Reinventing Workflows

A decade ago, the digital transformation agenda began heating up. Rightly fearful of disruption, enterprises with longstanding business models were suddenly on the hook to serve the increasing expectations of a rapidly digitizing customer. In 2011, Forrester projected multi billion dollar markets emerging in mobile, social, and cloud, and that innovation in customer engagement would start to become a critical competitive issue. At first, enterprises tended to focus on customer facing experiences and processes — those areas where customers would notice an improvement quickly. There were lots of easy pickings, such as in 2010, when Forrester advised that small website investments can pay off. While far from true transformation, the companies that followed this recommendation gained early wins.

The digital transformation imperative has now entered its teenage years, complete with growth spurts and awkward phases. What began as a mad dash to update and design customer-facing processes, remains — at its core — a challenging imperative to reenvision how work gets done at both the individual workflow and enterprise level. Since the beginning, true digital transformation has been the work of business process professionals. Their job is to find the right balance of process discipline, business insights, and technology to drive continuous improvement. Despite over a decade of investment in these initiatives, companies struggle to mature their approach and build a connected, automated, and intelligent enterprise.

In November 2019, IBM commissioned Forrester Consulting to investigate the modernization of business processes and workflows by conducting an online survey of 450 global decision makers. We found that firms understand the need to modernize their processes, but they struggle to overcome legacy tools and legacy mindsets.