Develop Your Value-First Business Process Automation Strategy

Scale your business automation by focusing on the people, processes, and value that matter.

Analyst Perspective

Automate to a common purpose and vision.

Aggressively scaling business process automation (BPA) with the latest concepts and leading-edge technologies is an attractive ambition for many organizations. However, the costs of automating many processes as quickly as possible often outweigh the benefits and may introduce risks and changes for which the stakeholders have no appetite. The lagging development of a good BPA practice can further hamper the future returns of today's investments.

Automate smarter, not faster by piloting BPA with the intent to scale. Pilots are safe starting points to establish your foundational governance and management practices and build the necessary relationships and collaborations for you to be successful. These factors will then allow you to explore more sophisticated, complicated, and innovative opportunities to drive new value to your team, department, and organization.

Andrew Kum-Seun
Research Director,
Application Delivery and Application Management
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge	Common Obstacles	Info-Tech's Approach
Business process automation (BPA) adoption gained significant momentum as your business leaders see the positive outcomes in your pilots, such as improvements in customer experience, operational efficiencies, and cost optimizations. Your stakeholders are ready to increase their investments in more process automation solutions. They want to scale initial successes to other business and IT functions. A strategy is needed to ensure all BPA initiatives drive toward a common business vision.	The shift from small-sized pilot automations to complex, scaled automations brings new challenges and barriers to your organization: Little motivation or tolerance to change existing business operations to see the full value of BPA. Inability to find new BPA opportunities that support the broader business strategy while meeting specific stakeholder needs and risk and change profiles. Teams are ill equipped to meet the demands and complexities of scaled BPA implementations.	Ground your BPA expectations. Set realistic, achievable goals centered on driving organizational business value and achieving key business priorities by optimizing and automating strategic business capabilities and processes. Envision your BPA journey. Tailor your scaling approach according to your ability to ease BPA implementation, broaden BPA adoption, and loosen BPA constraints. Prepare to scale BPA. Cement your BPA management and governance foundations to support BPA scaling by assessing the maturity of your BPA practice.

Info-Tech Insight
Automate with a purpose, vision, and strategy by concentrating your investments on the core processes, capabilities, and systems that matter. Low-risk, task-oriented automations are good starting points, but they constrain broader organizational returns. Business value can only scale when thoughtful steps are taken to gradually introduce BPA while foundational practices are built in parallel. Don't automate for the sake of automating.

Start strong with a business process automation (BPA) playbook

A good pilot project is critical to understanding BPA and setting an initial foundation for your BPA practice. See Info-Tech's Build a Winning Business Process Automation Playbook blueprint to start your BPA journey. This blueprint builds upon your lessons learned from your BPA pilot projects.

Business Process Automation Playbook

Formalize your business process automation practice with a good toolkit and a repeatable set of tactics and techniques. Use this as a starting point for a process automation initiative.

Organizations want to mature and scale their initial BPA success

Notable initial benefits:

1 Time Saved – "In the first day of live operations, the robots were saving 51 hours each day or the equivalent of six people working an eight-hour shift." – Brendan MacDonald, Director of Customer Compliance Operations, Ladbrokes ("Automation for Every Industry," UiPath, n.d.)

2 Documentation & Knowledge Sharing – "If certain people left, knowledge of some processes would be lost, and we realized that we needed a reliable process management system in place." – Peta Kinnane, Acting Audit and Risk Coordinator, Liverpool City Council ("Liverpool City Council," Nintex, n.d.)

3 Improved Service Delivery – "Thanks to this automation, our percentage of triaged and assigned tickets is now 100%. Nothing falls through the cracks. It has also improved the time to assignment. We assign tickets 2x faster than before." – Sebastian Goodwin, head of cybersecurity, Nutanix (Workato)

Can we gain more from automation?

As industries evolve and adopt more tools and technologies, their business operating models become more complex. Task- and desktop-based automation are often not enough. More sophisticated and scaled automations are needed to simplify and streamline complex operations from end to end and align them with organizational goals.

Stakeholders see scaling automation as an opportunity to scale the business

The value of scaling BPA is dependent on the organization's ability to scale with it. Stakeholders should see an increase in business value without a substantial increase in resources and operational costs (e.g. there should be little difference if sending out 10 emails versus 1000).

How business can be scaled with automation:

• Processes triggered by incoming documents or email: in these processes, an incoming document or email (that has semi-structured or unstructured data) is collected by a script or an RPA bot. This document is then processed with a machine learning model that validates it either by rules or ML models. The validated and enriched machine-readable data is then passed onto the next system of record.
• The accounts payable process: this process includes receiving, processing, and paying out invoices from suppliers that provided goods or services to the company. While manual processing can be expensive, take too much time, and lead to errors, businesses can automate this process with machine learning and document extraction technologies like optical characters recognition (OCR), which converts texts containing images into characters that can be readable by computers to edit, compute, and analyze.
• Order management: these processes include retrieving email and relevant attachments, extracting information that tells the business what its customers want, updating internal systems with newly placed orders or modifications, or taking necessary actions related to customer queries.
• Enhance customer experience: [BPA tools] can help teams develop and distribute customer loyalty offers faster while also optimizing these offers with customer insights. Now, enterprises can more easily guarantee they are delivering the relevant solutions their clients are demanding.

Source: Stefanini Group

BPA is positioned to support key business priorities

Business-Managed Automations

Today's BPA tools and technologies hold significant promise for automating a greater amount of manual work without traditional technical barriers to entry. Self-service, low- and no-code designers, full stack solutions, and out-of-the-box connectors made BPA key enablers for scaling beyond IT and enabling business-managed automations.

Recent trends are motivating the democratization of automation technologies:

• Scarcity of technical talent and specialized roles
• Technology and digitally savvy and motivated workers
• User-friendly tools and technologies
• Strained IT capacity and limited IT budget

See our Embrace Business-Managed Applications blueprint for more information

Transition to Digital

62% of respondents indicated between 1% to 20% of their manual processes shifted to digital.

Source: Tech Trends and Priorities 2023; N=500

"Going digital" reshapes how the business operates and drives value by optimizing how digital and traditional technologies and tactics work together and support the desired digital experience. This shift often presents significant risks to business processes, enterprise data, applications, and systems that stakeholders and teams are not aware of or prepared to accommodate.

See our Applications Priorities 2023 report for more information on digital experience.

However, justifying further investments in scaling and maturing BPA is not easy

1 No Clear Definition of Business Value

• Value can be intangible, ambiguous, and can cause all sorts of confusion given the multiple and often conflicting priorities any organization is sure to have.
• Your stakeholders may struggle to come to a unified understanding of value or an agreement on whether one thing is more valuable than something else.

2 Low Tolerance of Risk and Change

• The crux of successful BPA is the strategic, well-informed, and onboarded adoption of changes and the good mitigation and acceptance of business and IT risks.
• However, end users and stakeholders may be hesitant, resistant or fearful to accept and incorporate proposed process and system changes or address the risks.

3 Perceived Lack of Opportunities

• BPA pilots often involve the processes that are easy and valuable to optimize and automate. However, these low-hanging fruit will run out.
• Discovering new BPA opportunities can be challenging for a variety of reasons, such as lack of documentation and knowledge, low user participation or drive to change, and BPA technology limitations and constraints.

4 Inadequate Metrics and KPIs

• BPA requires constant monitoring of metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to quickly address optimization opportunities and demonstrate returns. However,

Many scaling challenges have yet to be addressed

Lack of Organizational Change Leaders
BPA success hinges on the organization's ability to effectively adopt business process- and system-related changes. People are generally resistant to change, especially large, transformational changes that will impact the day-to-day way of doing things or that involve changing personal values, social norms, and other deep-seated assumptions. Good change leaders are those who are motivated, incentivized, and empowered to drive these changes across the organization, but they are often difficult to acquire or properly equip.

