5 Tips to Implement a Strong Process Automation Culture in Your Organization
The idea that every company will have to become a software company to meet consumer expectations and overcome the competition from digital disruptors is not a novel one, as we’ve advocated in this blog.
In today’s digital economy, another necessity is also presenting itself; the need to become a process automation software company, meaning that to successfully achieve digital transformation at scale, stakeholders must rearchitect business processes before automating them.
The challenge isn’t just in automating processes—it’s in discovering the processes to automate (especially the complex, end-to-end processes where the real return of value lies), re-engineering those processes to make them optimal, and then automating them. The complexity in getting this right is that you need the synergy and alignment of stakeholders across the organization. That fundamental alignment and collaboration can only be delivered with a robust process automation culture.
These are 5 tips to help enterprise leaders establish a strong process automation culture that will facilitate the path to becoming a process automation software company and the ROI that comes with it:
1. Foster a Culture of Process Improvement
Impactful process improvement demands the centralized, collaborative effort of your organization’s business process experts. Manual, outdated methods of process improvement initiatives including siloed, disconnected teams or the labor-intensive interview practices of process discovery yield poor results that reflect in even poorer ROI.
A functioning culture of process improvement is made up of process improvement experts working closely together with the business stakeholders who own and execute the processes, and therefore know them best. For any optimization initiative, the process improvement experts must be loaned to the business to support the stakeholders that own the processes, so each party brings their fundamental knowledge and skillsets to the equation to contribute to an ongoing culture of process improvement.
2. Ensure that Process Improvement and Process Automation Go Hand-in-Hand
Optimizing a business process before automating it is one of the keys to successfully implementing automation at scale, and therefore, is also a key element to establishing a process automation culture.
A good rule of thumb to follow is to approach each process to be improved with the intent that it will be automated. In their recent report, Create A Governance Strategy To Meet The Process Imperative, Forrester advocates,
“Make sure that technology experts with process automation skills are involved in process improvement efforts to ensure that the art of the possible with regard to automation is always understood and represented.”
3. Standardize Process Improvement and Automation with IT Governance
IT governance is critical in any endeavour. That’s not just because the organization has its enterprise standards, policies, and controls to follow. Large enterprises normally operate in highly regulated industries, so governance is a key component that contributes to regulatory compliance.
To support the digital transformations enterprises are undergoing to become both software companies and process automation software companies, organizations must automate complex processes across different teams and that will touch different systems, which in all likelihood, will also involve interactions with legacy technologies.
Bold IT governance that is standards-based contributes to establishing a process automation culture because it standardizes and aligns critical process improvement and automation practices. Accessing data, storing data, maintaining security, providing a consistent customer experience, etc. are governed by explicit, understood practices that will reinforce regulatory compliance and also facilitate smoother change management.
4. Implement a Solid Change Management Strategy
Change management is a critical component of any process automation initiative and can make or break the momentum of your process automation culture. An essential element to any successful automation change management strategy is providing the essential tooling that facilitates visibility and transparency, especially for the business stakeholders that manage the change.
5. Champion Continuous Process Improvement
Process improvement must be perpetual for a process automation culture; it can never be a one-and-done scenario. Continuous improvement cycles must be established. With the aid of process discovery tools, your business process experts can receive continuous data and accurate definitions of your as-is processes, so constant modifications and re-designs can be applied to continually improve your processes.
Discover How Blueprint Helps You Implement an Aligned and Collaborative Process Automation Culture
Blueprint Enterprise Automation Suite is your fundamental business process command center to drive your process automation culture. Because the Blueprint Enterprise Automation Suite provides a central repository where all stakeholders can collaboratively design, define, optimize, and store complex, end-to-end processes, process improvement is a transparent, collaborative effort where both the business and IT converge to visualize and gain alignment during the process design and optimization stages. You can then accelerate your process automation culture by directly feeding your improved processes into your RPA platform to be automated using Blueprint’s out-of-the-box integrations with the industry’s leading RPA platforms like UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism.
Blueprint’s sophisticated trace capabilities also help you establish the IT governance key to a process automation culture, allowing you to connect all processes and process steps to high-level business objectives or enterprise constraints like business rules, policies, controls, and regulations to solidify compliance.
Blueprint also offers seamless change management and impact analysis, giving you a bird’s eye view of all the processes impacted by a change to a regulation or policy at the click of a button.
Watch the short demo below to see how Blueprint can easily help you implement a process automation culture instantly: