There’s not really a clear answer.

The reported times vary from a few seconds to minutes, hours, or (shockingly) stretching into days or weeks. KYC, or know-your-customer, refers to the process of verifying and identifying the customers of your bank. It is a crucial, regulatory compliance step that must take place—but the longer it takes, the worse the experience for your users.

In this blog, we’ll cover the overall KYC process, challenges that many banks face with this process. We’ll also dive into why banks should automate the process and how to go about that.

What is Know Your Customer and why is it important?

Imagine you’re running a bank. A potential customer walks in, claiming to be someone they’re not. They provide false identification, and you open an account for them without proper verification.

Turns out, this person is involved in money laundering or other illegal activities. Not only would this put your business at risk, but it could also harm your reputation and potentially lead to legal consequences.

That’s where KYC comes in. By implementing robust KYC processes, you can effectively weed out bad actors, ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, and safeguard your business from financial and reputational damage.

The challenges of traditional KYC processes

Typically, Know Your Customer processes involve collecting and verifying various types of customer information, such as their name, address, date of birth, and proof of identity. This data is then cross-checked against trusted sources, like government databases or credit bureaus, to ensure its authenticity.

For years, the only way to do this was manually. There would be several people whose sole job was to verify the information provided by the customer. Obviously, this would take time considering people would be pouring over paperwork and cross referencing manually.

New technologies such as AI and ML have streamlined and automated the verification process, making it faster and more accurate than ever before. Manual KYC processes are by their very nature time consuming and inefficient. Likewise, since they’re relying on a person to pay close attention to details for a considerable amount of time, they are also error-prone and risky.

5 Benefits/Opportunities of KYC Automation

Automation can be great but if you’ve got RPA, OCR, ML, facial recognition technology (FRT), and web scrapers, these individual functions may not be able to communicate effectively or you’ll drop data within handoffs.

Done properly, however, automation of a Know Your Customer process for banks can have a variety of benefits. Let’s cover the five biggest benefits of KYC automation.

1) Reduce Organizations’ Overheads on Administrative Staff

With more reliable, automated handoffs between people, systems, and departments there’s less pressure on needing to double check the work being done. This can relieve a significant back office burden from your staff.

2) Mitigate risk of fraud

This is what Know Your Customer is all about. Having an automated, scalable process can ensure your bank is protected from being used in the commission of crimes such as money laundering, fraud, or terrorism.

3) Improve customer experience

Call it the Amazon effect. Call it whatever you want but customer expectations and patience have drastically changed. No customer is going to wait through hours or days to be verified for an account opening. Automation ensures you’re keeping wait times as low as possible while also conducting due diligence on identify verification.

4) Can enhance manual KYC checks

One misconception about automation processes is that it should never, ever involve a person. No matter the process, there will be occasions where manual intervention is required. Automation can make sure that the simpler portions of a KYC process are handled automatically so that your human staff intervenes on the smaller, more nuanced cases or tasks.

5) Reduced errors

As the famous adage from Mad Magazine goes: Pobody’s nerfect. At data centers specifically, a vast majority of data errors (75%) are caused by people. By automating your KYC function, you’re reducing the amount of time people are interacting with data as well as the volume that they’ll need to attend to. This goes a long way to reducing errors and, in the long run, can save both time and money.

Use cases of KYC automation

Banks looking to automate their Know Your Customer processes should consider the following use cases.

Identity verification

This one might seem obvious. After all, this is the primary function of a Know Your Customer process. We’ve already covered this point but it’s important enough that it bears repeating—manual identity verification methods are usually laborious and prone to errors. But with KYC automation, these challenges are both mitigated.

Today’s Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning capabilities ensure that they make far fewer errors than humans. Automating the overall KYC process enables swift and precise verification of customer identities.

Compliance with GDPR

GDPR compliance can be a daunting task due to its labyrinthine rules around how and where personally identifiable data (PII) can be used. However, KYC automation simplifies this task. By updating your automation to remain in line with regulatory updates, you can ensure you’re always in line with the latest rules, protecting your bank from potential legal issues and fines.

Data collection/enrichment

Depending on the account type being created or the application by the customer, there can be a lot of information collected about them. KYC automation makes it far easier to streamline the collection of data allowing your team to focus on more strategic tasks. With the most accurate and up-to-date information readily available, you can make informed decisions quickly.

KYC documentation and reporting

The amount of documentation required to verify customer identities and monitor for suspicious activity is vast. This makes reporting for compliance cumbersome and difficult. Banks need to gather and continually update all of this documentation to fulfill KYC requirements and satisfy regulators. By automating the process, you can speed up this reporting using a process engine to orchestrate various parts of your Know Your Customer workflows and have far better insight into where bottlenecks and inefficiencies lie.