Overinvesting in Specific Technologies (Lock-In)
BPA is not a cheap investment. A single RPA bot, for example, can cost between $5,000 to $15,000. This cost does not include the added cost for training, renewal fees, infrastructure setup and other variable and reoccurring costs that often come with RPA delivery and support (Blueprint Software Systems). This reality can motivate BPA owners to favor existing technologies over other cheaper and more effective alternatives in an attempt to boost their return on investment.

Ill-Equipped Support Teams
Good technical skills and tools are critical to ensure BPA capabilities are deployed effectively. Low-code and no-code (LCNC) can help bridge capability gaps, but success isn't guaranteed. Sixty percent of respondents claim a lack of experience with low-code platforms as the biggest obstacle in low-code adoption (Creatio). The learning curve has led some organizations to hire contractors to onboard BPA teams, hire new employees, or dedicate significant funding and resources to upskill internal resources.

Develop a BPA strategy centered on excellence

Build a process excellence foundation to achieve operational excellence

What is process excellence?

Process excellence is adapting business processes to maximize productivity and efficiency. This is achieved by assessing, altering, and testing processes until they meet the desired outcome. Achieving process excellence depends on many quality standards being continuously measured, such as:

• Efficiency
• Productivity
• Accuracy
• Security and compliance
• Consistency and repeatability (little or no variance)
• User, customer, employee, and digital experience
• Alignment with business strategy
• Ability to meet targets and achieve goals

What is operational excellence?

Operational excellence aims to improve all aspects of business operations. These initiatives address core issues with the company's way of working and technologies and then build on top of those changes. This discipline extends process excellence and typically involves:

• Building the mechanisms to deliver change.
• Creating the discipline and structure to execute processes consistently.
• Prioritizing business value and customer experience.
• Focusing on effectiveness and business agility.
• Enabling collaboration across silos and systems.
• Maximizing system functionality and performance.

What Is a BPA Strategy?

• Looks for ways to transform the business and how it delivers value by identifying what technologies to embrace, what processes to optimize and automate, and what products and services to enhance.
• Unifies innovation and productivity possibilities with your desired end user, employee, and customer and brand experiences.
• Accountability lies with the executive leadership that involves consultation from IT and business subject matter experts.
• Must involve cross-functional participation from senior management from the different areas of the organization, including IT management and business representatives to gather strategic input.

Take methodical steps in your BPA implementation

BPA is a journey, not a sprint. New risks and complications will arise as you introduce new BPA capabilities at the individual level and across business units. Focus on small-scale, low-risk automations first to build strong foundations and then use your lessons learned for more complex implementations.

	1. How can I improve myself?	2. How can we improve my team?	3. How can we improve my organization?
Objectives	Improve worker productivity	Increase the team's throughput, commitment and load	Drive more value in existing pipelines and introduce new value streams
	Improve the repeatability and predictability of the process	Apply more focus on cognitive and complex tasks	Deliver consistent digital experiences involving different technologies
	Deliver outputs of consistent quality and cadence	Reduce the time to complete error-prone, manual, and routine collaborations	Automatically tailor a customer's experience to individual preferences
	Increase process, tool, and technology confidence	Deliver insightful, personalized, and valuable outputs	Forecast and rapidly respond to customer issues and market trends
Goals	Learn the fit of BPA and set the foundations	Improve practices and tools and optimize performance	Scale BPA capabilities throughout the organization

Keep risk and change top of mind

Risk and change management are necessities for ensuring consistent, repeatable and stable delivery of value. However, they are often overshadowed by industry hype and vendor promises. Do not underestimate the long-term business, technical, and end-user impact if risks and changes are not fully understood, controlled, and embedded in BPA decision making and strategy design.

		Business	Technical	End User
Risk	The future probability of unplanned, negative outcomes involving the failure or misuse of business capabilities and technologies.	Business operational costs Regulations and compliance Reputation and brand Business disruptions	System performance sustainability and reliability Business continuity Security Data quality	Morals and ethics Job security Low adoption of automation solution and process change Misuse of new capabilities
Change	The actions to alter components of the organization, such as its culture, underlying technologies or infrastructure, or its internal processes and policies.	Organizational resistance to business operational changes Customer acceptance of product and service changes Hindrance for growth and expansion	Ease of maintainability Horizontal and vertical scalability of the system Compatibility with existing solution, architecture, and industry standards	Skills and competency development Shifts in corporate culture Job description change

Mature your BPA practice to scale it

Assess, build, and strengthen your BPA foundations by focusing on the capabilities that support your vision.

While all capabilities are important for the target state of your BPA practice, Info-Tech suggests the capabilities with an asterisk (*) should be the initial focus.

Tailor your maturity assessment for each automation tool and unique implementation

Core Capabilities to Support Maturity and Scaling of BPA

Risk & Change Management*
Continuous process to analyze, evaluate, control, and address the probably negative impacts of risks and changes.

Vision & Objectives*
Clear direction and goals of the business process automation practice.

Business Process Management & Optimization*
The tactics to document, analyze, optimize, and monitor business processes.

Governance
Defined BPA roles and responsibilities, processes, and technology controls.

Business Process Automation Platform Management
The capabilities to manage a BPA platform and ensure it supports the growing needs of the business.

Business Process Automation Delivery
The tactics to review the fit of automation solutions and deliver and support according to end users' needs and preferences.

Balance individual needs with your organizational motivators

Success hinges on your team's ability to deliver business value. Well-optimized and automated processes instill stakeholder confidence in ongoing business value delivery and ensure stakeholder buy-in, provided that proper expectations are set and met. However, business value is not interpreted or prioritized the same across the organization. Come to a common business value definition to drive change in the right direction.

Business value cannot always be represented by revenue or reduced expenses. Dissecting value by the benefit type and the value source's orientation allows you to see the many ways in which a product or service brings value to the organization.

Financial benefits versus intrinsic needs

• Financial Benefits refers to the degree to which the value source can be measured through monetary metrics, such as revenue generation and cost savings.
• Intrinsic Needs refers to how a product, service, or business capability meets core functional, user experience, and existential needs.

Inward versus outward orientation

• Inward refers to value sources that have an internal impact and improve your employees' and teams' effectiveness in performing their responsibilities.
• Outward refers to value sources that come from your interaction with external stakeholders and customers.

See our Build a Value Measurement Framework blueprint for more information about business value definition.

Select the BPA opportunities that align to your strategic business objectives

Start with...

Scope

What are the priorities of the business and drivers of business value?

Business problem and objectives

Business strategy and value drivers

Risk and change tolerance

Customer and end user needs and personas

Possibilities

What are the possible candidates for good BPA adoption?

Documented processes

Canned and templated processes (vendor and community provided)

Process discovery and mining tactics

Application and end user surveys, feedback and reports

Then, evaluate their...

Desirability & Return

What can be gained from the BPA opportunity and how does it support my future vision?

Expected benefits and costs

Business prioritization

Success measures

End-user and customer demand

Viability & Achievability

What can jeopardize the successful delivery of the opportunity?

Business and IT risks

Delivery and support capacity

Organizational change

Technology compatibility

...to shortlist your...

High-Priority Opportunities

Strategic BPA opportunities that are designed to:

• Maximize learning.
• Evaluate the value and acceptance of BPA capabilities.
• Inform the development, maturity and scaling of your BPA practice.

Build and maintain your BPA toolbox

Understand the fit of today's BPA technologies to your functional needs.

