The Results Gap – Automated Workflow Intentions vs. Reality

This is the first of two posts focusing on the critical importance of automated, collaborative workflows. 

I was reading through an AIIM report – Business Process Automation in 2017: Designing an Intelligent Workplace – and it became clear to me that there is a “results gap” when it comes to what organizations say about process automation and what they are actually doing.

Watch the webinar: Keep Projects Moving - Automated Collaborative Workflows 

Executives understand that managing key business processes with automated digital workflows empowers their employees to stay on task, lower costs and improve the bottom line. In the AIIM survey, 79% of executives say that business process automation is “imperative” or “significant” to achieving their organization’s business goals. 

So far, so good.

But when asked to evaluate the status of their organization relative to core process objectives, many business leaders acknowledge that they have not yet turned their intentions into reality.  Consider the responses to this question: “In relation to your operational processes, how would you position your organization in the resolving the following business process issues?”

How can this be? I would argue that in the past, process automation was sometimes too difficult. That’s clearly no longer the case, particularly as business process automation has moved to the cloud, but our perceptions have not kept pace.

Say the words “business process management,” or even worse, mention the acronym “BPM,” and department heads and managers with long memories will run for the hills, chased by ghosts of past complex and over-budget process management projects.

But what if it was possible to think differently about workflow automation?

In my next post, I’ll talk about target areas for workflow automation – and how a modern, high-performance workflow solution can let you easily create and edit workflows without paying for programming.