Risk Profiling and Assessment

The biggest question that KYC seeks to answer is how risky would it be to do business with a certain customer. Are they on a database or watch list? Is their debt-to-income ratio too high to justify the loan they’ve applied for? Automating KYC makes it far easier to assess risk at scale.

How to automate your KYC process with Camunda

How do you implement this transformative solution? The key lies in a process orchestration platform like Camunda. This powerful tool serves as the core of your KYC automation system.

Once you’ve established the rules and flows throughout the process, the process engine orchestrates the automation of these tasks, ensuring efficient and consistent execution. Here’s a quick way to get started.

Step 1: Understand which part of KYC you’ll be automating

Before just diving in and automating everything, it’s crucial to identify the specific parts of your KYC process that can benefit from automation. Assess the tasks and workflows involved in KYC, and pinpoint areas that are repetitive, time-consuming, or prone to errors. For example, automating lead routing for sales teams for mortgage applications can significantly streamline the process and ensure accurate distribution.

Step 2: Find the right tools

Once you’ve identified the processes to automate, it’s time to find the right tools. Camunda offers a powerful and flexible process engine, specifically designed for automation. It provides high throughput even at scale, and offers both flexibility and security needed to meet your internal team’s requirements while remaining compliant.

Step 3: Implement, test, monitor, improve

Now that you have your processes mapped out and the tools in place, it’s time to start automating KYC. Start by configuring and setting up the automation workflows in Camunda.

Test the automated processes thoroughly to ensure they function as intended. Monitor the performance and gather feedback from your team to identify any bottlenecks or areas for improvement. Continuously refine and optimize the automated KYC processes based on the insights gained.

Closing thoughts

Banks looking to protect themselves from financial and reputational damage should pursue KYC automation as a key part of their overall financial process automation.

By reducing overhead costs, mitigating fraud risk, improving customer experience, enhancing manual checks, and minimizing errors, automation opens up a world of possibilities.

So, if you’re ready to embrace efficiency and accuracy, it’s time to automate your KYC process and unlock a new era of security and compliance.

Don’t let manual processes hold you back—embrace the power of automation and take your organization to new heights using Camunda with a free account and 30-day trial of Professional features! If you’re looking to learn more about overcoming common barriers to digital transformation in the financial industry, check out our digital guide, The Financial Automation Imperative.

The post KYC Automation for Banks: 5 Biggest Benefits appeared first on Camunda.

Obviously, this isn’t good because, ”as complexity increases,” a report by HBR remarked, ”a system’s understandability decreases.” The results are a business run by processes that are unmanageable, unpredictable, or both.

Automation is an effective tool for wrangling complexity. Removing the need for human input in all or parts of a process can help make operations more streamlined, efficient, and less error-prone.

Ironically, once you’ve begun automating multiple systems, complexity rears its head again. The solution is to bring in a system to orchestrate those automated processes no matter the systems or tools in use—and that’s where a process engine comes in.

A process engine has the dual benefits of helping orchestrate automation across the enterprise and helping you do it in a more scalable and efficient way. In this post, we’re going to dig into why.

What is a process engine, and why does it matter?

A process engine, sometimes referred to as a workflow engine, is the beating heart of any business process management system. In short, a process engine is a tool that serves to design, execute, monitor, and optimize business processes, even and including those that are 100% automated.

Process engines help make sense of intricate operations within a business. They ensure that tasks are executed in the correct order and at the correct time in conjunction with other workflows that might be happening simultaneously. They help deconstruct an opaque black box of sprawling, monolithic business processes into understandable (and monitorable) chunks.

Process engines and automation aren’t just for multinational global enterprises however—any organization with processes that span across various departments can benefit from automating all or part of the process.

For instance, let’s use a customer signing up for a SaaS (software as a service) product as an example. From the time that a person first learns of the product through becoming a customer, they may have interacted with five or more different departments. Marketing may have been tracking the person’s information as they were learning more about the product, Sales would have gotten involved when the customer wanted to sign up for a paid plan, and Customer Support would have been responsible for managing the relationship.

Automation can help greatly with streamlining handoffs between any of these points. At the same time, the process extends far beyond these three teams. The legal department, accounting, and IT team might be involved in various capacities as well. The more complicated a process like this becomes, the more a process engine can help facilitate that customer experience by seamlessly passing information and completing tasks from end-to-end.

How to harness the power of a process engine for automation

Every company is going to be in a different place in their automation journey.

Few may be starting with a complete greenfield and more will have automated some but not all processes that could use it. The last, smallest group of all will have many processes automated. Here’s how each of those groups should be leveraging a process engine.

Zero or few processes automated

If you’ve got more space to work with, the most important thing is that you incorporate a process engine by automating a clearly delineated, non-business-critical process. This should be a process that can be easily cordoned off from the rest of the business (and compensated for) should the test not function properly.

Unfortunately, many leap too quickly from a murky, possible problem to “this is the tool we’ll use” far too quickly. It’s only after really understanding the process from the get-go that you can move on to understanding which process engine can interface with the aspect of the business you’re looking to automate.