Backend Integration
Enables the ability to bring together data from multiple sources to be analyzed, sorted, transformed, and used.

AI/ML
AI is a technology that mimics the thinking and decision-making capabilities of humans. ML learns and improves AI algorithms through experience.

Configuration
Altering the parameters and properties of the system to change its behavior at runtime.

Native Workflow
Designing and tailoring process workflows within an application system to improve its usability and practicality.

App Builder
Platform to develop, test, deploy, and maintain custom, cross-platform applications.

iPaaS
Cloud platform enabling the development, management, and governance of integration flows across on-premises and cloud services and technologies.

Chatbots
Program that simulates and processes human conversations whether they are spoken or written.

iBPMS & Rules Engines
iBPMS is the combination of BPM tools with AI and other intelligence capabilities. Rules engines manage business rules and decisions using predefined logic.

Robotic & Intelligence Automation
RPA leverages an app's UI rather than programmatic access. Automate rules-based, repetitive tasks performed by human workers with AI/ML.

Point Solutions
Solutions that specialize in a specific industry, business domain, and/or business or IT capability.

Measure success with the right metrics

Establishing and monitoring metrics are powerful ways to drive behavior and strategic changes in your organization. Determine the right measures that demonstrate the value of your BPA efforts by aligning them with your business objectives, business value drivers, BPA goals, and non-functional requirements.

Select metrics with different views

01 BPA Practice Effectiveness
The ability of your practice to deliver, support, and operate BPA.
Examples: Solution quality and throughput, delivery and operational costs, number of defects and issues, and system quality.

02 Automation Value
The outcome of your optimized processes and BPA solutions.
Examples: Time and money saved, usage of products and services, speed of process execution, number of errors, and compliance with standards.

BPA Journey Goals and Milestones
Your organization's position in your BPA journey.
Examples: Maturity score, scope of BPA adoption, comfort and confidence with BPA capabilities, and complexity of automated processes.

Leverage Info-Tech's Diagnostics

End User Feedback

• Value of automation platform and scope of adoption
• Value of the apps enabled or modernized with automation
• Improvement in end-user support

CIO Business Vision

• Improvements to IT satisfaction and value
• Changes to the value and importance of IT core services with BPA
• The state of business and IT relationships
• Capability to deliver and support BPA effectively

Blueprint deliverables

Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

Business Process Automation Maturity Assessment Tool

Assess the maturity of core capabilities in your BPA practice to determine your readiness and ableness to support scaled and complex BPA solutions.

Key deliverable:

Business Process Automation Strategy Template

Document your business process automation strategy in the language your stakeholders understand. Tailor this document to fit your BPA objectives and initiatives.

Info-Tech's methodology for value-first BPA strategy

	1. Understand the Context	2. Define Your BPA Objectives & Opportunities	3. Assess Your BPA Maturity	4. Roadmap Your BPA Initiatives
Phase Steps	Step 1.1: Set the Business Context Step 1.2: Understand Your Stakeholder Needs Step 1.3: Build Your Risk & Change Profile	Step 2.1: Define Your BPA Expectations Step 2.2: List Your Guiding Principles Step 2.3: Envision Your BPA Target State Step 2.4: Build Your Opportunity Backlog	Step 3.1: Assess Your BPA Maturity	Step 4.1: Roadmap Your BPA Initiatives Step 4.2: Assess & Mitigate Your Risks Step 4.3: Complete Your BPA Strategy
Phase Outcomes	Business problem and priorities Business value definition Customer and end-user assessment (e.g. personas, customer journey) Risk and change profile	BPA problem statement, objectives, and metrics BPA guiding principles Desired scaled BPA target state Prioritized BPA opportunities	BPA maturity assessment Brainstormed solutions to address BPA gaps	List of BPA initiatives and roadmap BPA initiative risk assessment Completion of BPA strategy

Blueprint Insight Summary

Overarching Info-Tech Insight
Automate with a purpose, a vision, and a strategy by concentrating your investments on the core processes, capabilities, and systems that matter. Low-risk, task-oriented automations are good starting points but constrain broader organizational returns. Business value can only scale when thoughtful steps are taken to gradually introduce BPA while foundational practices are built in parallel. Don't automate for the sake of automating.

Phase 1	Recognize the intrinsic value of automation as an influential motivator for adoption. Successful BPA delivers more than just cost savings. It improves the lives of employees by allowing them to concentrate on the work they want to do, and it can improve the organizational brand with better-performing, more insightful, and more satisfying products and services.
Phase 2	Treat automation like any other enterprise technology. Optimizing and automating business processes involves more than understanding how it impacts the user. It relies on how these improvements meet risk and change appetites and tolerances, and on how the outputs drive customer satisfaction and business priorities.
Phase 3	Mature your practice as you scale your BPA technologies. Good skills, resources, and governance and management practices are critical for the successful scaling of BPA tools and technologies. BPA is not a set-it-and-forget-it asset; it needs to be delivered with quality in mind and be continuously monitored, reviewed, and maintained.
Phase 4	Maximize the learning of your minimum viable automations (MVA). Mature the foundations of your BPA with the knowledge and experiences you gained in your MVA as you build and refine your case to scale your BPA implementation across the organization.

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit	Guided Implementation	Workshop	Consulting
"Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."	"Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track."	"We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."	"Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

Guided Implementation

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

Phase 1	Phase 2	Phase 3	Phase 4
Call #1: Learn Info-Tech's perspective and methodology on BPA strategy.	Call #4: State the target vision, guiding principles, and BPA expectations.	Call #6: Review your maturity assessment and brainstorm solutions.	Call #7: Review your BPA roadmap.
Call #2: Understand the business context and define business value.	Call #5: Review and prioritize BPA opportunities.		Call #8: Review your BPA strategy.
Call #3: Review your risk and change profile.

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is 8 calls over the course of 4 months.

Workshop Overview

	Day 1	Day 2	Day 3	Day 4	Day 5
Activities	Understand the Context	Define Your BPA Objectives & Opportunities	Assess Your BPA Maturity	Roadmap Your BPA Initiatives	Next Steps and Wrap-Up (offsite)
	1.1: Set the Business Context 1.2: Understand Your Stakeholder Needs 1.3: Build Your Risk & Change Profile	2.1: Define Your BPA Expectations 2.2: List Your Guiding Principles 2.3: Envision Your BPA Target State 2.4: Build Your Opportunity Backlog	3.1: Assess Your BPA Maturity	4.1: Roadmap Your BPA Initiatives 4.2: Assess & Mitigate Your Risks 4.3: Complete Your BPA Strategy	5.1 Complete in-progress deliverables from previous four days. 5.2 Set up review time for workshop deliverables and to discuss next steps.
Deliverables	Business problem and priorities Business value definition Customer and end-user assessment (e.g. personas, customer journey) Risk and change profile	BPA problem statement, objectives, and metrics BPA guiding principles Desired scaled BPA target state Prioritized BPA opportunities	BPA maturity assessment Brainstormed solutions to address BPA gaps	List of BPA initiatives and roadmap BPA initiative risk assessment Follow up engagements with Info-Tech	Workshop outcome document and Info-Tech observations and perspectives. Completed BPA strategy template.

Contact your account representative for more information.
workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

Phase 1

Understand the Context

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

• Step 1.1: Set the business context
• Step 1.2: Understand your stakeholder needs
• Step 1.3: Build your risk & change profile

This phase involves the following participants:

• IT and business leadership
• Business process and unit owners
• Application and product owners
• IT delivery and operational teams

Develop Your Value-First Business Process Automation Strategy

Phase 1 Insight Summary

Phase Info-Tech Insight
Recognize the intrinsic value of automation as an influential motivator for adoption. Successful BPA delivers more than just cost savings. It improves the lives of employees by allowing them to concentrate on the work they want to do, and it can improve the organizational brand with better-performing, more insightful, and more satisfying products and services.

