CIO and IT leaders have the greatest opportunities to modernize their enterprise platforms, change the culture, and deliver digital business transformations. The secret is out – while first-era digital transformations were driven by improving customer experiences and leading the organization to be more data-driven, all roads on the customer journey map lead to efficient, scalable, and intelligent digital process automation.

So while competitors are lifting and shifting legacy applications to public clouds, progressive CIOs and IT leaders seek a workforce multiplier by breaking data silos and deploying an intelligent process automation platform.

These IT leaders bring low-code, RPAs, chatbot, decision support, machine learning, and workflow orchestration to their business teams and empower them to reimagine scalable operations. They’re tackling the most visible and often more complex business processes, including customer onboarding, vendor management, and quote-to-cash processes.

CIOs see ROI delivered in multiple ways. For example, a recent Forrester study identified that Bizagi’s platform offered 288% financial returns. CIOs seek benefits other than cost savings, such as increased net promoter scores, realized upsell opportunities, and improved end-user productivity gains.

What is an Intelligent Process Automation Platform

What’s not to like about automation? The CFO gets cost savings, leaders benefit from more streamlined operations, and customers are happier when their expectations are met.

Only that automation sets a very high bar on what machines can perform reliably, especially when employees often interpret automation to mean “without any human involvement.”

For example, you can automate many steps in a loan application and its approval processes when the applicant checks all the right boxes. However, most financial transactions have complex exceptions and actions that require orchestration across multiple systems. Managers and employees know the daily complications and oversimplifying their jobs with only rudimentary automations often leads to a backlash from vocal detractors.

That’s why CIOs and IT leaders need more than simple task automation, departmental applications, or one-off data analysis.

Digital leaders recognize the importance of intelligence and orchestration to modernize workflows, meet customer expectations, leverage machine learning capabilities, and enable implementing of the required business rules.

An intelligence automation platform brings together three powerful elements:

• The intelligence from machine learning, decision systems, and exception handling
• The automation of digital processes, repeat tasks, and complex orchestrations
• The collaboration from enabling more people in the organization to make data-informed decisions, improve operational quality, and enhance customer experiences

The collaboration is the “secret sauce” to drive transformation because it enables employees from the business, technology, and analytics to align and implement smart and efficient business processes.

How Intelligent Process Automation Enables Transformation and ROI

How does an intelligent process automation platform work in practice? It requires a platform with several capabilities that are easy to use and with elements of the workflow, that subject matter experts can implement with low-code tools. Intelligent process automation platform capabilities include case management to support enterprise services, business process management to perform workflow analysis, business process modeling to orchestrate workflows, and integrations to common RPA, ERP, and ECM platforms.

Empowering transformation comes from the full integration of capabilities and engaging operational subject matter experts using low-code implementations. Calculating the ROI from an intelligent process automation platform includes hard benefits such as cost savings and improved service deliverability, and soft benefits, including greater employee satisfaction and improved business agility.

CIO and IT leaders recognize that long-term, transformational benefits come from intelligent process automations that empower people, democratize information, and simplify business processes.

This post is brought to you by Bizagi.

The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Bizagi.