One example might be automated lead routing for sales teams. The team is looking for inbound leads to be assigned to the right person, in the proper territory, with the correct account distribution. This would be a perfect process that can be automated.

Should things go awry, a person monitoring can still adjust and fix without losing any opportunities. Then, and only then, should teams start exploring possible tools to use, be sure to consider one that offers high performance, even at scale, and offers the flexibility your internal teams need.

Many processes automated but looking to scale

If your organization has a more advanced automation program, the struggles and challenges take on a different hue. Instead of trying to figure out which processes to automate, you’re instead looking at how these processes interact with each other or ensure data integrity.

The first step in this case is to have a complete understanding of the way these automated processes fit into the overall structure of your business workflows. Begin by mapping the various processes that include automation from end-to-end.

Using a standard, visual language like Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) can make this step less time-consuming as it will allow stakeholders from across the organization to contribute their portion. Then, using the diagram(s) created, begin to identify how those automated processes fit into the larger enterprise.

It’s vital you map these processes before adding a process engine into the mix. You can’t have the process engine operating as a centralized hub if you don’t know what parts to add into it. Likewise, by ensuring you have the complete process outlined, a solid process engine can provide analytics and show you where the bottlenecks and inefficiencies are. As you incorporate using a process engine to orchestrate existing automations as well as adding new ones, you’ll ensure you’re scaling faster and in a more deliberate manner.

What to look for in a process engine

The selection of the tool your team is using to properly automate the business process you’ve identified is equally as important. As you’re looking to select your tool, here are a few things to keep in mind.

Durability

Durability refers to a process engine’s ability to complete processes over a long period of time.

Business processes may cross multiple workflows and require input from various stakeholders over their duration.

You’ll want a process engine that can effectively handle state persistence, message correlation, timeout handling, and status transparency without losing information as it executes.

Resilience

Having a resilient process engine means that should an error be thrown at any point during a process, the workflow engine is able to either A) retry the same step over again or B) follow a designated backup plan.

Without this quality, it would mean that if one part of a process fails the entire workflow breaks even if the error is only due to a small part of the process.

Scalability

When searching for an automation engine, it’s essential to prioritize scalability.

Any automation engine you’re considering adopting should be scalable and able to accommodate growth. This is a crucial function for businesses that want to stay competitive and responsive to changing demands.

A scalable workflow engine can adapt to the needs of a growing business, whether it’s deploying a process across multiple departments or managing a high volume of transactions.

Reusability

Reusability refers to a process engine’s ability to use and repurpose existing processes or process fragments, rather than starting from scratch every time.

This can significantly reduce development time and increase efficiency since the same processes can be used across different areas of the business. For instance, a customer onboarding process may be utilized across multiple departments such as sales and customer service.

With reusability, businesses can save time and resources by leveraging existing processes and building upon them. This also ensures consistency and standardization, improving the overall quality of the processes.

Ready to automate and optimize your processes?

If you’re looking for a process engine that fits all of the important criteria, consider building or migrating your automation efforts to Camunda. Every day, Zeebe, the process engine behind Camunda, is helping huge enterprises and scrappy start-ups alike with a cloud-native design that delivers superior performance, resilience, and security.

With its distributed architecture designed for high throughput, Zeebe offers horizontal scalability that can accommodate the ever-changing demands of businesses. Furthermore, the sophisticated mechanism for asynchronous communication with microservices and language-agnostic approach makes it possible to build clients in any programming language.

By utilizing Camunda (and by extension, Zeebe) enterprises can future-proof their process orchestration efforts and stay ahead of the competition.

Find out more about Zeebe or give it a try with our 30-day, no-strings-attached free trial of Camunda.

The post How to Harness the Power of a Process Engine for Automation appeared first on Camunda.

Later innovations like the automated teller machine and the debit card continued the banking automation trend of digitizing analog processes. With the advent of the internet, machine learning, and cloud computing, there are still so many automation opportunities to explore. 

For instance, using AI for risk assessment, automating the classification of unstructured data, or reducing manual work can help you increase the agility of the overall organization, improve the customer experience, and get new features and products to market much more rapidly.

We’re going to explore six concepts to keep in mind for your bank’s next digital transformation project.

1. Understand the process to be automated

Knowing what you’re trying to automate is the first, most important step, and you need to think about the processes affected both up and downstream. 

Forrester reports that “managers often see automation as a technology initiative that can be led by the IT department.” This only gets you a fraction of what’s possible as IT will only be able to automate “separate and distinct parts of the process” rather than looking at things holistically. 

Therefore, banks must be willing to reengineer their processes completely rather than stick with “this is just the way we’ve always done it” or legacy thinking.

The best way to tackle this task is by mapping your process with a language like Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). 

