Digitalizing Core Business Processes: There Is Still a Lot of Work to Do with Basic Process Improvement

In “The State of Intelligent Information Management: Getting Ahead of the Digital Transformation Curve,” AIIM made the case that every organization is on – or should be on! – a Digital Transformation journey. The heart of this Transformation journey is understanding, anticipating, and redefining internal and external customer experiences. AIIM believes that Digital Transformation effectiveness is imperiled by a rising tide of information chaos and confusion and that rising tide of information chaos and confusion is creating a demand for new information management practices that extend beyond traditional Enterprise Content Management.

Our research in the State of the Industry report identified Digitalizing Core Organizational Processes as currently the most important of the 4 practice areas for organizations relative to achieving their Digital Transformation goals, and so our objective in this Industry Watch was to probe more deeply into how organizations view process automation and to determine whether the reality of their current efforts is enough to achieve true Digital Transformation.

Our research leads to these three core findings:

1. True Digital Transformation requires more than just digitizing back end processes.
2. Many organizations have yet to do the very basic work of process automation, putting them at a severe disadvantage in their efforts to embrace Digital Transformation. Despite the relative maturity of many core process improvement technologies, there is still a significant market opportunity here for solution providers, although this kind of basic process standardization should not be confused with true Digital Transformation.
3. New technologies – like Robotic Process Automation, Blockchain, Low and No-code Process Engines, and Intelligent Capture – open up opportunities to not only improve process, but to totally rethink them.

Key Findings

Only 35% of organizations would rank their organizations as an 8, 9, or 10 on a ten-point scale, measuring their overall effectiveness in automating, monitoring, and controlling their core business processes. The average self-assessment is 6.35.

67% of organizations report that less than half of their processes are automated.

Those that embraced the first wave of process technologies did a good job of attacking many core process problems; less than 30% of organizations rank their organizations as below average relative to such core process metrics as response outliers, irregularities, stuck-in-process delays, process completion times, compliance errors, sub-optimum routing, and process failure rates.

Fairly traditional back-end operations are cited as the prime targets for process improvement. These include processes like internal reviews and approvals (48%), HR processes (36%), sales processes and contracts (34%), customer correspondence (32%), and finance (29%).