Automation challenges unpacked -- Part 1: Endpoint diversity

Overall, 96 Percent of IT leaders in the State of Process Orchestration report say process automation is critical to helping them accelerate their digital transformation goals. Even so, 72 Percent agree that their real-world, business-critical processes are becoming more difficult to maintain. Why is that the case? For many companies, process automation challenges tie to two core concepts: endpoint diversity and process complexity.

I’ll cover process complexity in part two of this series, but for now, let’s dig into some of the challenges that stem from endpoint diversity and how to solve them.

What is endpoint diversity in process automation?

Every process is made up of tasks. Endpoints are the people, systems and devices that execute these tasks. For an automated process to run successfully, you have to coordinate the processing of these tasks. For example, you might have a human task, such as a manual approval workflow, in the middle of a set of software-driven tasks. You might have system tasks where microservices or SaaS applications need to be coordinated, or where a handheld scanner or IoT device would trigger additional steps in a process. According to the State of Process Orchestration report cited above, the typical automated process uses 5.68 different endpoints.

The more endpoints you have within your organization, the more complex it becomes to drive a process from beginning to end. Many large enterprises contend with legacy systems; in fact more than 800 billion lines of COBOL code run on mainframe systems in production today. These systems can be complex and difficult to integrate alongside modern technologies.

In addition, many organizations leverage SaaS applications in their automated processes. The typical organization uses 130 SaaS apps. Plus, hybrid and remote working teams continue to remain the norm in the wake of the pandemic, adding to the people challenge of endpoint coordination.

To break it down in simplest terms, more endpoint diversity can lead to more fragmented and disjointed silos in your business processes unless you are able to orchestrate all of your endpoints easily.

The business challenges of disjointed process silos

Whether your endpoints are people, systems or devices, the main risks with end-to-end process automation is to have pockets of disjointed business processes not connected to each other -- hence overall ineffective processes. For example, nearly everyone has had the problem of  calling into a customer contact center after troubleshooting online. Even if your username was authenticated during troubleshooting, you often have to repeat the steps you’ve already taken to the customer service representative. With a properly orchestrated process that correlates a unique user identification to each caller, this customer frustration could be avoided.

Frustrating customer experiences are just one challenge that comes from siloed process automation inefficiencies. Employees rely on automation to make their jobs easier, taking repetitive tasks off of their plates so that they can move on to more valuable work. When these automated systems don’t work properly together, organizations run the risk of employee frustration and churn.

Finally, with many business-critical tasks, there’s little to no margin for error. If a process is running slowly or ineffectively, it can be difficult for organizations to gain visibility into the bottlenecks or inefficiencies driving these issues. These challenges can result in lost revenue and reputational damage, if they’re not remediated quickly.

Solving endpoint diversity challenges

As organizations depend more and more on automations of all types, process orchestration takes on a greater role in driving its effectiveness. Orchestrating your processes ensures continuity across all process endpoints, regardless of where they originate. Orchestration can even combine disparate, siloed processes together to make them run more seamlessly.

Case in point, not every company with a legacy system can afford to rip and replace it all at once. It’s costly in both monetary terms and lost productivity from business-critical systems going offline. Process orchestration can help coordinate temporary solutions, such as RPA bots driving legacy system automation, with modern, cloud- and microservices-based software systems. Step by step, the development and integration teams can replace components of the legacy system with modern technology that’s easier to deploy within an organization’s overall automation strategy.

What’s more, when you orchestrate your processes from end to end, you can gain greater visibility into potential inefficiencies and bottlenecks. Rather than operating in silos, an orchestrated process can provide data into exactly where a process is breaking down with a certain team, system or device. From there, you can take action to remediate these issues quickly, before they cause customer or employee disruption.

Of course, endpoint diversity is not the only challenge organizations face when it comes to automation. Process complexity often holds organizations back from achieving automation namaste. However, there are ways to address these challenges that align with both business and technical stakeholders’ goals. I’ll cover process complexity strategies in the next article.

Image credit: limbi007/depositphotos.com

Jakob Freund is is co-founder and CEO Camunda. He is responsible for the company’s vision and strategy, and is the driving force behind Camunda’s global growth and takes responsibility for the company culture. As well as holding an MSc in Computer Science, he co-authored the book "Real-Life BPMN" and is a sought-after speaker at technology and industry events.