Using this standard can make this process easier and give your team a visual way of representing the process. It doesn’t matter where the reader sits, in IT or the business side of the organization, if they understand BPMN they will be able to interpret the model and give feedback.

It’s for this reason that more and more organizations have adopted BPMN because:

• It’s a respected standard by an independent third party rather than a proprietary language
• Despite its simplicity, there is power in how ideas can be expressed cleanly
• IT-forward organizations rely on it heavily because it makes hidden business logic more visible, reducing back-and-forth handoffs between IT and business functions
• When executable, BPMN can drastically speed up implementation

 To get started using BPMN, check out our quickstart guide and free BPMN modeler here.

2. Decide if you are digitalizing or just digitizing

As we mentioned earlier, much of the previous automation efforts in banking have centered on the idea of digitization rather than digitalization. 

While the two words are 2 letters apart, they mean quite different approaches when it comes to automation. According to Gartner, digitization takes an analog process and changes it to a digital form without any different-in-kind changes to the process itself. Think of this like the transition from a check to a debit card.

Digitalization, on the other hand, Gartner defines as the “use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities”. A good example, in this case, would be the difference between calling a taxi station versus using a rideshare app to get a ride to the airport.

Take time to consider the process you’re automating and ask yourself:

• Are there any opportunities to streamline or improve this process? 
• Could there be a way that the process could drastically change with the use of current technologies?
• What are some potential ways we’re stuck in legacy thinking with this process?
• How can this help our internal teams (eg. easier to modify by the dev team, less manual work)

3. Change management principles for automation in banking

It’s easy to grasp the promise that automation in banking holds—But bringing these plans to fruition within a large enterprise can seem an insurmountable task.

This is where practicing proper change management principles comes into play, chief among which is having a cross-departmental group that meets regularly and shares updates or information. In other words, forming a Center of Excellence (CoE). 

These groups have been shown to help with centralizing and sharing information, fostering collaboration, and driving adoption. 

Recent surveys of IT executives show that an increasing number of teams are establishing these CoEs in order to share best practices and drive organization-wide digital transformation.

As far as Camunda clients go, we’ve seen it time and again with automation initiatives for our clients that a CoE can often spell the difference between merely meeting expectations and huge transformations for an organization.

4. Consider the customer experience in banking

Customer expectations across the board in all industries are changing. Thanks to the huge digital shift in the last few years, consumers expect every single business to operate much in the same way Amazon does: efficiently, offering an unparalleled digital experience, and tailored to your preferences. 

In banking, these digital experiences are across various facets of an organization – from automated loan processing to customized product offerings – and consumers expect these things fast. If people can get a quicker decision from another bank (eg. in applying for a credit card), they will. As CIOReview reports, with nearly all US adults (88%) using financial tech in some capacity, many are more than willing to compare their current experience with potential alternatives.

What this means is that while continuing on your digital transformation journey, your teams should have an eye toward more composable architecture types such as those offered by microservices. Composable architectures grant you the ability to make updates to existing systems on the fly with little to no downtime and also allow for the rapid launch of new initiatives.

Business continuity is obviously a top priority for banking institutions. You’re going to have a lot of angry customers if your banking systems or app is down on their payday.

5. Respond to market conditions using automation in banking

Another benefit of composable architectures is the ability to leverage emerging technologies or make changes as the market conditions shift. 

These shifts will look different depending on organizational priorities, economic factors, and customer requests.

Capital One, for instance, was struggling with its back-office operations. Their previous process for processing legal documents was manual and error-prone due to complexities surrounding various state and jurisdiction-based decisions and actions. 

They were eager to not only address customers’ needs faster and save operation costs so they looked to automation in order. Find out how they modernized their case management systems using automation in their CamundaCon presentation.

By implementing your automation plan in a strategic way, you can work in a more agile fashion and get new products and services out the door quickly. This will allow you to account for periodic forces like inflation, staffing issues, and other economic forces as they happen.

6.  Avoid automating everything at once

The jump between automation proof of concept to a full process automation program can be the difference between taking a dip into a swimming pool versus a dive into the Marianas Trench.

The fastest, most effective route to your overall digital transformation efforts lies in not trying to do everything at once. 

One of our clients, Intuit, used automation in order to streamline their workflows both internally and externally. They started with just a single workflow but scaled up to more than 20+ with a peak of over a million executions a day. To dig into how they did this, check out their CamundaCon session here. 

The moral of Intuit’s story is to stick with projects that have clear beginnings and endpoints. These might include applying for a new account, loan origination, or fulfilling certain regulatory compliance requirements such as Know Your Customer (KYC).

