Digitize or deteriorate: Forrester on automating at scale

Niamh Lordan00:00

Hi everyone, and welcome to our webinar today, Digitize or Deteriorate. My name is Niamh Lordan, and I'm head of marketing here at FlowForma. A few tips before we start: this webinar is being recorded, and if you need any assistance, please email info@flowforma.com. Your lines are muted, but I'd encourage you to ask questions in the chat; we have a 10-minute slot at the end for live Q&A. Afterward we'll share the recording, and we'd appreciate you completing a short survey.

Niamh Lordan00:56

I'm delighted to be joined by Rob Koplowitz, VP and principal analyst at Forrester. Our community is really interested to hear your insights from the recent Forrester process automation survey, and your tips for digitizing in 2021. We're also joined by Paul Stone, our product strategist, who'll share some FlowForma customer case studies that line up well with what Rob has seen in his research.

Rob Koplowitz01:05

Hi Niamh, thank you for having me.

Paul Stone01:33

Hi everybody. Good to be here.

Rob Koplowitz02:02

Thank you, and thanks to everybody joining. I was a little more forceful in my title: rather than digitize or deteriorate, I have digitize or die, which may well be the case. There's a process imperative we've all faced for a number of years, but the heat has really been turned up. Automation has to get out of the back room and its big BPM project roots, and become something pervasive, where everyone participates and you aggressively go after all the manual processes in your organization.

Rob Koplowitz03:21

We've made progress, but around February and March things got very real in terms of testing our agility. Can we respond to unforeseen circumstances? Can we automate things really quickly? The test, of course, was COVID. A lot of processes became problematic very quickly, across financial services, insurance, healthcare and public services.

Rob Koplowitz04:22

We asked people specifically what happened when they went to a remote work model, because we were inundated with calls about things that were broken. The survey data says two-thirds of organizations encountered processes that were either broken or suboptimal. Some were mission critical: serving patients and clients, revenue recognition, moving major projects forward.

Rob Koplowitz05:12

Those that were digitized reacted far more effectively. Those far down the path of an automation strategy, with a foundation in place, had the tools, techniques and methodologies to react and be agile. We think of digital as software being an expression of the business: tools that let everyone drive efficiency, and drive innovation through automation. Software is simply far more resilient than paper processes in a situation like this.

Rob Koplowitz06:11

So what have we learned? We have to accelerate the path many of us were already on, toward wide-scale, long-tail digitization. You can't function without automation. Processes that need paper, or people moving spreadsheets around when they're co-located, are very vulnerable to breaking down, and there are a lot of them.

Rob Koplowitz06:51

COVID is a tragedy, but is it the last challenge you'll face? Is it geopolitical, a digital predator entering your market, or simply higher demands from your customers? There are a lot of forcing functions, and COVID was the forcing function of all forcing functions. Think of it as a test, and automation and digitization won. Those that were more automated were far more effective in dealing with it.

Rob Koplowitz08:09

You also have to build your automation on an adaptable foundation. Cloud platforms were far more resilient and able to scale than internal IT systems when your workload suddenly tripled. Can you build software without hiring professional developers you can't find anyway? Can you put processes in place quickly, close to the business user? That's low-code and digital process automation. This more adaptable foundation was the winning formula.

Rob Koplowitz09:29

Let's step back: why do people do process improvement? We've tracked this for about five years, and captured it right before and right after COVID hit. When we ask for the primary focus of process improvement efforts, most organizations focus on accelerating digital business transformation, and a number do it specifically to improve customer experience. Read customer as patient, citizen or employee too.

Rob Koplowitz10:38

After COVID, we expected a big change in a tougher economic climate. But the strategic objectives remained largely the same. Cost reduction as the primary focus a little more than doubled, from a small base. When we ask whether people expect cost reduction from process improvement and plan to measure it, about 77% say yes. So it's not either/or, but digital transformation is a far more powerful goal: cost reduction tends to happen in silos, while transformation and customer experience happen across the organization and have much higher impact.

Rob Koplowitz12:25

How much remains to be done? Beyond the big-bang application implementations and big BPM projects, there's a long tail of things to automate, and it's daunting. Paper was what broke most completely and most quickly when we moved to remote working. You couldn't move the file folder between desks or monitor the mail room. And 77% of organizations still have at least a few dependencies on paper processes.

