Why it’s time

to embrace
digital process
automation
Accelerate digital transformation
today and tomorrow

A PEGA
WHITEPAPER

Build
for
Change
Contents
3 Introduction
4 The state of automation and operational excellence
4 From inflated expectations to the trough of disillusionment
6 Introducing digital process automation
7 Three well-intentioned mistakes on the path to digital automation
9 A new path for success: From task-centric to outcome-centric
13 Digital process automation with Pega
14 Conclusion
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Introduction
As organizations chase the promise of digital transformation, many are realizing that these
efforts must go beyond skin deep. Transformation demands more than just embracing new
channels or showcasing new technologies. Organizations must transform processes – the
ways in which customers are served, promises are fulfilled, and operations run. A recent
Forrester study found that within two years the primary driver of process improvement
projects won’t be cost reduction – it will be accelerating digital transformation.1

Figure 1: More and more executives are viewing process as central to digital transformation

The hype around robotic process automation (RPA), AI, and intelligent automation can make
digital transformation feel more like digital chaos. Business and IT leaders must navigate a
shifting world of buzzwords and vendors to deliver real value. Trying to solve every process
and automation problem with RPA alone leads to failures and creates new silos. And while
the promise of these technologies is exciting, technology itself will never replace the hard
work of transformation – getting organizational alignment across silos, learning to think
end to end and from a customer-first perspective, and building competencies around Agile
development and design thinking.
Today’s automation challenges demand more than just buzzword technologies. Enterprises
must combine the promise of emerging technologies, like AI and RPA, with business process
management (BPM) and case management, which have been proven to deliver results at
scale. They must embrace Agile methods and design thinking while leveraging low-code
approaches to bring business and IT together. And automation efforts must not be viewed
merely through the lens of cost reduction, but more as a vital part of designing and deploying
the streamlined experiences that customers and employees demand. This is the true goal of
digital process automation.

1
Koplowitz, R, "The Growing Importance of Process to Digital Transformation," May, 2018. Accessed from https://www.
forrester.com/report/The+Growing+Importance+Of+Process+To+Digital+Transformation/-/E-RES143158
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The state of automation

and operational excellence
Software has always been about delivering efficiency to processes. From spreadsheets and word
processing, to workflow and document management, to business process management, software
has enabled business to drive productivity and keep costs down.
Digital transformation demands going beyond questions of efficiency, to designing the business
– and your software – around changing customer expectations. Organizations are planning
for – or have already started – running more and more process-centric applications, adopting
Agile methodologies and tools, and incorporating smart technologies like AI and RPA. However,
integrating all these new tools and technologies with existing legacy systems, multiple internal and
external data sources, and third-party apps is challenging. And it’s causing transformations to take
longer than expected.

From inflated expectations to

the trough of disillusionment
RPA: How much have you actually automated?
Just a few years ago, most process transformation efforts were delivered with business process
management (BPM) technology. Due to the siloed nature of many organizations, this approach
required cross-silo coordination and expensive integrations. Too often, BPM projects got mired
in analysis paralysis, with too much time spent documenting and analyzing existing processes,
rather than designing the new approach.
The emergence of tactical, quick-win technologies, such as RPA, provided relief. Suddenly, every
process issue looked like it could be fixed with automation. Today, many organizations are looking
to RPA as the cure-all for their automation needs. Touted as quick to install and non-invasive by
nature, RPA has become a pet project of many business stakeholders who are frustrated with IT’s
ability to support the speed of transformation.
In the last few years, however, the dust from early-stage RPA deployments has begun to settle,
and some harsh truths about broadly applying RPA to broken processes have emerged:

Only

30-50% 3% 63%
of initial RPA of bot of business leaders
projects fail2 deployments cite unsatisfactory
reach scale3 implementation speed3