Our chief technologist, Bernd Ruecker has explored and explained this idea at length and has the following suggestions on how best to tackle this point:

• Start with a project, not a program
• Don’t start big and strategic endeavors too early in your journey. Instead, go step-by-step until you are ready to scale
• Resist the temptation to create your own platform
• Let your lessons learned influence your target picture, don’t just adopt some consulting company’s best practices
• Provide reusable components if they increase productivity, but as libraries teams want to adapt (instead of having to adapt)
• Define learning paths for new people or teams
• Make sure to let projects breathe and project owners lead the decision-making process

If you’re interested in learning more, we’ve consolidated all of our consultants’ methods and thinking behind the success of hundreds of automation projects in Scaling Process Automation at Your Company.

Conclusion

Once you’ve automated portions of your processes, it’s important to be able to piece them together across business functions and from the second a customer makes a request until the task or issue is resolved entirely. 

This means that process orchestration is just as important as automating them. 

For more examples of how automation in banking is changing the landscape, check out our recording of Process Automation Forum Live: Banking & Finance. 

There, you’ll hear how Morgan Stanley & Truist are using automation to streamline everything from customer onboarding and customer service to risk management and regulatory compliance. Explore the potential of process automation with a 30 day free-trial of Camunda 8 >>

The post Automation in banking: 6 considerations for digital transformation appeared first on Camunda.

It’s neither faster nor more efficient. It’s just…digital now. Here’s why this sort of thinking is a major obstacle to taking full advantage of the opportunities provided by digital transformation:

With that logic the process itself remains largely unchanged. It’s not really transformed and can be considered part of a company’s legacy as opposed to the path forward.

With customer expectations changing more rapidly than organizations can, the only way to maintain a competitive advantage is by phasing out a legacy mindset from your organization.

In this post, we’ll explore what exactly a legacy mindset is, how it’s an obstacle to becoming a truly innovative enterprise, and how to overcome one in your organization.

What is a Legacy Mindset?

A legacy mindset doesn’t necessarily just live in the minds of people. It can also be present in processes, technology, or worst-case scenario, all three.

People with this legacy mindset are “perfectly happy to keep plugging away in the same way they always have” says Bill Franks, Chief Analytics Officer at IAA, “regardless of how the world is changing around them.”

During his CamundaCon 2019 keynote address Jakob Freund, CEO of Camunda, pointed out the main way to (not) become a digital-first enterprise.

In Jakob’s words, “established corporations trend toward where they’re most comfortable and can occupy the high ground…Unfortunately, this isn’t where the battle [for competitive advantage] is happening.”

Losing competitive advantage, especially in industries where there are rapid disruptions happening or margins are razor-thin, can be detrimental regardless of whether your organization has been around for 10 years or 100.

Limitations of a Legacy Mindset

It’s the people behind the tech who will either make or break any sort of digital initiative at your organization.

Let’s say you’re starting to build a case internally for a scalable process automation program at your company, you may be battling against some team member’s trauma from experiencing previous “failed” digital transformation projects. Which might’ve involved their team taking a previously analog process, copying it, and then pasting it into a digital format with no desired results to follow. Each application and process require a custom transition plan to ensure it has what it needs to run smoothly from one environment to the next. 

Oversimplifying the process is a common problem and one that was encountered by Dr. Eric Euerlings, Senior Integration Domain Architect at Helsana, Switzerland’s leading provider of health and accident insurance. 

Dr. Euerlings said, “many companies in the late 2000s got everyone together and said ’we need to organize our company around processes.’ Process this and process that – becoming a huge process engine. They thought if they’d just rebuild the processes in a new tool like Pega, then it would work. Mostly, it didn’t.”

While the steps to overcome a legacy mindset are simple, they’re not easy. It’s not a quick fix. It’s a rewarding journey as illustrated by the story Dr. Euerlings shared during his presentation at CamundaCon titled The Journey from Ideas to Production.

5 Steps to Overcoming a Legacy Mindset

Speak early, speak often

It’s important to start building a multi-functional network across your organization. Automating a business process from start to finish, and transforming it into something more efficient and automated necessitates cross-departmental cooperation. 

As Dr. Euerlings said during his presentation, “superheroes don’t fit well into corporations.” This means looking for allies in seemingly unlikely places depending on the sort of process you’re working on.

For instance, if you’re dealing with something that involves contracts or the like, you should absolutely seek out some friends in the legal/compliance area as they’ll need to be involved in the process eventually. Why not get them involved with the project from the start?

Speak about the right things

Whatever you do, regardless of the project, do not begin with discussing  technical things. Focus on the value and the benefits that such a project might bring to their workload. Explain the ways it’ll increase transparency and efficiency.

The most important thing Dr. Euerlings noted is that you must have a team member that can be bridge “between techies and the suits”. You need someone who is able to translate technical language into business objectives and opportunities, and vice versa.

Test a small project

After socializing your plans for automation, the next step is to choose a pilot project that will operate as a proof of concept.

As we’ve written about before, the fastest, most effective route to digital transformation is picking a lighthouse and pilot project that gets results fast. Find out more about how to choose the right project that will help you get off on the right foot in scaling process automation at your company.