Rob Koplowitz13:34

A few doesn't seem like many, but if that inefficient file folder sits in the middle of a larger automated process, the process breaks completely. Then there's everything happening in spreadsheets. The tools we've given the business to drive efficiency are spreadsheets and email, and they're fundamentally offline, invisible within the overall process and not part of your managed platform. Put those together and there's a massive amount of automation to do to become a truly digitized business.

Rob Koplowitz14:37

There seems to be some confusion in the market about no-code and low-code, some of it probably generated by Forrester, but there is a difference. No-code platforms build very powerful applications, and they're designed for citizens, business developers, to take the reins with minimal support from IT and professional developers, ideally none. That's a design criterion: if you need a piece of functionality, the vendor has to build it in a declarative way a business user can use, like an Excel spreadsheet.

Rob Koplowitz15:45

With low-code you can build a lot with a business developer too, but the vendor's philosophy is that the most sophisticated applications are built with professional developers, and there's always an escape hatch to hand things over to them. If you don't have professional developers available, you need to think more about no-code. The overlap is significant and they're often conflated, but the biggest difference is the vendor's philosophy and where it puts its R&D.

Rob Koplowitz16:45

Look at the tools we've given the workforce: paper, then printers, then spreadsheets, which is basically where we've lived for 20 years. Now we're moving into citizen development, which brings these processes online. I'm not just automating; I'm automating into a managed platform where I have visibility. That's a significant change, and really important for digitizing an organization end to end.

Rob Koplowitz17:41

Some of you are thinking, I can't let everybody develop software; things will break. That's okay. Think about guardrails, and doing this carefully and methodically. We see several models emerging: a private tier, where business teams execute projects with their own resources; democratization, with as few guardrails as possible to encourage wide-scale adoption; and federation.

Rob Koplowitz18:34

Federation is probably the winner. You have a center of excellence that picks tools based on governance capabilities, ease of development and training. They act as ambassadors to the business, teach people to use the product and stay available for consultation. You end up with a long tail of developers building a wide range of applications, but safely, meeting the organization's strategic goals. That puts pressure on vendors to deliver products IT can approve, with security, privacy and governance it understands.

Rob Koplowitz19:58

This has become much more active since COVID. Low-code and no-code platforms have become first-class citizens in the development portfolio, and organizations are learning how to leverage them.

Rob Koplowitz20:34

IT no longer holds the reins on every project, so process expertise is back in vogue: the process professionals who know how to build and optimize processes. The business becomes a partner in developing applications. Bring your governance, risk and compliance people in at the beginning, not the end: automation makes processes visible, transparent and auditable, so they have a lot to gain.

Rob Koplowitz21:25

Customer experience professionals matter if you're building something for employees, citizens, customers or patients. Processes cross organizational boundaries and legacy technology, which requires high-level sponsorship to set strategic goals. And the change manager: somebody taught us to use spreadsheets and email. The same diligence has to be brought to no-code and the citizen developer.

Rob Koplowitz22:31

A few recommendations. First, assess your ability to drive automation very quickly. Did your organization react in near real time when COVID hit, and are your business people partners in driving automation? Second, assume rapid and agile is the new normal. Think of business people as your new development superpower, but with great power comes great responsibility, so pick tools that let you govern them.

Rob Koplowitz23:39

Third, make this the speed of business, because if it's not a pandemic, it'll be a digital competitor or market demands asking you to move fast. And finally, take a holistic approach. Make business process optimization a core strength, work with the professionals who understand it, and connect that optimization to automation. Is the answer always automation? No, but more often than not it is. And never stop: make it part of your organizational DNA.

Paul Stone24:43

That's great, Rob. Thanks for those insights. What you'll find in these case studies is that what people are actually doing with no-code closely matches the approach Rob suggests. For those of you who don't know it, FlowForma is a no-code digital process automation tool. It's different because it combines three things in one: workflow, document generation and handling, and forms that capture data. In a business developer's mind, that's how a process works: what data do I need, what's the next task and who's assigned, what documents and communications go out.