2
Lamberton, C. (2017, June). Get ready for Robotic Process Automation. https://www.ey.com/gl/en/industries/financial-
services/fso-insights-get-ready-for-robotic-process-automation Lamberton, C, "Get Ready for Robotic Process
3
Wright, D, "Deloitte Global RPA Survey," 2018. Accessed from https://www2.deloitte.com/bg/en/pages/technology/
articles/deloitte-global-rpa-survey-2018.html
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Although RPA can have a place in nearly every automation strategy, the challenge is to deploy
appropriately. When attempting to transform through RPA alone, it is apparent that there are
use cases the technology is not fit for: processes that contain complicated rule-based decisions,
cut across multiple systems, or orchestrate both humans and automation to get work done.
Focusing solely on RPA can perpetuate legacy system problems that go unaddressed,
leaving customer experiences without the streamlined processes needed to support them.
If operational processes are siloed and slowed by bottlenecks, an army of robots performing
repetitive functions won’t fix the problems inherent in flawed processes.
In short, RPA allows for the automation of existing processes, but, on its own, fails to address
the transformational need to redesign processes for the digital world.

What can AI actually do?

Despite existing for many years, artificial intelligence (AI) is back at the top of the tech hype
cycle, creating both confusion and potential. In the past decade, the door has opened to
its practical application, a change fueled by the new abundance of data to power decisions,
expanded cloud computing power, and ever-increasing customer expectations.
AI can only deliver on its promise when leaders have a clear understanding of how to use it to
engage customers to drive optimized interactions. This requires an honest appraisal of current
engagement models, including personalization of marketing treatments, empowering sales with
insights, guiding support agents with intelligence, and more.
Adding to the disillusionment are many vendors, clamoring for attention, using AI as a
buzzword. Unfortunately, not all have a proven track record using it to deliver meaningful
outcomes at scale. Some may even be a marketing veneer covering a stack of acquired and
disparate software. Organizations must look behind the branding and demand tangible proof
points and evidence of AI driving specific outcomes.

Process still matters

Process is at a crossroads. Many organizations see the value of end-to-end digital
transformation, but they still think traditional BPM systems are too expensive, too complicated,
and too focused on a limited number of applications that don’t really touch customers.
Despite these challenges, successful BPM projects have delivered thousands of applications,
streamlining work and accountability. These apps allow organizations to track information and
use that data to improve performance by revamping, replacing, or removing what
wasn’t working.
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Introducing digital process automation

Digital process automation (DPA) goes beyond traditional BPM, allowing organizations to take a
truly end-to-end approach to transformation. DPA is about using intelligence and design thinking
to streamline processes - and create better experiences - for your employees and customers.
Unlike BPM and robotics, which are standalone technologies that automate existing processes,
DPA unifies technology to enable organization-wide digital transformation. It can orchestrate
complex processes across a variety of systems and resources, including the development and
maintenance of the apps that power internal processes. DPA breaks down silos, improves
customer-centricity, adds agility to legacy technology, and provides end-to-end automation to
support the needs of customers and employees.
DPA’s support of digital front-end processes and back-end operations requires a holistic
approach to automation: thinking about all of your organization’s processes and how they
interconnect to deliver outcomes.

Rise of the citizen developer

The growing need to rapidly digitize and automate processes, along with a burgeoning demand
for application development, has created a crisis within countless IT organizations. This is
further complicated by the growing need for data scientists to manage and drive value from
AI technologies. This shortage of skilled developers and engineers has been a major driver for
change.

No code:
Business and IT
work together

Complex coding:
IT only

Figure 2: Low-code empowers business users to take increased

ownership in developing their own applications.
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Low-code application development platforms help bridge an organization’s skilled developer

shortage gap. These platforms are quicker and less expensive to customize in house, and
don’t require armies of programmers. They give non-programmers the ability to visually build
out application specifications, empowering the “citizen developers” within an organization, like
business people and marketers, to work collaboratively with IT to design and modify operation-
specific applications.

