The five fundamentals of creating a frictionless enterprise

Achieving a frictionless enterprise that allows for a streamlined, perfectly aligned flow of information across both internal and external stakeholders is a desirable state of business for many organizations. Manuel Sevilla, chief digital officer of business services at Capgemini, recently shared his thoughts on this topic at CamundaCon LIVE 2020.2, where he detailed the framework required for embracing this frictionless attitude. Here we take a look at the five fundamentals enterprises should consider when trying to increase efficiency, get to market faster, and provide users with an enhanced experience, they include:

• Hyperscale Automation
• Cloud Agility
• Data Fluidity
• Sustainability
• Secure Businesses

Let’s take a look at each of these in detail.

1. Hyperscale automation

   An organizational focus on delivering a touchless process has significant benefits for improving enterprise efficiency. One that applies automation can make things easier for end users and employees to complete their tasks, without unnecessary friction. With this in mind, augmenting the workforce should be one of businesses’ first priorities as enhancing process and employee efficiency frees up time and resources for the completion of higher-value tasks. Additionally, designing or redesigning processes to leverage automation technologies can help to ease use and adoption. 

   To hyperscale automation, organizations can take advantage of architecture that supports touchless processes between the business, vendors and customers. Delivering efficiency here can be supported by microservices, application program interfaces (APIs) and blockchain technologies. In fact, Camunda’s The State of Process Automation report reveals that companies are accelerating investment in process automation as a business driver for growth and efficiency in near equal measure.

2. Cloud agility

   The application of cloud services has had a significant positive impact on the level of efficiency and agility available to organizations. However, in order to capitalize on all of the benefits of cloud agility, it is important to ensure strategic and wholehearted adoption of cloud technologies to drive toward cloud-native business processes; moving one application at a time can be costly in many ways. 

   Moving to the cloud is the first step in improving efficiency, but once done, there are steps organizations can take to further leverage their investment. These include leveraging cloud-native architecture that allows businesses to scale as needed; embracing DevOps techniques that simplify the process of arriving at a digital solution; combining multiple clouds; and leveraging internet of things, 5G, and edge computing as growth opportunities.

3. Data fluidity

   Creating a frictionless enterprise goes beyond automation and continuous improvement requires an understanding and analysis of processes in real-time. In order to achieve this and to identify previously unforeseen issues or inefficiencies, organizations must constantly gather and examine process-related data.

   Artificial intelligence can offer enterprises a huge head start in identifying problems as they crop up and can help to ensure that brands do not feel the consequences of errors spreading throughout the system. However, it is important to remember that data silos are the enemy of efficiency, and exploiting data lakes and warehouses will be key in improving data access and quality. 

   Data science and data scientists can offer keen insights that allow the identification of opportunities in areas that organizations were not even looking into. To maximize the benefit of the data science investment, it can be useful for organizations to modify their approach from time to time, sometimes giving teams a clear order, but other times allowing them to analyze data with no constraints. They may be able to open up new doors and lead the organization to new ways of doing business through the patterns they discern.

4. Sustainability

   While driving for increased efficiency and streamlined processes, organizations should strive to operate with a shared goal of becoming more sustainable and inclusive. These goals go hand-in-hand, as by improving efficiency, businesses reduce the energy and resources that they require. Not only is it the right thing to do, but it is in increasing demand from both employees and customers.

   Moving to the cloud from an on premise data center is an excellent way to improve energy efficiency, but it is not the only thing organizations can do. A focus on technology that empowers corporate responsibility and sustainability (CR&S) is an area where many organizations could improve; businesses have an opportunity to reduce costs and their carbon footprint through auto-scaling, cloud-native solutions. Simplifying processes and taking advantage of a data lake allows organizations to avoid wasting energy and resources as a result of data silos. 

   It is also important to consider the importance of data inclusion, designing, and identifying application frameworks that provide immediate and unrestricted access. If a process is only useful or relevant for one part of society, it is a sign that the business is excluding a part of your customer base and it may be time to simplify that process. 

5. Secure business

   Enterprises do not operate in a vacuum, but require suppliers, partners, and customers to survive. And while it is critical to ensure that internal frictions are alleviated in an enterprise, it is also important that external frictions are similarly addressed. Businesses must develop trust throughout their ecosystem and collaborate to establish rules in order to achieve this, with cybersecurity being just one aspect to consider.

   Migration to the cloud presents a unique and ideal opportunity for organizations to review and address solution security. By leveraging DevOps, enterprises can improve security throughout the application by automating and executing testing tasks — including the APIs that partners must have trust in. Technology also helps address compliance concerns, with blockchain offering an immutable proof of work that can reassure partners and customers, and in turn build confidence.

Reduce friction, improve insights

A frictionless enterprise empowers organizations to not only improve interactions within their business ecosystem but can also help them make informed decisions at speed. Organizations have an opportunity to increase efficiency in avoiding potential issues and streamlining operations in a positive, meaningful way by understanding and embracing these fundamentals.

This article was originally published as Creating a Frictionless Enterprise: Five Fundamentals.