Step 1.1	Understand business value is more than dollars and cents. The crux of any role, process, or technology change is its full acceptance, adoption, and use by the workers, teams, and departments who are affected. This can only be achieved if their core needs are met in the design, implementation, and support of BPA, such as the removal of stress, impediments, or restrictions challenging worker productivity.
Step 1.2	Put the user front and center. We want to better understand the end user and their operational environment. Use a variety of tactics, such as personas and journey maps, to visualize the human-computer interactions from an end-user perspective and initiate a discussion of how technology and process improvements can be better positioned to help your end users.
Step 1.3	Position BPA as an organizational change and risk management initiative. Any time you start a BPA initiative that depends on users to significantly modify their old way of doing things, the changes will force people to become novices again and introduce risks that were not previously relevant. Good organizational change and risk management practices and leadership can help keep these issues limited to the initial implementation.

Step 1.1

Set the business context

Activities
1.1.1 Elicit and document the business problem and strategy
1.1.2 Define and prioritize your business value drivers

This step involves the following participants:

• IT and business leadership
• Business process and unit owners
• Application and product owners
• IT delivery and operational teams

Outcomes of this step

• Business problem and priorities
• Business value definition

Understanding the business context is a must for your BPA strategy

CIOs must execute strategic initiatives to add value to the business. Most CIOs fail because of low support from the business. IT brings new business expansion opportunities to the table by identifying proven and emerging technologies, including BPA.

As a strategic partner, IT needs to work with the business despite this not having traditionally been the case. IT may not know what information it needs from the business to execute on its initiatives.

An effective CIO understands how to support the business' strategic initiatives with BPA and how BPA can significantly improve enterprise productivity and value. To understand the business context, the CIO needs to ask pointed questions to uncover business imperatives.

What makes a good BPA strategy?

1. Incremental Value Delivery – You can generate and share measurable results throughout the BPA journey. Value is not just created for the organization, but for individuals too.
2. Adaptable – You can review progress and revise priorities as conditions and needs change.
3. Achievable – Your BPA team can execute the strategy and gain the expected outcomes.
4. Communication – You can communicate progress and achievements that reflect individual and team needs, not just for the company and its financials.

Learn how BPA became a priority

Business Priorities Driving BPA

Market Reach & Expansion
Extending the visibility and awareness of the organization in new marketplaces and expanding presence and engagement with the existing customer base.

Cost Optimization
Maximizing business value in processes and technologies through disciplined and strategic cost and spending reduction practices.

Competitive Differentiation
Developing and optimizing your organization's distinct and innovative products and services quickly.

Digital Transformation
Transitioning processes, data, and systems to a digital environment and operating model.

Operational Efficiency
Improving software delivery and business process throughput by removing wasteful activities, improving quality output, and injecting value-added activities.

Other Business Priorities
New corporate products and services, business model changes, application rationalization, and other priorities may require modernization, innovation, and a different way of working.

Engage your stakeholders to elicit the business context

Stakeholder Engagement

A prerequisite to all strategic planning should be to elicit the business context from your business stakeholders. At a basic level, understand what questions to ask to understand the general business context. At a more advanced level, discern which questions must be answered for each key BPA initiative and what those answers need to look like to be sufficient for execution.

ENGAGEMENTS MUST UNCOVER

1 Your organization's top three business goals & strategies

2 Your organization's top 10 business initiatives

3 Your organization's mission & vision

Note: This is a prerequisite to building your BPA strategy.

Visit Info-Tech's business context blueprint to download the full methodology.

Identify the group of stakeholders and end users who should be engaged

Gauge the scope and breadth of the people, business capabilities, and products and services that would be involved in BPA.

Tactics to discover impacted people, capabilities, and technologies:

Stakeholder Discussions

Discussions through one-on-one interviews or small focus groups of interested individuals offer insights on background and context of impacted roles, how to navigate obstacles before they arise, and what should be accommodated in the solution design to gain the most value.

See Document Business Goals and Capabilities for Your IT Strategy blueprint for more information.

IT Tools

IT has or can have access to various tools to glean the scope involved in BPA, such as:

• Process discovery and mining tools
• IT service management and help desk tools
• Access management
• Configuration management

See SoftwareReviews for more information on IT tools.

Value Chains and Streams

Value streams and value chains connect business goals to the organization's value realization activities. They enable an organization to create and capture value by engaging in a set of interconnected activities and to better understand how BPA can influence those activities.

See Map Your Business Architecture to Define Your Strategy for more information.

Application Capability Maps

Application capability maps give you a sense of how technology supports the business and the scope of its adoption. This alignment enables you to better understand how BPA adds value and impacts technologies with a large organizational footprint.

See Application Portfolio Management Foundations for more information.

1.1.1 Elicit and document the business problem and strategy

1-2 hours

1. Gather and review the various documents containing the business context. This includes business strategy documents, interview notes from executive stakeholders, and other sources for uncovering the business strategy. See the following slide for examples.
2. If available, state the organization's vision and mission.
3. Begin to formulate how BPA can support the business by answering the following questions with stakeholders:

SWOT analysis, PESTLE analysis, and Porter's 5 forces are some tactics you can use drive this discussion. Refer to Define Your Digital Business Strategy for more information.

1. Highlight the strategic themes that emerged from your discussions with stakeholders.
2. State the strategic goals using these themes and the KPIs to indicate when you will be successful.
3. Document your findings in the Business Process Automation Strategy Template.

Output

Business strategy mission, vision, and goals

Participants

IT and business leadership Business process and unit owners Application and product owners IT delivery and operational teams

Download the Business Process Automation Strategy Template

1.1.1 cont'd

Example of documents to review to glean business context

Inputs	Documents/Method	Outputs
Key stakeholders	Strategy Document	Stakeholders that are actively involved in, affected by, or influence outcome of the organization, e.g. employers, customers, vendors.
Vision and mission of the organization	Website Strategy Document	What the organization wants to achieve and how it strives to accomplish those goals.
Business drivers	CEO Interview	Inputs and activities that drive the operational and financial results of the organization.
Key targets	CEO Interview	Quantitative benchmarks to support strategic goals, e.g. double the enterprise EBITDA, improve top-of-mind brand awareness by 15%.
Strategic investment goals	CFO Interview Digital Strategy	Financial investments corresponding with the strategic objectives of the organization, e.g. geographic expansion, digital investments.
Top three value-generating lines of business	Financial Document	Identification of your top three value-generating products and services or lines of business.
Goals of the organization over the next 12 months	Strategy Document Corporate Retreat Notes	Strategic goals to support the vision, e.g. hire 100 new sales reps, improve product management and marketing.
Top business initiatives over the next 12 months	Strategy Document CEO Interview	Internal campaigns to support strategic goals, e.g. invest in sales team development, expand the product innovation team.
Business model	Strategy Document	Products or services that the organization plans to sell, the identified market and customer segments, price points, channels and anticipated expenses.
Competitive landscape	Internal Research Analysis	Who your typical or atypical competitors are.