Three well-intentioned mistakes on

the path to digital automation
The software industry has a history of promising momentous change and then failing to deliver.
Too often, organizations focus on a new approach – implementing a bot, deploying AI – that may
solve a tactical need, but misses the mark on long-term transformation.
We’ve found that organizations often make three common mistakes when pursuing digital
process automation and transformation:

Mistake one: Automating the channel, not the journey

Chatbots, intelligent assistants, text messaging, web self-service, email, call centers – there are so
many channels, and the list keeps growing. The pressure to be present has led organizations to
focus automation efforts on specific channels, instead of thinking about customer journeys. This
leads to standalone development teams building unique logic into each specific channel, isolating
intelligence, and creating disconnected processes and silos.
When logic is hard-coded into each channel, experiences are inconsistent and incoherent.
The organization wastes development dollars building duplicate systems, further frustrating
customers. When focusing only on creating apps that automate individual channels, it’s
impossible to provide the seamless experiences organizations – and customers – need.

Mistake two: Automating tasks, not processes

Deploying standalone bots may deliver results, but they won’t transform business. This is because
standalone bots are harder to deploy than many people think: between managing exceptions
that can arise in any process and manually updating business logic, it’s easy for bots to break and
to lose efficiency. Moreover, focusing on isolated tasks means that the majority of automation’s
benefits are left on the table. And building ROI based purely on staff reductions doesn’t often pan
out. Many organizations don’t realize that it’s easier to automate 10 percent of 100 people’s work
than to automate 100 percent of 10 people’s work – until they’re knee-deep in a failing project.
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Task-centric bots create fragmentation – a common problem across automation projects. In a

2018 AQPC study4, 26.6 percent of respondents cite “moving from a function-based to process-
thinking culture” as a top challenge. Task-centricity ignores the reason most processes exist: to
deliver a meaningful outcome. Customers make contact because they want something – to buy a
new product, to open an account, to fix an issue – and those outcomes often live in a tangled nest
of systems and silos. Automating individual tasks means losing sight of the desired outcome – and
unintentionally imposing issues on customers.

Mistake three: Allowing siloed automation, not end-to-end automation

Perhaps the most impactful mistake is automating processes and tasks within silos, not
redesigning processes to streamline experiences from end-to-end. Organizations tend not to
connect the transformation of front-end engagement back through systems and processes that
deliver outcomes. Discrete bot implementations don’t map customer journeys or create end-to-
end experiences: they only speed the execution of a specific task. This creates a gap between
experiences and promises offered to customers and the ability to efficiently deliver.
Automation plays an important role in digital transformation, but needs to operate as part of a
larger, connected ecosystem. By isolating the focus into building digital channel experiences or
driving operational cost reductions with task-based automation, organizations fail to completely
realize the advantages they seek from digital transformation.
Without end-to-end automation, silos will grow, widening the gap between dozens of front-end
channels and back-end processes and data. This fractured architecture is wildly expensive, and
sometimes impossible to modify and scale, creating a cycle of “rip and replace” whenever new
technology is implemented. As McKinsey put it in a report on the risks of RPA: “Taking an end-to-
end view of the outcome…is better than applying a robotic Band-Aid to a particular pain point.”5
Automations should fit seamlessly into your business processes and systems, and you should be
able to swap robotic automations for APIs as they become available and viable.

4
APQC, "Process and Performance Management," February, 2018. Accessed from https://www.apqc.org/knowledge-
base/download/416920/
5 Edlich, A. and Sohoni, V., "Burned by the bots: Why robotic automation is stumbling," May, 2017. Accessed from
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-mckinsey/our-insights/digital-blog/burned-by-the-bots-why-
robotic-automation-is-stumbling
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A new path for success: From

task-centric to outcome-centric
While traditional BPM and RPA projects are incremental steps in the right direction, delivering true
digital transformation demands more. DPA delivers the technology and methodology needed
to redesign processes to support the needs of customers and employees in a digital world.
To accelerate and realize success with DPA, it’s necessary to rethink the processes around the
outcomes customers seek and the experiences they demand, and then integrate the tasks and
automations needed to design and deliver those journeys.

