Preface
At CamundaCon 2024 in New York, Sanjam Sarpal, a solution architect from Atlassian, joined us on stage1. You might know Atlassian from tools like Confluence, Jira, or Trello, which are ubiquitous in the business and software world. Sanjam explained how Atlassian had recently successfully completed a transition from one enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to another in just nine months. ERP transformations are complex, time-consuming projects that many organizations fail with, and they have likely cost many CIOs their role - yet, Atlassian managed it with a breeze. He further shared that when Atlassian acquired the company Loom, they were able to integrate Loom's billing workflows into Atlassian's systems in three or four months, whereas in the past such a procedure would have taken nine months to a year. What was the reason for these success stories, in which transformation projects not only were executed seamlessly but were completed in a fraction of the usual time?
You might have guessed it already: Atlassian had introduced process orchestration. This approach allowed them to understand, manage, and transform the billing and ERP processes with ease, swapping out systems where needed, incorporating new product variations, and adjusting data transformations and endpoint integrations along the way.
And they didn't stop with the ERP transformation or the billing workflow. Atlassian made process orchestration a strategic technology on the enterprise level and developed an operating model that allows the organization to successfully reap its benefits: a central team (often known as a "center of excellence") helps autonomous delivery teams (like the ones Sanjam led) apply the right technologies, patterns, and best practices easily and swiftly. This accelerated building of not only the billing workflow but many others, leveraging economies of scale, driving efficiencies, and improving the customer experience - for instance, by reducing ticket turnaround times within support requests by 93%2.
Earlier the same year, the research firm Forrester reported that TK3, a big German health insurance company, had reduced the happy path for its denture reimbursement process from about 1.5 weeks to 2.7 seconds (read: seconds!) through process automation and digital data exchange with dentists. This is another great example of hitting two targets with one arrow: Not only did they lower operational costs through process automation, but they also hugely improved the customer experience. What's more, the newly orchestrated processes can be infused with innovative technologies (like AI) to drive further improvements.
Those successes are part of a broader pattern that is currently unfolding in the market. Recognition is growing that process orchestration can enhance business agility, increase employee productivity, improve customer experiences, and reduce business risks. As you will see in "The Benefits of Process Orchestration" starting on page 7, the benefits to organizations have been proven, with a 2024 Forrester report estimating a return on investment of over 400%. And according to Camunda's State of Process Orchestration 2024 report4, 91% of companies surveyed have seen increased business growth due to process automation within the last year. In addition, 95% say automation has helped them achieve operational efficiency, and 93% say automation has helped improve customer experiences.
Process automation has become table stakes for organizations to remain competitive. And applying process orchestration strategically on the enterprise level allows you future-proof your enterprise architecture. That is, it not only gives you strong advantages right now, but ensures you will be able to make any needed changes to your business processes in the future - and if we know only one thing for sure, it's that business processes need to adjust often and quickly. Adaptability is crucial for your organization to survive. As one of our marketing colleagues says, "Orchestrate or die!"
Consider Artificial Intelligence (AI), which has been taking the world by storm since the launch of ChatGPT. While ChatGPT and other generative AI tools have created tremendous hype about the possibilities of AI, to the point where no CEO can afford not to think about it, enterprise adoption is still lagging (as, for instance, technology analyst Benedict Evans points out in his article "The AI Summer"5). There may be multiple factors at play here, such as data readiness or compliance concerns, but one of them stands out: Most organizations are just not able to strategically integrate AI into their value streams, because their operations are - frankly speaking - too chaotic. Business processes are buried in a mess of wildly integrated legacy systems, with limited visibility and minimal understanding of how the full end-to-end process works. In such a scenario, you cannot magically transform your business by just throwing in AI. You need to build the foundation first; otherwise, you are betting your organization's survival on fairy dust.
Don't get us wrong: we are fully convinced of the transformative potential of AI (and are investing heavily in it ourselves). But it's not a surprise to us that, on the whole, it hasn't yet delivered the value organizations expect. A report from BCG6, for example, showed that 74% of companies struggle to generate and scale value with AI, and only 4% of companies are creating substantial value. As the report notes, "A common misconception is that AI's value lies mainly in streamlining operations and reducing costs in support functions. In fact, its greatest value lies in core business processes, where leaders are generating 62% of the value."
To tie this back to Atlassian's story, with their process orchestration layer in place, it is clear how they could integrate AI into their billing workflow: for example, by leveraging a large language model for fraud detection. Once you have the foundation, AI simply becomes an endpoint in your process that can be orchestrated.
At the same time, according to the State of Process Orchestration report, on average just 50% of organizational processes have been automated so far, many of those in a scrappy fashion. So, there is a huge opportunity on the table.
How can you set up your company to drive the right process architecture across your business, to realize value today and be ready for tomorrow? With this book, we aim to provide a recipe for achieving this. It's about adopting process orchestration to automate more while being faster at it at the same time, and transforming your organization's enterprise architecture to a future-proof model centered around business processes and business capabilities. The focus of this book is less on the nitty-gritty details of technology stacks and more on how to scale usage across the organization to benefit the company. This includes shaping your business architecture, staffing teams, getting the wider organization and management on board, anchoring the technology in the organization, and a lot of other sociotechnical elements. That said, it's also critical to create a technically sound foundation to build great solutions, and we'll show you how.
The book you hold in your hands is based on our experiences over the last decade helping numerous customers drive enterprise process orchestration adoption to an impressive scale to transform their business. We hope you'll join them.
Why Automation?
If you're not yet fully convinced of the transformative potential of process automation and the pivotal role of process orchestration, let's take a closer look at how they deliver impact step by step.
A while ago, one of our customers, a Top 10 insurance company in Germany, was startled by the results of its latest customer survey. The company found that customer satisfaction with the speed of claim processing had declined dramatically over the last three years (Figure P.1). However, digging deeper into their performance, they found that the process time had remained stable over that period. So, why had customer satisfaction gone down? The most likely explanation: Customer expectations have shifted massively. We've all gotten used to the lightning speed of the digital economy on our smartphones. Have groceries delivered to your home in a few minutes? No problem. Instantly open a bank account online? Done. Get a new eSIM in a matter of seconds? Easy. Wait 10 days for your insurance claim to be processed? No thank you!
Figure P.1 Customer satisfaction with outcomes, communication, and speed.
This story of increased customer expectations is the reality in almost any business domain, and digitally minded organizations are beginning to eat up incumbent market share by providing a superior customer experience with high operational efficiency.
For example, a recent study around the Know Your Customer (KYC) checks7 that banks need to do when onboarding new corporate clients found that 48% of banks lost clients because of slow and inefficient onboarding, and four out of five of those banks attribute that loss to delayed processing. To give you an idea of what "delayed" means, banks took on average 95 days to complete a KYC review in 2023. That's more than three months! And this finding needs to be viewed against the background that customers have more choices by the day, be it via FinTechs or BigTechs like Amazon Finance for Business. Those...