1.1.1 cont'd

Example of strategic themes from stakeholder consultation: Municipal government

Executive Council

1. Improve access to services online
2. Seamless interaction with citizens
3. Better ways for citizens to engage

City Management Leaders

1. Mobile, mobile, mobile
2. Single digital ID
3. Greater self-service options
4. Attract top talent

Business Representatives

1. Make it easier to do business with city
2. Timely processing of permits, licenses, etc.
3. More online interaction with city

Parks and Recreation

1. Lower carbon footprint
2. Revitalization of low-income space

Infrastructure and Transit

1. Smarter transit
2. Open Wi-Fi/open data
3. Reliable network and infrastructure

Arts and Culture

1. Greater digital marketing for cultural events
2. Better insights into what communities want

1.1.1 cont'd

Example: Municipal government

Vision
City X: A great place to make a living; a great place to make a life.

Mission
Making life better every day.

Our Strategic Goals

1. Smart city of the future
2. Social equity and social resilience
3. Workforce of the future
4. Build world-class transit system and infrastructure
5. Environmental resilience and sustainability
6. Create a globally connected and economically prosperous city

We'll be successful when...
100% of our core services are available online.
Capture and treat 90% of City X's annual rainfall for green rainwater use.
Increase access to public housing by 40% by 2025.
Increase the number of public meetings or input opportunities by 25% by 2025.

Reach a common definition and means to apply value

Value is subjective. It is defined through past achievements and future objectives.

• There must be a consensus view of what is valuable within the organization, and these values need to be shared across the enterprise.
• Instead of maintaining siloed views and fighting for priorities, all departments must have the same value and purpose in mind.
• These factors – purpose and mission, past achievement and current state, vision and future state, and culture and leadership – impact what is valuable to the organization.
• Being able to understand the value context will allow IT to articulate where IT spend supports business value and how it enables business goal achievement with BPA.

Business value is more than dollars and cents.

The crux of any role, process or technology change is its full acceptance, adoption, and utilization by the workers, teams and departments affected. This can only be achieved if their core needs are met in the design, implementation, and support of BPA, such as:

• BPA removes the stress, impediments, or restrictions challenging worker productivity.
• Safe and nurturing environment to learn and adopt process changes.
• No fear of losing one's job or of inability to shift to a new way of working or new responsibilities and accountabilities.
• Ability to focus on work that is motivating and fulfilling to the worker.
• Solutions are aligned with the personal ethics and morality of the workers.

Explore the value of scaled BPA

According to Automated Dreams' Business Automation Strategy Playbook, 5 key benefits of scaled BPA are:

1	Increased Efficiency and Productivity Automating repetitive tasks will save time and reduce errors, allowing employees to focus on more complex and valuable tasks. For example, automating the invoicing process at a start-up would save employees time, remove customer wait periods, and reduce the chance of miscalculation.
2	Improved Customer Service Automation can help organizations respond more quickly and efficiently to customer inquiries and requests. For example, using a programmed chatbot to respond to customer inquiries will help you respond quickly, reduce churn rates, and improve relationships with customers.
3	Cost Savings Automation can reduce labor costs and increase operational efficiency, leading to cost savings for your organization. For example, when a logistics company automates the scheduling and dispatching of its delivery trucks, labor costs will reduce.
4	Improved Accuracy and Consistency Automated processes ensure that tasks are completed consistently and accurately. For example, automating the process of onboarding new employees for a start-up would help to ensure that all necessary steps are completed consistently and accurately.
5	Better Compliance and Security Automated processes and tech companies help organizations comply with regulations and ensure the security of sensitive data. For example, automating the process of data logging and managing tracking access for sensitive data would help your business comply with regulations and ensure the security of the data.

Source: Automated Dreams.

1.1.2 Define and prioritize your business value drivers

1-3 hours

1. Review the themes and strategic goals defined in the previous exercise.
2. Gather the various stakeholders, end users, and supporting roles (e.g. IT delivery and operations) who are tied to these strategic goals.
3. Review the business value framework on the following slide:

1. Using the different perspectives, identify and prioritize your business value drivers.
2. Document your findings in the Business Process Automation Strategy Template.

Output

Business value definition

Participants

IT and business leadership Business process and unit owners Application and product owners IT delivery and operational teams

1.1.2 cont'd

Example: Municipal government

Step 1.2

Understand your stakeholder needs

Activities

1.2.1 Understand your stakeholder needs

This step involves the following participants:

• IT and business leadership
• Business process and unit owners
• Application and product owners
• IT delivery and operational teams

Outcomes of this step

• Customer and end user assessment (e.g., personas, customer journey)

Give your BPA stakeholders the experience they expect

Automate to support digital experience (DX)

Digital experience refers to the interaction between a user and an organization through digital products and services. Digital products and services are tools, systems, devices, and resources that gather, store, and process data; are continuously modernized; and embody eight key attributes that are described on the following slide. DX is broken down into four distinct perspectives*:

• Customer Experience – The immediate perceptions of transactions and interactions experienced through a customer's journey in the use of the organization's digital products and services.
• End-User Experience – Users' emotions, beliefs, and physical and psychological responses that occur before, during, or after interacting with a digital product or service.
• Brand Experience – The broader perceptions, emotions, thoughts, feelings and actions the public associate with the organization's brand and reputation or its products and services. Brand experience evolves over time as customers continuously engage with the brand.
• Employee Experience – The satisfaction and experience of an employee through their journey with the organization, from recruitment and hiring to their departure. How an employee embodies and promotes the organization brand and culture can affect their performance, trust, respect, and drive to innovate and optimize.

*Influenced by Accelerate in Experience, 2020.

See Info-Tech's Applications Priorities 2023 report for more information on DX.

Describe the experience you want to build with personas

Increase the acceptance of BPA by addressing the pains, frustrations, and needs of your stakeholders.

You need to understand who you are helping to determine the best solution for the problem. Personas give you holistic insights into the end user by revealing who they are, what they need, and what their pains and gains are.

One of the best ways to flesh out your end-user persona is to engage with the end users directly or to gather the input of those who may engage with them within the organization.

For example, if you want to understand how a student interacts with the school's technologies, you might want to gather the input of students or of teaching faculty that have firsthand experience with different student types and can define a common student type.

See our Apply Design Thinking to Build Empathy With the Business blueprint for more information on personas

Info-Tech Insight
Employ gemba in your solution design. Gemba motivates decision makers to go to "the place where value is created" to learn about and understand the end users and customers so that BPA efforts reflect their needs. Capture the end user using personas and customer journeys.

1.2.1 Understand your stakeholder needs

0.5-1 hour

1. Brainstorm the various stakeholders of your high-priority value drivers.
2. Construct personas of each stakeholder using the following slide as a guide.
3. Document your findings in the Business Process Automation Strategy Template.

Output

Customer and end user assessment (e.g. personas, customer journey)

Participants

IT and business leadership Business process and unit owners Application and product owners IT delivery and operational teams

1.2.1 cont'd

Example:

Stakeholder demographics

Name: Anne
Age: 35
Occupation: Engineering Faculty
Location: Toronto, Canada

Pains
What are their frustrations, fears, and anxieties?

• Time restraints
• Using new digital tools
• Managing a class while incorporating individual learning
• Varying levels within the same class
• Unmotivated students

What do they need to do?
What do they want to get done? How will they know they are successful?

• Design curricula in a hybrid mode without loss of quality of experience of in-classroom learning.

Gains
What are their wants, needs, hopes, and dreams?

• Interactive content for students
• Curriculum alignment
• Ability to run a classroom lab (in hybrid format)
• Self-paced and self-directed learning opportunities for students

Adapted from Osterwalder, et al., 2014

Leverage journey mapping to extend your stakeholders' learning

Conduct a journey mapping exercise to identify opportunities for innovation or automation.

A journey-based approach helps an organization understand how a stakeholder moves through a process and interacts with the organization in the form of touch points, channels, and supporting characters. By identifying pain points in the journey and the activity types, we can identify opportunities for innovation and automation along the journey.