Paul Stone26:12

We combine all that into a single end-user interface, so it's easy to adopt, and into a true no-code configuration tool, where you set up steps, data and business rules, such as generating an email or pushing and pulling data from a back-end system. No-code means you can train business people quickly and get them results quickly, which is how you achieve ROI. And the platform runs on Office 365, so it's easy to install and get up and running.

Paul Stone27:57

First, the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and how it used FlowForma to accelerate its digital transformation. It teaches over 600 students and is an important worldwide research institution; it's working on a universal snakebite antivenom, for example. But after more than 120 years it was very dependent on paper. If a researcher needed to travel to a disease outbreak, they'd fill in a paper form and wait for it to be signed off, and often they couldn't wait.

Paul Stone29:07

That led the COO to be very concerned about operational risk: with email, paper and spreadsheets, they never knew where anything was. They needed a digital solution but had a small IT department and no budget for an external build, so they looked to no-code. We trained the IT team, who built the travel request process themselves, then trained eight more people. The finance department took the reins, digitized all its processes and went paperless. In all, they quickly digitized over 120 processes, and now they're refining them as the business changes.

Paul Stone31:32

Next, Beaumont Hospital, a large hospital in Ireland with over 3,000 staff, which wanted to improve the patient journey. It was heavily dependent on paper, which introduces delays, and pieces of paper get lost or misfiled, so processes fail. They started by digitizing processes in IT, then formed a center of excellence of IT staff and clinicians. That was so important, because the clinicians knew the requirements and the problems, and became a key part of digitizing processes.

Paul Stone32:54

With over 80 processes digitized, they've saved over 900,000 pieces of paper from being printed, a nice sustainability spin-off with a real impact on patient experience. It let the IT staff do more core IT work, and gave clinicians more time with patients.

Paul Stone33:41

This one is about improving compliance. CVB is the joint venture of Costain, Vinci and Bachy Soletanche delivering a very large tunnel under the River Thames in London. Three companies means three sets of processes, but for maximum productivity you want everybody working on common, standardized processes. So they trained civil engineers to digitize processes themselves and deliver them into the business.

Paul Stone35:04

A lot of their processes mix mobile steps on site with steps back at head office. FlowForma lets you say one step runs on a mobile device, the next on desktop, and the next is completed by an external contractor, so suppliers and contractors collaborate on the same process. It's all captured in an audit trail, evidencing compliance, which helped them show Tideway, the client, that they were spending money wisely. When COVID-19 came along, they built processes to handle it, like returning to work, and because so much was already digitized, the impact was minimal.

Paul Stone37:03

Abingdon & Witney College wanted to improve worker productivity and demonstrate the savings over what had gone before. So they required FlowForma to capture productivity statistics on every process they digitized. They trained apprentices to digitize processes, measured performance, refined the processes, and did a detailed before-and-after analysis: the trips and visits process saved over 1,600 hours, student update forms over 1,300 hours, and task assessment 620 hours.

Paul Stone38:57

That's the aggregation of small gains. When you set out to automate at scale, every small saving adds up, here to the equivalent of several full-time employees. And you can only automate at scale with a system that lets you move quickly: a typical process in FlowForma takes two to four weeks to put into production. You'll also get surprises. On the A14 project, one process saved over two million pounds and another avoided a 10 million pound penalty.

Paul Stone41:06

A little about FlowForma the company. We're an award-winning process automation tool, with well over 200,000 people using FlowForma across 20 countries, from New Zealand to the west coast of the US. From the outset we focused on no-code and citizen developers, but we fully support IT in the process: just like the federated approach Rob described, you can put guardrails in place, separate production and development environments, and minimize risk. We've had recognition from Forrester and Microsoft; we're a Microsoft Gold partner.

Paul Stone42:41

Our customer base is very broad, because digital process automation isn't designed for one sector. Everybody wants to be more agile. Aon uses it to manage contractor insurance; NG Bailey and Maverick use it in construction; the NHS has common use cases; Inland Rail in Australia has committed to FlowForma as its DPA platform for the 10 years of the project; and Ahold Delhaize uses it for product development.

Niamh Lordan44:13

Thanks, Paul, and thanks, Rob; the research and case studies lined up really nicely. We'll send the slides and recording tomorrow. Jill asks: can you give me your top three tips for digitizing? Rob first, then Paul.

