine whether the business departments have
retained the knowledge to fully document the processes. In many
insurance organizations, process knowledge has been lost via
outsourcing arrangements. If knowledge is lost, the focus should
move to other business areas where the detailed level of
knowledge has been retained.

■ Ask whether a process “should” be automated, rather than “could”

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■ Evaluate and document processes as fully as possible: Allocate

more time for documenting the process in terms of inputs, outputs
and success factors. This will save significant effort at the testing
stage and reduce or eliminate production issues, which will
otherwise be more costly or problematic to fix.

■ Avoid trusting the documented processes: Realize that

documented processes may not actually be followed by humans,
so take time to evaluate the actual processes in operation.
Skipping this step could lead to every outcome being classified as
an exception when the bot is implemented, if the preceding
process steps were not followed by a human.

■ Justify replicating existing processes “as is”: Realize that process

inefficiencies will exist and that streamlining a process can, in
itself, have a significant impact. Some tasks and processes may
warrant being automated “as is,” due to their simplicity or instant
business impact.

■ Identify processes where a short-term, “throwaway” solution is

viable: IT budgets are limited and typically unable to meet all
business demands. Freeing up delivery items by implementing a
temporary measure in the short term will allow the IT team to
focus on priority areas.

Maximize Business Outcomes With a Holistic DigitalOps

Mindset
Application leaders must resist the temptation to take a “one size fits
all” approach to business
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Service for Your Center of Expertise to Scale DigitalOps and Robotic

Process Automation”). While this COE may initially focus on a small
number of methodologies and/or tools, the COE should guide
application leaders and key stakeholders toward a more
comprehensive set of options. That is, it should create and
communicate a vision for a hyperautomated future achieved using
hyperagile working practices and tools (see “Top 10 Strategic
Technology Trends for 2020”).

Application leaders should build the DigitalOps capability by directly

connecting investments in hyperautomation directly to business
outcomes, by becoming “automation mixologists” (see “Financial
Services CIOs Must Start With Business Outcomes on Their Journey
to Become Automation Mixologists”). They should assemble a
portfolio approach to automation by establishing mixologist
principles and applying an understanding of how multiple
technologies can operate together to solve business problems.

At a minimum, application leaders should consider:

■ Adopting process-centric low-code application platforms to

experiment with new customer experiences (see “Magic Quadrant
for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms” and “Magic
Quadrant for Multiexperience Development Platforms”).

■ Using iBPMSs to automate, orchestrate and choreograph complex

business processes that span application, functional and
organizational silos (see “Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Business
Process Management Suites”).
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services (see “Choosing Application Integration Platform

Technology”).

■ Extracting meaning and key pieces of structured data from

unstructured and semistructured sources of content using content
analytics services (such as intelligent data extraction, sentiment
analysis, content classification, optical character recognition and
intelligent character recognition).

■ Enabling real-time optimization of business processes as they

execute (see “Innovation Tech Insight for Decision Management”)
by using advanced analytics (statistical, predictive and machine
learning).

■ Increasing knowledge worker collaboration by deploying employee

collaboration platforms to enable ad hoc, but visible and auditable,
collaboration between knowledge workers across the organization
(see “Market Guide for Employee Communications Applications”).

■ Analyzing ad hoc interactions to identify further opportunities for

automation (see “How to Choose Your Best-Fit Vendor for RPA
Software Platforms”) by using process-mining tools (see “Market
Guide for Process Mining” and “Differentiate RPA Products via
Process Mining and Robotic Process Discovery”).

■ Engaging with business stakeholders to assess the impact of

automation on roles and skills within the workforce (see “Using a
Digital Talent Management Framework to Build a Digital-Ready
Workforce” and “3 Automation Myths Debunked”).

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Data and Analytics”) by deploying augmented analytics and visual-

based data discovery platforms to support better knowledge work
decision making.

Although this list is not exhaustive, it gives a good indication of the

myriad technology options that application leaders must consider for
their automation and intelligence roadmap.

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