Embrace design thinking methodologies to elevate the stakeholder journey and to build a competitive advantage for your organization.

See our Apply Design Thinking to Build Empathy With the Business blueprint for more information on customer journeys

Example of stakeholder journey output: Higher Education

Stakeholder: A faculty member
Journey: As an engineering faculty member, I want to design my curricula in a hybrid mode of delivery so that I can simulate in-classroom experiences

Journey Activity	Understand the needs of students	Understand the needs of students	Deliver course material	Conduct assessments	Upload grades into system
Touch Points	Research (primary or secondary) Teaching and learning center	Training on tools Office suite	Video tools PowerPoint live Chat (live) Forum (FAQ)	Online assessment tool	ERP LMS
Nature of Activity	Non-routine cognitive	Non-routine cognitive	Non-routine cognitive	Routine cognitive	Routine manual
Metrics	Time to completion	Time to completion	Student satisfaction	Student satisfaction Student scores
Key Moments & Pain Points	Lack of centralized repository for research knowledge	Too many tools to use	Lack of Wi-Fi connectivity for students Loss of social aspects	Adjusting to new forms of assessments	No existing critical pain points; process already automated
Opportunities	Centralized repository for research knowledge	Rationalize course creation tool set	Connectivity self-assessment/checklist Forums for students	Implement an online proctoring tool

Step 1.3

Build your risk and change profiles

Activities
1.3.1 Build your BPA change profile
1.3.2 Build your BPA risk profile

This step involves the following participants:

• IT and business leadership
• Business process and unit owners
• Application and product owners
• IT delivery and operational teams

Outcomes of this step

• Risk and change profile

BPA is an organizational change management initiative

What is organizational change management (OCM)?

OCM is a framework for managing the introduction of new business and IT processes and technologies to ensure stakeholder and team adoption.

OCM involves tools, templates, and processes that are intended to help change leaders analyze the impacts of a change during the planning phase, engage stakeholders and teams throughout the change delivery, and train and transition users toward the new technologies and processes being implemented.

When is OCM needed in BPA?

Any time you start a BPA initiative that depends on users to significantly modify their old way of doing things, the changes will force people to become novices again and introduce risks that were not previously relevant. Good organizational change and risk management practices and leadership can help keep these issues limited to the initial implementation.

OCM should be built into your BPA initiatives, including structuring a framework to teach and coach people to adopt new tools and procedures, comply with new and modified policies, and learn new skills and behaviors to better support optimized and automated processes.

See our Master Organizational Change Management Practices blueprint for more information.

1.3.1 Build your BPA change profile

1-2 hours

1. Select one application or business process that is the focus of your BPA initiative. Identify the readiness and ability of your business to change as shown in the example on the next slides. Add other change factors that should be included in this assessment.
2. Identify the readiness and ability of your organization to change as shown in the example on the next slides. Add other change factors that should be included.

1. Document your findings in the Business Process Automation Strategy Template.

Output

Change profile

Participants

IT and business leadership Business process and unit owners Application and product owners IT delivery and operational teams

Download the Business Process Automation Strategy Template

1.3.1 cont'd

Example

Change Factor – Application Stack	Description	Readiness to Change	Ability to Change	Owner
Value stream	The value stream can be streamlined and modified to take advantage of BPA to maximize value generation.	Yes	Yes	Julia Ng
Business capability	The business capabilities supporting your value stream can be streamlined and modified to take advantage of BPA to maximize value generation.	Yes	No	Julia Ng
Business process	The business processes supporting your business capabilities can be streamlined and modified to take advantage of BPA to maximize value generation.	No	No	Julia Ng
Application UI and UX	The application's user interface and user experience can be modified to best suit the user's functional and personal needs, which include device accessibility, the format of information delivery, and visual and audio designs.	Yes	Yes	Mark Lee
Application logic/code	The application's business logic and code can be modified with modern languages, frameworks, and architectures to meet their accessibility, scalability, maintainability, and other quality needs.	Yes	No	Mark Lee
Integration	The application, data, and infrastructure integration strategy and technology can be modified to address new system dependencies and implement the desired architecture.	No	No	Bill White
Data architecture	The rules, policies, standards, and models that govern and define the type of data collected and how it is used, stored, managed, and integrated within the organization and its database systems. These can be modified when needed.	Yes	No	Bill White
Master data management	Your organization established and has control over master data values to enable consistent, shared, contextual use across systems, and it can be modified when needed.	No	No	Bill White
Infrastructure	The infrastructure and its architecture can be modified when needed.	Yes	No	Amy Brown
Security	The security rules, policies, standards, and models that govern and define how an application should be managed, accessed, consumed, and protected.	No	Yes	Lily Sanchez

1.3.1 cont'd

Example

Change Factor – IT Delivery and Support	Description	Readiness to Change	Ability to Change	Owner
IT resource capacity	The availability and ability to shift IT resources to complete BPA considering their knowledge, their skills and expertise, the tools at their disposal, and their other priorities and commitments.	No	No	Bob Zane
Team structure	The team can be restructured, and roles can be redefined to best suit the delivery, support, and management of BPA.	Yes	No	Bob Zane
Intake, analysis, and backlog management practice	The project and work intake, analysis, and backlog management practice can be modified to best leverage and support the value and benefit opportunities of BPA.	No	No	Julia Ng
Design and architecture practice	The design and architecture practice can be modified to best leverage and support the value and benefit opportunities of BPA.	Yes	Yes	Andrew Miles
Development and configuration practice	The development practice can be modified to best leverage and support the value and benefit opportunities of BPA.	Yes	Yes	Andrew Miles
Testing practice	The testing practice can be modified to best leverage and support the value and benefit opportunities of BPA.	Yes	No	Andrew Miles
Deployment and implementation practice	The deployment and implementation practice can be modified to best leverage and support the value and benefit opportunities of BPA.	No	No	Andrew Miles
Application support, maintenance, and management practice	The application support and maintenance practice can be modified to best leverage and support the value and benefit opportunities of BPA.	No	No	Amy Brown
Application and system monitoring	Application and system performance monitoring, dashboards, and instrumentation can be reconfigured to gauge the success of BPA.	No	Yes	Amy Brown

1.3.1 cont'd

Example

Change Factor – Business Stakeholders	Description	Readiness to Change	Ability to Change	Owner
Modified way of working	An end user's ability to adopt new and modified workflows involving modernized or removed technologies.	Yes	Yes	Julia Ng
User experience	An end user's mental, behavioral, and psychological capacity to accept and adopt changes given available training, onboarding, coaching, and communication.	Yes	Yes	Mark Lee
Shift in business model	The business' ability to shift their primary source of business value and realign their business model to fit this new value stream.	Yes	Yes	Julia Ng
Organizational reputation and image	The perception, morality, and image of the organization amid changes to the business and operational model.	Yes	No	Julia Ng
Process, application and product ownership	The ownership structure of the technical stack of the application or product and the role's/team's ability to drive growth and maturity of the process, application or product.	No	No	Julia Ng
Application system control	The degree of control and accessibility to the application stack and the organization's ability to make fine-tuned configurations and customizations.	No	No	Amy Brown
Business strategy	The ability to shift the focus, approach, and objectives of the business strategy to lessons learned from this BPA effort.	No	Yes	Julia Ng
Industry compliance	The organization's ability to pivot or budge on meeting or being guided by regulations (e.g. HIPAA, SOX) and industry standards and frameworks (e.g. ITIL, COBIT).	No	No	Amy Brown

The aggressiveness of your BPA initiatives hinges on your risk appetite

Risk Tolerant	Moderate	Risk Averse
You have no compliance requirements. You have no sensitive data. Customers do not expect you to have strong security controls. Revenue generation and innovative products take priority and risk is acceptable. The organization does not have remote locations. It is likely that your organization does not operate within the following industries:	You have some compliance requirements, such as: You have sensitive data and are required to retain records. Customers expect strong security controls. Information security is visible to senior leadership. The organization has some remote locations. Your organization most likely operates within the following industries:	You have multiple strict compliance and/or regulatory requirements. You house sensitive data, such as medical records. Customers expect your organization to maintain strong and current security controls. Information security is highly visible to senior management and public investors. The organization has multiple remote locations. Your organization most likely operates within the following industries:

See our Build an IT Risk Taxonomy blueprint for more information.