Rob Koplowitz45:06

First, start digitizing. Get something into people's hands to give them a sense of the art of the possible, ideally with IT's awareness so it's in a safe space, and put some of your less efficient processes online. Second, work closely with IT, not behind their backs, so they can provide guardrails and expand the scope in a logical progression. Third, this is real. While you experiment, you're learning how to do this at scale.

Paul Stone46:25

I closely align with Rob. Number one is get started: digitize that first process. I always say go for the obvious one, the one everybody complains about. Then build momentum: show evidence of the positive effect to other departments, your peers and IT. And ultimately form a self-sustaining community, a center of excellence involving IT, with people supporting each other in continuously digitizing processes.

Niamh Lordan47:22

Paul, Jenny asks: is there a FlowForma mobile app?

Paul Stone47:42

Absolutely. FlowForma is available on iOS and Android, and uniquely, when you build a process it's immediately available on desktop or mobile. You don't have to build specifically for mobile; it adjusts automatically. There's mobile-specific functionality too, like capturing GPS locations.

Niamh Lordan48:20

Rob, Oliver says his business has very over-complicated processes, a mix of paper and proprietary software. They want to digitize, but there's little willingness to simplify. Any tips?

Rob Koplowitz48:53

That's a hard one, and it gets back to change management. Some level of executive support is really valuable: someone who can cut through and say this is inefficient and we're doing it because it's a strategic objective. On the ground, process expertise is coming back into vogue. Michael Hammer talked about business process re-engineering 25 years ago; it fell by the wayside as too heavy, but done iteratively, starting small with smaller wins, it's back, with an eye toward automation.

Rob Koplowitz50:25

So first, recognize the process is fundamentally inefficient. Second, get support to address it. Then combine someone who knows how to engineer a more effective process with someone who understands what automation can do. You can bring a horse to water, but there are a lot of external forcing functions, like COVID, causing people to rethink that hesitance.

Niamh Lordan51:08

Paul, Elaine asks: how long would it take to start digitizing processes with FlowForma?

Paul Stone51:22

You can start very quickly. We'll talk about your requirements, identify a specific process pain point and build you a proof of concept, which you can then modify yourself. Our customer onboarding program gets you up and running and self-sufficient within a few weeks, so you see ROI fast and use it to drive further automation. Think three to six weeks to have your first process in production.

Niamh Lordan52:13

Rob, what are your predictions for automation in 2021?

Rob Koplowitz52:31

Our hypothesis going into the upcoming survey is that low-code and digital process automation are coming together and becoming pervasively adopted, and that supporting disciplines like process mining, process modeling and documentation become more widespread, though that will probably emerge a bit more slowly. We take the first step into a world where business people are active partners in driving automation. Since COVID, we're getting many more requests about how to routinize this and democratize development.

Niamh Lordan54:17

We have a few questions about integrations. Paul, how can people integrate FlowForma with other systems?

Paul Stone54:22

First, FlowForma can run without integration and still generate ROI. When you want to integrate, it uses SharePoint as its database, integrates with SQL databases, and connects to other applications through Microsoft Logic Apps, Power Automate or web services, with several connectors built in. We'll normally consult with you and advise the quickest way to integrate.

Niamh Lordan55:31

One more question, for both of you: should an organization start the traditional low-code way before maturing to no-code?

Paul Stone55:51

Go no-code. No-code is faster, and that's the simple truth. If you're confident no-code will deliver what you need in the business, I'd argue it's faster and leave it there. But then I'm a bit biased.

Rob Koplowitz56:24

I'm taken aback by your candor, Paul. They serve different needs. At Forrester we'd ask: do you have professional developers, are they available to help, and what class of applications are you building? You can't go low-code without professional developers to back you up. Map your functional requirements to a no-code tool, and if you can get everything you need, it'll get you there faster. Both are faster than traditional coding; there isn't one that's better, but with a little analysis there's probably one that's better for you.

Niamh Lordan58:03

We're running out of time, so thanks to Rob and Paul for all their time, and to everyone who joined and sent questions; we'll get answers to the ones we missed. A quick survey will come up when the webinar ends. To find out more about FlowForma case studies, or to book a demo, visit flowforma.com. Thanks, everyone, and stay safe.