Digital transformation made easy

Corporate digital transformation is a bit like government nutrition guidelines to eat five serves of vegetables a day: almost everyone knows what they should be doing, and why they should be doing it – yet few manage to achieve the goal.

Several studies of large US enterprises have found that while most have embarked on some form of digital transformation, as many as 70 per cent have failed. According to Forbesmagazine, this wasted investment in doomed digital change could be costing American businesses an estimated $US900 billion.

The crux of the problem, according to Nintex, a global leader in process management and automation, is an overburden on IT departments in the digital transformation process.

In a recent survey of 450 US decision makers directly involved in their organisation’s digital transformation strategies, Nintex found that IT bottlenecks, budget shortfalls and a limited pool of in-house coding talent were the main culprits stifling the digitisation process.

“The problem time and again is that people over-think the problem,” says Ryan Duguid, Nintex’s ‘Chief Evangelist’, who is on a mission to spread the gospel of democratising digital transformation beyond the IT department.

“While it pays to start with the end in mind and have a clearly defined strategy, there is a tendency to do so at the expense of addressing the glaring problems right in front of your eyes,” says Duguid. “Management says, we better bring in consultants to identify and document all our processes – we’ll find the highly strategic ones and automate those, and we’ll simulate, and we’ll optimise, and on and on it goes. That’s all well and good, but big initiatives bring big risks, and history is littered with failed projects of this sort. In the meantime, what happens to all those everyday improvements that could be made across the entire organisation – improvements in targeting customer satisfaction, employee engagement, pace of innovation, risk reduction and operational efficiency?”

Compounding the problem, Duguid says, is that companies have traditionally relied on a select few with advanced technical skills to do the heavy lifting as they move to digitise and automate processes. “There are only so many developers in the world, and often they are one step removed from understanding the true nature of the problems they are trying to address. As a result, there’s only so much you can tackle in your business over any given period.”

He says Nintex’s Workflow Cloud platform offers a circuit breaker to this IT challenge. The platform gives both IT and non-technical professionals right across an organisation – from sales and marketing to human resources and legal, to finance – access to easy-to-use, powerful tools that enable fast digitisation and automation of the business processes they use every day – no coding required. At the same time, it serves as a powerful accelerator for professional developers, enabling them to break the back of process problems and get on with writing code for the areas where it’s really needed. With the platform’s visual design canvas and intuitive drag-and-drop tools, users can quickly map and document business processes, automate workflows, create forms and apps that capture information and link users to business processes, and measure and analyse process efficiencies. Says Duguid: “It’s about searching out every little opportunity across the organisation – the hundreds and thousands of processes you can automate, not just a handful of the most visible.” Duguid acknowledges that companies will always require code to tackle their most complex problems. To this end, the Nintex Workflow Cloud has an Xtensibility framework to enable developers to customise the platform to meet their individual requirements. Still, he says there are thousands of everyday processes that can be easily automated on the platform without a single line of code – from employee recruitment and leave requests in the HR department, to discount approval processes in sales, and expense management in finance. He says one customer has automated no less than 120,000 discrete processes throughout its business. “The way they did that was not by hiring a massive team of developers and consultants, but rather by building out a centre of excellence, empowering people in the business to solve their own problems – giving them technology and some guardrails to help take care of issues they saw in front of them every day.”

This bottom-up approach to digital transformation has clearly gained traction. In 12 years, Nintex has grown from a boot-strapped start-up run out of a Melbourne apartment, to become a global leader in process management and automation, with its headquarters just outside Seattle and almost 500 employees globally. At last count, the company had more than 8000 customers in 90 countries, including Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Toyota and the governments of India and Ireland.

While customers in industries from healthcare and government to manufacturing, retail and media report significant productivity gains and cost savings as a result of automating processes via the Nintex platform, Duguid says he prefers to focus on the millions of hours saved.

“People are freed up to concentrate on the job they were hired to do, the work they are passionate about and the outcomes that truly impact on customers.”

He says the company has run figures on one segment of users – representing just 15 per cent of its total customer base – that point to around 6000 years of time saved. “People get that time back into their life. That’s what’s important to me.”

That saving can be extrapolated across Nintex’s entire 8000-plus customer base and beyond, says Duguid, as the company aims to reach 13,000 customers by 2022.

As part of its strategic vision, Nintex has recently acquired New Zealand process mapping and management specialist Promapp, which Duguid says will give his team another entry point, helping customers accelerate documenting and optimising every process, not just those suited to automation.

Duguid says the aim is not to automate people out of work but to help them focus on the highvalue, creative tasks that people do far better than computers. “I know what computers and AI and mass scale data analysis are good at; we should leave that stuff to computers. Fighting it is not going to get us anywhere as a society. What we’re about is making sure people are as good as they can be.”

‘People are freed up to concentrate on the job they were hired to do, the work they are passionate about and the outcomes that truly impact on customers.’

Ryan Duguid