1.3.2 Build your BPA risk profile

1-2 hours

1. Review the various risks your organization is exposed to that are relevant to your BPA strategy. See the following slides for examples of risks. Clarify the "Risk," "Detail," and "Risk Event" columns so that they are reflective of your business and IT stakeholders.
2. Document the mechanisms that are available to manage and monitor your risks in the "Control" column.
3. Indicate who is the owner of each risk.
4. Identify the appetite for each risk: high, moderate, low.

1. Document your findings in the Business Process Automation Strategy Template.

Output

Risk profile

Participants

IT and business leadership Business process and unit owners Application and product owners IT delivery and operational teams

Download the Business Process Automation Strategy Template

1.3.2 cont'd

Mainstream risks

Risk	Detail	Control	Owner	Appetite
Financial	The ability to obtain sufficient and timely funding capacity.	Project management office IT budget committee	Steve Moore	Low
Non-Financial	Non-financial risks are risks that are not considered to be traditional financial risks. Non-financial risk includes operational risk, technology risk, culture. and conduct.	Architecture review board Change advisory board	Steve Moore	Low
Reputational	Potential negative publicity regarding business practices regardless of validity.	IT steering committee Business strategy review	Julia Ng	Moderate
Strategic	Risk of unsuccessful business performance due to internal or external uncertainties, whether driven by events or trends. Actions or events that adversely impact an organization's strategies and/or implementation of its strategies.	IT steering committee Business strategy review	Julia Ng	Moderate
Sustainability (ESG)	This risk of any negative financial or reputational impact on an organization stemming from current or prospective impacts of ESG factors on its counterparties or invested assets.	Legal and compliance review	Nick Green	Moderate
Talent and Risk Culture	The widespread behaviors and mindsets that can threaten sound decision making, prudent risk taking, and effective risk management and can weaken an institution's financial and operational resilience.	Organizational leadership steering committee	Julia Ng	Moderate

1.3.2 cont'd

Technology risk

Risk	Detail	Risk Event	Control	Owner	Appetite
Change (Transformation)	IT integration (e.g. merger and acquisition)	Data breach when replacing or integrating IT system	IT disposition process	Bob Zane	Low
			Security risk assessment	Bob Zane	Low
	Enterprise or material change program (e.g. implementing ERP)	Software failure/bug	Testing and release management	Bob Zane	Moderate
Performance	Process failure	Execution error by employee	Process diagrams	Bob Zane	Moderate
			Validation checks	Bob Zane	Moderate
	Technology failure	Outage on outdated systems	Manage technical debt	Bob Zane	Moderate
		Server failure	Live system failover	Bob Zane	Low
	External relationship	Cloud provider causes performance issue	Contract provisions	Bob Zane	Low
			Ongoing performance monitoring	Bob Zane	Moderate
Availability/ Continuity	IT continuity and disaster recovery	Configuration differences in primary and secondary data center	Failure mode and effects analysis End-user testing	Bob Zane	Moderate
	Disruptive cyberattacks	Cyber threats (denial of service, malware, etc.)	Air-gapped backups	Bob Zane	Low
			Regularly patch firewalls	Bob Zane	Low
			Solutions to protect critical internet activities or services	Bob Zane	Low
		Data poisoning (malicious data fed into AI models)	Penetration testing of AI models Regular checks of data in models	Bob Zane	Low

1.3.2 cont'd

Technology risk cont'd

Risk	Detail	Risk Event	Control	Owner	Appetite
Asset Management	Operation & optimization of assets	Denial of service	Control access	Bob Zane	Low
		Corruption of data	Boundary defense	Bob Zane	Low
		Noncompliance because IT was not aware of business system (shadow IT)	Develop and maintain asset register Easy access to approved hardware/software catalog Well-defined policy on exceptions and approvals	Bob Zane	Moderate
		Software/subscription license expires	Maintain asset register Proactive notifications sent to asset manager	Bob Zane	Moderate
		Unapproved cloud software as a service (SaaS) used for proof of concept, impacting product delivery	Easy access to approved software catalogue SaaS discovery (management) solution	Bob Zane	Moderate
	Asset maintenance	Unauthorized installation of software (e.g. SaaS)	Role-based access and desktop management Asset management change register Expense tracking	Bob Zane	Moderate
		Information theft of legacy system	Offboarding policy and decommission process	Bob Zane	Low
	Management of risks associated with ownership	Employee/contractor abuse of authorization	Control access (privileged user)	Bob Zane	Low
		Employee steals payment information	Monitoring and role-based access	Bob Zane	Moderate
		Critical equipment damaged in hurricane	Business continuity planning Inventory of license and license keys Exposure assessment (calculate exposure score) Hot swaps of critical equipment in disaster recovery plan	Bob Zane	Moderate
		Employee exits or changes their role in organization	Identity access management Linking asset register updates to tasks and events Role-based access	Bob Zane	Low

1.3.2 cont'd

Technology risk cont'd

Risk	Detail	Risk Event	Control	Owner	Appetite
Asset Management	Management of risks associated with use	Misuse of information systems	Activity monitoring and role-based access	Bob Zane	Low
		Employee loses device	Training UEM software (remote wipe) Encryption	Bob Zane	Low
		Employee loses USB devices	Encryption Cutting off access to USB drive	Bob Zane	Low
Delivery (Execution Risk)	External	Consultant delays	Contract provisions (e.g. late penalties) Due diligence on vendor assessments	Bob Zane	Moderate
	Internal	Unplanned work that must be accommodated in a certain timeframe	Escalation to IT governance committee	Bob Zane	Moderate
		Business case becomes obsolete	No way to mitigate (monitor for early warning signs and escalate to governance committee)	Bob Zane	Low
Disruptive Innovation	Artificial intelligence	Employee puts model into use that results in customer complaint	AI ethics committee	Bob Zane	Low

1.3.2 cont'd

Talent and culture risk

Risk	Detail	Risk Event	Control	Owner	Appetite
Capacity	Labor market changes	High percentage of employees are nearing retirement.	Establish an ongoing recruitment process to ensure consistent pipeline of potential employees	Jane Olson	Low
			Succession planning	Jane Olson	Low
			Hire-to-train program for new employees without skills, knowledge, or ability to be provided roles	Jane Olson	Moderate
	Lack of IT leaders	Employees unable or unwilling to reduce gaps in their leadership capabilities.	Provide all employees with leadership training whether they chose a technical or people career path	Jane Olson	Moderate
	Remote work	Lose staff to organizations that offer flexible working locations and arrangements.	Mobility policies	Jane Olson	Moderate
Capability	Critical person risk	Key person who has critical skill leaves organization.	Formalized knowledge-sharing program	Jane Olson	Moderate
		A single employee knows how to troubleshoot a problem and is unavailable one day when the problem arises.	Formalized knowledge-sharing program	Jane Olson	Low
	Competency changes	On-premises skills are no longer needed as the organization embraces full cloud adoption.	Reskilling program for new or changed roles	Jane Olson	Low
		An innovative technology (e.g. AI) enters the market and disrupts workforce skill requirements.	Formalized training program for employees	Jane Olson	Moderate
Cost	Salaries for critical skill employees	Innovative technology organizations can offer higher salaries.	Formalize the employee value proposition to include elements beyond salary	Jane Olson	Moderate
		Employees dedicate focus to side gigs to make additional income.	Provide employees opportunities to work overtime hours	Jane Olson	Low
	Operational budget reductions	A recession forces the organization to reduce headcount across IT.	Have a ready-to-leverage skills matrix for employees	Jane Olson	Low
			Monitor market	Jane Olson	Low