Train, train, train. Then, train again.

Training is an essential ingredient to succeeding in this process.

Dr. Euerlings related that on-site training in particular was an essential ingredient in Helsana’s success. Training gives your team the opportunity to bring in new ideas into their work and build up new insight they can layer on top of their existing knowledge.

For instance, “They get to learn and see all the ways to integrate with external systems that really drive their enthusiasm,” Dr. Euerlings said.

Present everywhere

The last but most vital part of stamping out the legacy mindset once and for all is sharing your success story with process automation everywhere. 

Celebrate your successes across the organization, loud and proud. Do “roadshows” across departments, business, and IT alike, making sure to present in a way that will resonate with your audience.

That might even include speaking at CamundaCon like Dr. Euerlings did.

Modernize and Conquer

Dr. Euerlings ended his presentation talking about how overcoming the legacy mindset was so impactful to his business that they have a backlog of new project requests. “We have actually had to block requests” he stated.

This may seem like an outlier example but automation programs that have the best chance at succeeding like the one at Helsana begin small and don’t try to do too much all at once. 

For a step-by-step guide on how to accomplish this, check out our guide Scaling Process Automation at your Company. Inside, you’ll discover the methods and thinking behind the success of hundreds of automation projects.

The post How to Overcome a Legacy Mindset appeared first on Camunda.

Legacy and homegrown infrastructure are simply not capable of keeping pace with the digital transformation advancements that are defining a more complex business environment than ever before.

Maintaining a competitive advantage means automation. Specifically, leveraging as many technologies as possible – a concept labeled by Gartner as hyperautomation.

As defined by Gartner®, hyperautomation means “a business-driven, disciplined approach…to rapidly identify, vet and automate as many business and IT processes as possible [and] involves the orchestrated use of multiple technologies, tools or platforms.”

Read on to learn three reasons why top enterprises are using automation to reach their goals.

Tackling Those Pesky Scalability Issues

Ah, scalability – the bane of engineer’s existence.

Defining scalability issues are best illustrated with a story.

There was a restaurant in my hometown. It was a hole-in-the-wall sort of place that bar-none, served absolutely the best Italian food outside of the North End in Boston. They were doing so well that they moved across the street to a bigger space…and promptly closed within a year.

What changed?

They couldn’t scale their operation to accommodate the increased demand. You can probably think of a few local businesses that fell into this same trap. 

Automation may be the key to scalability but it has to be used in the correct way. If your program tries to do too much too soon, you can end up with more problems than you started with.

That’s why we advocate starting small and building upon your successes from there. 

Other key guidelines that every automation project should keep in mind for maximum scalability include:

1. Start with a project, not a program.
2. Don’t start big and strategic endeavors too early in your journey. Instead, go step-by-step until you are ready to scale.
3. Resist the temptation to create your own platform.
4. Get buy-in from your decision-maker. This is much easier to obtain when there is some real pain that your workflow is going to solve.
5. Let your lessons learned influence your target picture, don’t just adopt some consulting company’s best practices.
6. Make sure you give experienced people the opportunity to help in follow-on projects.
7. Capture best practices and ensure knowledge sharing.
8. Provide reusable components if they increase productivity, potentially as libraries that teams want to adapt.
9. Establish an internal consulting approach, probably organized as a center of excellence.
10. Define learning paths for new people or teams.
11. Make sure to let projects breathe and let project owners make their own decisions.

For more details of what we mean by each of these points, check out our guide on Scaling Process Automation at your Company.

Making Better Use of People’s Skills and Time 

Let’s face it, there are things that computers are just plain better at. 

I don’t take it personally that my TI-89 calculator was better at Calculus 2 than I was back in college. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure any random potato from the cafeteria was as well.

In all seriousness, computers will always be better at certain tasks than humans, like remembering things indefinitely and paying attention constantly without fail.

That’s because according to chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov, automation and the assistance of computers combined with people is the ultimate combination. Unlike life, chess is a game of tactics and perfect information. 

You can see 100% of the information you need in order to act at any one time. Therefore, there are a finite (though large) number of moves that can happen next so a computer needs to only calculate all of those millions of calculations to settle on what is the next best action. 

It’s a tactical choice rather than a strategic one.

When Garry Kasparov lost to the computer chess player Deep Blue in 1997, it was hailed as the end of humanity’s superiority over the computer. The next year, he organized a different sort of tournament where each player was paired with a computer to calculate moves for them. In one case, a player that Kasparov had soundly beaten a year earlier instead played the grandmaster to a 3-3 draw.

As Kasparov wrote in a New York Review of Books article that by pairing people with machines, “we [people] could concentrate on strategic planning instead of spending so much time on calculations. Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions.”

Either way, designing a better process remains key. Kasparov continued by saying that “Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.”