“ We’re able to accelerate at least getting that first

version out, and we can do it very quickly. It’s a very
visual and collaborative process.”
-Scott Nelson,
Technology Director
Manheim

DPA goes end to end

It’s crucial to think end to end about service processes, designing journeys that get customers
outcomes they want in a way that’s easy for them and efficient for the business. And digital
process automation is end-to-end automation. While it leverages robotics to automate tasks
as needed, it operates in the context of end-to-end processes. This essentially means applying
design thinking to your process. Design thinking starts with the impact of process on customer
and employee experiences and uses rapid prototypes and testing to rebuild those experiences.
When applied to automation, this means moving beyond using bots to speed up a process step
involving a manual task, and instead means reimagining the process from start to finish, with the
outcome at the heart of its design.
Working together, end-to-end automation and robotics can orchestrate work anywhere, anytime,
while context is maintained. And when application changes occur, or an API becomes available to
replace a bot, it can accommodate these changes without breaking the process.
No matter the process, or particular mix of robotic and human work, it is crucial to be able
to deploy and get results quickly. The ability to design applications without code is critical. By
empowering business and IT to work together in an objective-driven, no-code environment,
reimagined processes can quickly be brought to life.
Many vendors claim to deliver end-to-end automation but are missing critical elements. So, don’t
be fooled – ticking off the basic check-boxes of DPA is not enough. And not only do you need
to make sure all the elements of DPA are present, but they also need to live on a single, unified
platform – so they don’t require time-consuming integrations.
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The digital process automation checklist

A comprehensive DPA strategy includes the following components:

DPA starts with case management

At every level, the goals of DPA are tied to outcomes. But how is progress against outcomes
visualized and tracked at every step? Enter case management.
A “case” is a piece of work to be done that represents a specific outcome, like a customer inquiry
that must be resolved or a new account to be opened. Case management uses a visual metaphor
to lay out the steps needed to accomplish a piece of work tied to a business outcome, with
logical stages mapped to high-level milestones. Not only does this allow for visualization of all
intermediate steps needed to reach the end goal, but it also allows for reuse, as processes are
broken down into modular pieces. With all steps documented, rules and exceptions captured,
and reuse enabled, workers avoid the guesswork in building and rebuilding processes.

Figure 3: A case is a way of capturing a meaningful outcome,

and easily documenting the stages of the journey

Businesspeople define a case by laying out its stages or milestones in a simple visual designer.
Users can then add steps to each stage, building the framework for processes and establishing a
common language without getting buried in detail. The case becomes a canvas on which business
and IT can collaborate.
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DPA turns AI into operational intelligence

Operational intelligence efforts should be focused on what’s actually working or not working
within processes and workflows. What can AI really mean for operations? Before embarking upon
an AI strategy in operations, step away from the hype and go back to the basics.
First, evaluate your business rules and processes. How do you turn these into operational actions?
What can you identify without AI? Do you need another tool to locate bottlenecks, evaluate their
impact, and determine root cause? Is work allocated correctly regarding time and workers, both
humans and bots? In many cases – especially for processes tied to customer experiences – rather
than discovering the current process, it’s better to redesign the process from the customer
experience perspective you hope to deliver.

DPA works across existing systems

There’s immense pressure to deliver new experiences on the front end while maintaining back-
end systems that store data and transactions that are core to your business. Today, the average
organization uses 1,181 cloud apps across the entirety of its functions,6 so integrating new
systems can be troublesome, difficult, and time-consuming. The “rip and replace” approach, which
completely supplants legacy systems, is expensive, risky, and takes years for return on investment.
Building point solutions on top of legacy systems to solve short-term problems only creates more
silos. This approach might yield short-term results, but as new technologies are leveraged, this
translates to more patch solutions – which are neither strategic nor adaptable.
DPA helps organizations avoid these tradeoffs by seamlessly connecting front-end experiences to
back-end legacy systems. This technology allows you to “wrap and renew” legacy systems with an
open, extensible layer that improves business outcomes immediately.
The goal is to provide industry-leading functional capabilities for real-time decisions and end-to-
end automation, while ensuring interoperability and open extensibility.

