What will the process orchestration landscape look like in 2023? This is a question that is on the minds of many corporate executives. To get a better understanding, we gathered around the crystal ball to analyze five trends that will define the future of process orchestration.
Why do you need process orchestration?
With its unbeatable cost and resource-saving benefits (not to mention its boon to productivity!), organizations rushed to implement automation into every corner of their organization. Few organizations appointed a ringleader to lead the way. Departments unilaterally chased down as many point solutions as possible to band-aid the efficiency leak of manual work. All teams—from finance to marketing and HR—tapped different apps to streamline their line of business, like:
Task or project managers
Support ticketing and help desks
Invoicing software
E-signature tools
Marketing Analytics
At face value, these initiatives aced goals. But zoom out, and departments continued to operate independently. There was little conversation between each team’s tech. The jungle of automated solutions pushed, pulled, and picked at a customer base—but few organizations had visibility into the overall picture. Each solution had a proprietary method for analyzing data, collecting information, and recording its activity. Left unchecked, this “everyone for themselves” method worsens the very silos automation promises to tear down. Process orchestrationis the ultimate un-siloing strategy. Platform and vendor agnostic, it allows businesses to synchronize all the different moving parts of their organization.When it comes to process orchestration, businesses can consider themselves orchestra conductors. Process orchestration combines everything into a symphony, under precision control, focused on the same strategic goals. It’s so powerful that Gartner crowns it as one of the most influential innovation drivers. After all, if you want your operations to run smoothly, you need to understand the interplay between the various components to get the right tune. Without process orchestration, every department and every point solution are like instruments playing wildly different melodies.
Five trends shaping the future of process orchestration
A process orchestration platform gives you end-to-end command over your operations. Since it sits at the helm of your software stack, it’s hyper-sensitive to evolving buzzwords and technologies. Here are the trends set to reshape process orchestration in 2023.
1. Process orchestration = the key to process excellence
Process orchestration is the sharpest shooting arrow in your quiver for targeting organizational excellence. Bringing all of your organization’s automated activity under one umbrella will unlock an unparalleled perspective. Many organizations pursue tech integration through fusion teams—a flock of business technologists most familiar with the ins and outs of your operations. These special squadrons have one goal and one goal only: to find better ways to work together. Business technologists aren’t just knowledgeable. They’re hard-wired for collaboration, endlessly sniffing out new opportunities to harmonize technology initiatives. The good news is that they already account for 41% of the workforce, making it easy for you to tap into their enormous potential. Process excellence is a continuous methodology that compels team members to search for new efficiencies. Process orchestration platforms empower these all-stars with the insights they need to mine better business methods.
2. Low-code tools continue to transform development strategies.
Only some organizations are free of an overstuffed development backlog. In code-heavy organizations, 73% of their processes are locked behind sophisticated programming languages—limiting the number of staffers who can help lighten the load. Low code makes you more nimble. More agile. Development isn’t locked behind coding language expertise. Everyone, from sales analysts to HR managers, can build workflows and apps independently. The democratization of IT responsibilities welcomes new talent, facilitating rapid deployment of new features and products. Low-code tools also benefit traditional developers. Projects requiring lines of complex code now use drag-and-drop visual tools like a whiteboard. Users can pull in elements—like API connectors or process starting points—to visually build out workflows. Without low code, it’s easy to streamline individual tasks. But paired with an orchestration mindset, you can stand conductor over even more sophisticated processes.Governing egalitarian development is a well-oiled orchestration platform. Citizen developers can create workflows with the same business rules and integrators as pre-existing processes. DevOps team members can closely monitor new workflows to identify redundancies and smooth coordination.
3. Emerging technologies make their mark on process orchestration.
As organizations aim to organize increasingly complex processes, more cutting-edge tools will come into play. Here are three emerging technologies process orchestrators are eyeing in 2023:
Software robots: Robotic process orchestration (RPA) and intelligent document processing (IDP) will shoulder more tasks than ever. RPA is the teacher’s pet of your tech ecosystem—give these bots the rules of an assignment, and they’ll follow orders to a T. It makes them excellent data entry assistants, screen scrapers, and database managers.
A typical document management system is as lifeless as a filing cabinet—IDP becomes the big brain of your organization’s digital paperwork. It can file documents and extract key details. IDP also topples the constraints of the traditional search process—making it infinitely easier to track down documents.
Process simulation: Car manufacturers and aerospace engineers have a long history trialing product modifications and process changes using twins. One of the earliest examples harkens back to aeronautical engineer Ken Mattingly. He tinkered with a Houston-based replica of Apollo 13, experimenting with ways to help the disaster-stricken astronauts spinning out of control 200,000+ miles away from Earth. These days, you don’t need to construct a real-world duplicate of your organization to test new ideas. Digital twins duplicate your operations in the virtual realm, allowing you to tweak task sequences or dry-run new business rules.
AI orchestration: Gartner predicts artificial intelligence will have a hand in 50% of enterprise processes by 2025. AI can run through workflows like an autonomous sleuth, identifying redundancies, pinpointing customer trends, and identifying more efficient ways to get things done. Additionally, advancements in AI and machine learning technologies will transform how teams work together, providing increased accuracy and faster time to market for projects.
Overall, 2023 promises to be an exciting year for new technologies to heighten process orchestration.
4. APIs drive new revenue models.
An application programming interface, or API, is like a language translator helping two software components share information. For example, an API lets you log in to Spotify using credentials from your Facebook account. A workflow task can drop incoming documents into OneDrive. Twitter accounts like the United States Geological Survey use APIs to fire off automated earthquake alerts. These “data-as-a-service” business models allow organizations to leverage another business’s core offering or data trove. They can display it (like a phone lock screen that broadcasts live sports scores) or transform it into an entirely new service (like Apple tapping the Goldman Sachs banking infrastructure to build out their mobile payment strategy). Instead of building a customer-facing offering from the ground up, you can rent. Well-orchestrated processes keep tabs on API processes. More importantly, process orchestrators must effectively manage data coming in and out of other services. You can reformat incoming data to suit your app’s requirements and standardize security protocols. As more businesses ferry data using APIs, process orchestration will become more crucial.
5. Highly complex customer experiences
Customer engagements are heavily layered. Organizations talk with customers through email, phone, social media DMs, and web chats. Humans lead some conversations, while chatbots and virtual agents conduct others. Leading the charge are the customers themselves. 83% of customers say ‘convenience’ is the top factor influencing their buying decisions. In fact, 97% of shoppers (nearly unanimous!) admitted to abandoning a purchase because the process felt too inconvenient. Organizations add even more personalized experiences to satisfy customer demands, like self-service platforms and smartphone apps. Personalization creates even more data, touchpoints, and insights for organizations to keep track of. You can build strong customer relationships that last by lassoing every aspect of the journey into a process orchestration platform.
Process orchestration is more important than ever.
Experts predict orchestration needs will grow from $4.4 billion to $22.9 billion by 2031. Why the spike? The ever-growing tech stack shows no signs of slowing down. It can topple your organization or drive its triumph. Process orchestration is an unrivaled strategy for gaining control over your processes and technologies—before they spin out of control.