If we apply this to the paradigm of automation and digital transformation, merely moving an analog process to digital without any improvements, well, you might as well have just left it as is.

Automating the rote tasks and tactics at your organization can free up your employees to focus on their more, higher-value tasks.

Lose the Competitive Advantage in One Easy Step

During his 2019 keynote speech at CamundaCon, our CEO and co-founder, Jakob Freund, showed the satisfaction metrics for an insurance company over the course of several years. 

The decline in satisfaction  wasn’t due to a worse response time for resolving issues, which actually improved over that timeframe. What changed was customer expectations. 

The ability of companies like Amazon to deliver products and services in increasingly efficient ways has made the average consumer expect that same sort of customer experience from every organization they encounter in their daily lives.

Every company today is held to the same standards and if you can’t deliver your products or services in the way that your customers want, someone else will. According to the International Data Corporation, by 2022, they expect that “more than half the global economy will be based on or influenced by digital as most products and services utilize a digital delivery model or require digital augmentation to remain competitive.”

One of the main things that hold most organizations back from achieving this sort of efficiency is their current infrastructure being unwilling or unable to adapt quickly to changes. That’s why top enterprises are adopting process automation platforms like Camunda to help remodel their core technologies.

By automating the business processes that are at the core of their organization, enterprises are not only able to make them more efficient but easily improve them as well.

We’ve written before on this blog about how to Create a Better Customer Experience with Process Automation, so we’ll summarize the main points here:

1. Winning the Battle against Bottlenecks – use a workflow engine like Camunda to automate business processes from inception to completion across various systems and end-points and use your increased visibility to identify where bottlenecks are.
2. Be Where Your Customers Are –  leverage an automated tool for consolidating your communication channels can help your team recognize and prioritize the messages that need to be responded to.
3. Bridge the Gap Between Digital and Physical – Chris Gianutsos from Ernst & Young wrote that “after a year of sacrifice and social distancing, consumers are craving more in-person experiences but also expect that the handoff between digital and physical interactions will be seamless.”

Conclusion

Automation is the path forward for enterprises looking to provide a top-notch customer experience and maintain a competitive advantage.

Learn how to maximize the results from teams pursuing these automation initiatives in Gartner’s® Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022: Hyperautomation.

Gartner, Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022: Hyperautomation, By Stephanie Stoudt-Hansen, Frances Karamouzis, Keith Guttridge, 18 October 2021

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

The post 3 Reasons Why Top Enterprises Are Automating appeared first on Camunda.

Snicket also said that “A library is like an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance, particularly if the library is very tall and the surrounding area has been flooded.” 

Please take a moment to remember that taking advice from people is often a hit-or-miss sort of thing.

On the first point, I agree wholeheartedly—I’ve usually got an emergency book stashed in my car just in case of a particularly long wait in a queue.

With some of us having a little more time these days to catch up on our reading as we dive further into the holiday season, we once again asked our Camunda colleagues and our community to share their reading recommendations — what’s on their shelf right now and what they reach for every once in a while to re-read.

Books to De-stress

The weather outside gets frightful this time of year…at least in the northern hemisphere. The holidays don’t do much to help. De-stress a bit with these favorites:

How to Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis

“During what has been a very stressful year, this book has helped me to reframe how I approach household tasks, time management and more. It has been helpful for approaching cleaning and chores from a space of compassion, which has been invaluable as of late.”

– Rin Oliver, Developer Advocate (Camunda)

The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor

“I’ve really enjoyed this book. It discusses how happiness tends to precede success, not the other way around. Oftentimes, we’re let down when these “things” we acquire don’t yield more happiness. This book takes a deep dive into finding our own happiness, which, in time, will likely lead to the success we dream of.”

– Christina Ausley, Technical Writer (Camunda)

If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura

“I have an end-of-year tradition where I re-read this, my favourite ever book. I’m a fan of setting new personal goals in the new year and this book does a great job of making you reflect on yourself and how you’re living your life, but also does it in a very refreshing and light-hearted way (it has some great ‘laugh out loud’ moments).”

– Eve Plumridge, People Experience (Camunda)

Books for Upskilling

Actor Harrison Ford once told a story of his pre-Han Solo days as a carpenter.  He worked with this architect and would tell them “Look, I’m terribly sorry, but I want to change that by half an inch,” and they’d say “No limit for better.” I think that is a worthy credo.

If you’re looking to get better at something, these books might just do the job:

Building Microservices by Sam Newman

“It is very well written and explains a lot of important concepts when it comes to microservices without being too boring or ‘dry’.”

– Nele Uhlemann, Developer Advocate (Camunda)

Product-Led Growth by Wes Bush

“Best book this year, not because of groundbreaking news but because it contains a lot of really helpful, practical advice that helps to structure our own internal thinking around how Camunda can continue to grow.”