DPA accelerates productivity with low code

Organizations are looking for ways to innovate, break down silos and reduce costs – and low-
code helps them do all of those. Building an app, whether it’s simple or complex, shouldn’t be
a struggle. A visual design approach empowers Agile development and collaboration between
business and IT to drive proven results.
With low code, business users and IT staff work together on requirements, then rapidly build and
deploy business rules, processes, and offers.

6
Netskope, "Netskope Report Reveals User-Led HR, Marketing, and Collaboration Applications are Most-Used, Despite
Pending GDPR." February, 2018. Accessed from https://www.netskope.com/press-releases/netskope-reportreveals-
user-led-hr-marketing-collaboration-applications-used-despite-pending-gdpr
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Business stakeholders are able to provide feedback and requirements on Agile artifacts
directly in a project management tool. Bringing the business closer to the development
process eliminates shadow IT and empowers development teams to ensure innovation and
scale take place in a compliant fashion.

Figure 4: Use visual models and Agile methods to build apps that are always up to date and easy to change.

Low code empowers your staff to take increased ownership of the development and
maintenance of their own applications – all while freeing up your skilled developers to focus
on higher-value work, rather than chasing down requirements. Now, developers at any level
can quickly design elegant, future-proof, and powerful applications using pre-configured and
reusable building blocks.
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DPA with Pega

Pega combines industry-leading DPA technology with proven Agile and design thinking
methodologies to help organizations successfully reduce costs, increase speed to market, and
embark on the ongoing journey of digital transformation. This approach brings together business
and IT leaders to identify key challenges and define the right problems to tackle first, before more
expensive investments are made.
Pega’s technology helps break down deliverables into short, actionable, and attainable sprints –
creating an Agile process for user experience design and development. Visual tooling – not just
low code, but truly no code – empowers business and IT to design software together without the
hassle of requirements docs or spec sheets that never stay in sync. Everything – business goals,
processes, UI, integrations, security – is captured directly in Pega’s visual models.
Pega also opens many possibilities for process redesign, employing bots, APIs, and humans when
necessary, orchestrating perfect handoff as they work together. By having humans and bots
collaborate, the human side of experience delivery is kept intact, while gaining the efficiencies and
cost savings of bots.
How do you really deliver the promise of digital transformation? Get started quickly with Pega’s
approach, which allows you to begin optimizing your top customer journey decisions and
processes in as little as 30 days. This enables you to rapidly see value from transforming customer
service experience and operations without the risk of massive desktop replacements or building
siloed channel systems.
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Conclusion
Achieving digital transformation is not just about automation or process management – it’s
about outcome-driven processes, automated end to end, that drive value for both customers
and businesses. Digital process automation allows you to deliver the frictionless experiences
your customers demand, with the efficiency you need.
Start your digital transformation journey today. Find an outcome. Streamline the process. Make
it better and deliver value to your customers, fast, with digital process automation.

Learn more about digital process automation with Pega.

Ready to Experience the power of the Pega Platform firsthand with a 30-day free trial.
get started?
We are Pegasystems, the leader in software for customer engagement and operational excellence. Our
adaptive, cloud-architected software – built on the unified Pega Platform™ – empowers people to rapidly
deploy and easily change applications to meet strategic business needs. Over our 35-year history, we’ve
delivered award-winning capabilities in CRM and digital process automation (DPA), powered by advanced
artificial intelligence and robotic automation, to help the world’s leading brands achieve breakthrough
business results.

For more information, please visit us at www.pega.com

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