Visualization of process, testing and orchestration data: Seeing helps with understanding
In the world of business process management and automation, you can cross business intelligence with process mining and you get something we can call process analytics. What does that mean?
Business managers have been clamoring for better ways to understand what is happening inside their critical business processes. Well, inside all business processes really -- because if you can mine process data you should be able to see patterns and find weak spots. And once you find them, you can fix them -- optimize processes, find better ways to avoid blockages, and so on. One way to help business managers is to give them a way to visualize process data - to see not just the workflows, but to see what is happening inside them.
The journey to intelligent office automation
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has been around longer than you might realize. At its core, RPA simply means the automation of any manually intensive IT or administrative task. For instance, scheduling an email is one early example of RPA. But over the last two years, RPA has become much easier to use and the tools have been democratized out to the business units so arduous daily tasks may now be automated easily. Think of it as a highly evolved Excel macro, created by someone in the business that automatically logs into and out of applications to make the enterprise more effective and efficient.
What's more, due to the lack of resources available, automating enterprise processes traditionally caused friction between business units and IT. Today, IT teams may focus on large, transformative automation (e.g., new ERP Systems, new services) and push everything else back over to other business units. Transforming an organization by allowing business units to accomplish more on their own -- while freeing up IT to focus on more complex and important tasks is a far more effective use of all resources.
How rampant robotic process automation (RPA) adoption is introducing new threat vectors
Robotic process automation (RPA) is nothing new. In fact, it’s an automation toolkit that was first introduced back in the 1990’s. But in 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic and the all new remote work norm, RPA interest and adoption hit a new high. Why? Because with RPA, digital workers are able to take over repetitive, manual tasks traditionally performed by their human counterparts -- freeing up time, energy and critical human resources.
Gartner’s Fabrizio Biscotti, research vice president, put it best: "The key driver for RPA projects is their ability to improve process quality, speed and productivity, each of which is increasingly important as organizations try to meet the demands of cost reduction during COVID-19. Enterprises can quickly make headway on their digital optimization initiatives by investing in RPA software, and the trend isn’t going away anytime soon."