– Jakob Freund, CEO (Camunda)

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

“This rather old book holds true today and in the future due to simple but effective principles. I like the simple hints on how communication is key to being likable and convincing. Some of them, you might know others you may not be aware of.”

– Björn Richerzhagen (MINAUTICS Berlin)

Books for Broadening your Horizons

“All the secrets of the world are contained in books,” Snicket says. “Read at your own risk.” 

These next few books are a great entry to get a different perspective on life whether that’s through fiction, history, myth, religion or data.

Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution by Mike Duncan

“I’m a big fan of Mike Duncan and this year he released this book which inspired me to create a process that, funny enough, inspired a series of video tutorials!”

– Niall Deehan, Developer Advocate (Camunda)

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“It’s just my all-time favorite.”

-Nastasja Johnston, Head of People Experience (Camunda)

Not My Father’s Son: A Memoir by Alan Cumming

“Personally I love learning about people. I studied counseling and psychotherapy so that for me autobiographies are my favorite and super interesting. This one in particular is fabulous. It’s all about his upbringing and the challenges he overcame.” 

– Carol Teskey, Chief People Officer (Camunda)

Bhagavad-Gita As It Is by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

“Highly regarded by scholars and philosophers, I’ve been reading the Bhagavad-Gita daily for 25 years now, and have not reached the limit of its applicability to the complexity of life’s challenges, and the search for purpose.”

– Josh Wulf, Developer Advocate (Camunda)

Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado-Perez

“The book is about how the world we know, government policy, medical research, technology, workplaces, media, etc. is built for and by men. Women are sadly overlooked and this has bad consequences not only for women but for men as well. I liked that the book is backed up with data and information from studies around the globe. It is an eye-opener, even if painful, but very useful to raise awareness about the topic.” 

– Gerardo Manzano (JIT)

Books by Camundi

Our Camundi are a busy bunch. In addition to catching up on their reading, our team is also quite prolific. Check out some of the titles written by our team below:

• Practical Process Automation by Bernd Ruecker, Camunda Co-founder & Chief Technologist

• Real-Life BPMN by Jakob Freund & Bernd Ruecker, Camunda Co-Founders

• Meaningless, Repetitive Work: Hilariously Honest IT Job Ads from the Legendary Recruiter by Josh Wulf, Developer Advocate

• The Business Value of Developer Relations: How and Why Technical Communities Are Key To Your Success by Mary Thengvall, Director of Developer Relations

The End?

A special thanks to everyone who answered my Slack messages, emails, Zoom calls, letters by owl, faxes, smoke signals, and other communications. You’re wonderful, wonderful people. 

If you need any inspiration for why you should pick up one or several of the above, we’ll go back to Lemony Snicket again (who I’m currently reading).

He’s written a new book titled Poison for Breakfast, which is as irreverent as it is weird and charming. Anyway, Snicket says that “well-read people are less likely to be evil.” And isn’t that what we all try to do this time of year? 

Right? Don’t look at me like that. I might start to have questions.

The post The Camunda Holiday Reading List 2021 appeared first on Camunda.

For instance, there’s only one codebase you have to worry about which makes deployment easier and fairly straightforward, at least…at first.

As your codebase expands, your organization can run headlong into one of the key limitations of this architecture style, scalability.

Once your monolith passes a certain point of size, releases become more complicated to wrangle and whole portions of the code that should not have been forgotten become lost.

This has led many enterprises to decompose their monolithic architectures, breaking them down into their composite services, and restyling them into microservices-driven architectures. 

According to O’Reilly, this isn’t an uncommon practice. 

In a survey taken last year, O’Reilly reported that:

“Almost one-third (29%) of respondents say their employers are migrating or implementing a majority of their systems (more than  50%) using microservices.”

If you’ve decided to embark on this path and want to mitigate the risk of downtime, there’s only one surefire way to go about it, methodically.

Check out the infographic below to get a snapshot of all three phases each decomposition should go through.

What This Means For You

Decomposing a monolith basically comes down to three C’s: 

• Capture
• Communication
• Capabilities

However, merely implementing microservices in place of a monolith isn’t a cure in itself – they aren’t some sort of business panacea (though that’d be nice).

As the number of microservices involved in a single business process increases, serious drawbacks can occur if you’re not careful. 

Orchestrating and monitoring business processes end-to-end can turn into a nightmare and severely limit scalability, eliminating any benefits the use of microservices may have had. 

That makes it vitally important to carefully think through and map out your journey as you decompose your monolith and continue to build upon your newly established architecture with microservices.

What’s Next?

For more information on this topic, we recommend checking out our collection of microservices resources, Ultimate Guide to Process Automation and Microservices. Inside, you’ll find a collection of webinars, white papers, and blog posts to provide you with best practices and tips around leveraging microservices in your automation program.

Automate Any Process, Anywhere

Digital transformation initiatives can’t avoid all potential roadblocks. Learn how to overcome them when they arise.

Download the whitepaper

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