1.3.2 cont'd

Talent and culture risk cont'd

Risk	Detail	Risk Event	Control	Owner	Appetite
Culture	Not enabling a culture of innovation	Lose staff to employers that support an innovative culture.	Provide employees with opportunities to work on innovative initiatives	Jane Olson	Low
	Leadership by example	The desired behaviors for employees are not demonstrated by members of the leadership team.	Conduct regular assessments such as an IT value survey, cultural assessment, and employee exit survey	Jane Olson	High
		Employees are not encouraged to collaborate even though the operating model depends on good collaboration.	Create forums and cross-functional working groups for collaboration between IT and specific departments	Jane Olson	High
	Tallest poppy syndrome	A high-performing employee quits after facing criticism and resentment from their team members after being publicly recognized for hard work several times.	Provide equitable praise of employees Interruption techniques (interrupt behavior)	Jane Olson	High
Compliance	Labor laws	Organization fails to provide accessibility accommodations for a prospective employee during the interview process.	Include information in all job postings on how accessibility accommodations can be accessed.	Jane Olson	Low
	Employee policy acknowledgement	An IT employee faces discrimination when applying for a manager role.	Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policy training	Jane Olson	Low
	Misconduct	A junior employee faces harassment from a senior member of the leadership team.	Harassment training/whistle blowing program/escalation process	Jane Olson	Low

1.3.2 cont'd

Data risk

Risk	Detail	Risk Event	Controls	Owner	Appetite
Data Quality	Data accuracy	Misreporting to regulator or enforcement action due to inaccurate data	Data profiling to determine and monitor data quality: Business rule to data rule alignment Completeness, accuracy, and consistency checks Record transfer, rows imported checks Data quality remediation action plans: Data remediation (e.g. data cleansing, data transformation) People and process remediation (e.g. requiring two people's approval or controls to prevent consequences from misclicks) Technology remediation (e.g. interface changes, data change controls Data issues and incident management processes Policies and procedures on data standards Data governance	Bill White	Low
	Data completeness	Loss of customers due to a missing data attribute that would help the customer compare and choose			Low
	Data consistency	Customer compliant due to incorrect data on customer record leading to mistrust or wrong service provision			Low
	Data availability	Unreliable analysis due to data lineage fault or failed data delivery			Low
	Validity	Third-party contractual issues: Invalid data fields leads to data transfer protocol issues when providing data to third parties			Low
	Timeliness	Misreporting due to data lineage fault or late delivery of data			Low
Data Architecture	Data classification	Reputational damage through misuse of data an employee or entity should not have access to	Data classification standards and procedures Automated data classification Data access controls	Bill White	Low
	Data access	Reputational damage through misuse of data an employee or entity should not have access to	Role-based data access controls (row, column, and cell level)	Bill White	Low
	Data standardization	Misreporting to regulator or enforcement action due to misinterpretation of data	Data design standards Business glossary, data dictionaries Data and change governance	Bill White	Low
	Metadata management	Ineffective business processes or reporting due to data load parameter errors in data messaging service	Data design standards Canonical modeling Use of API gateways	Bill White	Low

1.3.2 cont'd

Data risk cont'd

Risk	Detail	Risk Event	Control	Owner	Appetite
Data Culture	Data governance	Misreporting to regulator or enforcement action due to undetected control failure	Data governance program, data stewardship	Bill White	Low
	Data literacy	Employees use incorrect or wrong data or share confidential information	Data literacy program and training, role-based data training	Bill White	Low
Data Privacy	Sensitive data (PII)	Breach of legal obligations through misuse or improper sharing of PII data	Policies and procedures Employee training Data access controls	Bill White	Low

1.3.2 cont'd

Strategic risk

Risk	Detail	Risk Event	Control	Owner	Appetite
IT-Business Alignment	Planning	New business is acquired without an IT assessment – integration costs more money than estimated	CIO and CEO work in partnership on acquisitions	Bob Zane	Moderate
		Business department acquires new software that is not supported by IT	Well-defined policy on exceptions and approvals	Bob Zane	Moderate
		Unplanned risk surface during implementation	IT conducts risk assessment prior to starting initiative	Bob Zane	Moderate
	IT strategy	IT enhancement project gets sidelined because resources are needed for unplanned (unallocated) business initiative	IT strategy and resource planning is in place	Bob Zane	Moderate
		CIO is fired because they are perceived as not providing value	CIO is part of executive committee Business-aligned IT strategy is in place	Bob Zane	Moderate
IT Capabilities and Performance	Internal control framework	Shadow IT is pervasive or is increasing risk and costs	IT Steering Committee (governance)	Bob Zane	Moderate
		Increased number of incidents and control failures	IT policies and up to date and regularly reviewed Performance review	Bob Zane	Moderate

1.3.2 cont'd

Third-party risk

Risk	Detail	Risk Event	Control	Owner	Appetite
Legal and Compliance	Regulatory penalties and fines	Third party is not in compliance with rules and regulations.	Ongoing monitoring	Amy Brown	Moderate
	Legal (criminal acts, arbitration and disputes)	Arbitration is required due to delays in delivery.	Contractual provisions	Amy Brown	Low
		Publicity/IP use without consent.	Contractual provisions	Amy Brown	Low
			Social media monitoring	Amy Brown	Moderate
Performance	Internal process	Third-party management control failure, e.g. SaaS drops.	Business continuity planning	Amy Brown	Moderate
	Technology	Failure due to poor technology integration.	Contractual provisions	Amy Brown	Moderate
			Enforcing change control	Amy Brown	Moderate
			Configuration process	Amy Brown	Low
	External relationship	Third party outsources to an external party and the external party fails to deliver.	Due diligence at time of contract	Amy Brown	Low
Supply Chain Management	Subcontractor risks	Data breach.	Contractual provisions (accountability – all protections)	Amy Brown	Moderate
	Concentration risk	Cloud provider Infrastructure down.	Cloud exit strategies	Amy Brown	Moderate
			Contingency plans	Amy Brown	Low
Financial	Limited resources or skills	Key person leaves third-party supplier.	Due diligence at time of contract	Amy Brown	Low
	Insolvency/bankruptcy	Third party is insolvent.	Contractual provision (do not include exclusivity clause)	Amy Brown	Low
Strategic	M&A	Third party is restructured, and unfavorable terms and conditions are introduced.	Mutual assignment clause	Amy Brown	Low
	Market changes or change in customer preferences	Third party product or service becomes obsolete.	Flexibility in strategy	Amy Brown	Moderate

1.3.2 cont'd

Third-party risk cont'd

Risk	Detail	Risk Event	Control	Owner	Appetite
Security (exception: may go under IT Security for smaller organizations or be managed holistically)	Cyber	Botnet attack.	Security audit	Amy Brown	Moderate
	Physical	Third party asset is damaged.	Security audit	Amy Brown	Moderate
	Administrative controls	Generic access is given to a third-party admin and disgruntled party leaves.	Security audit (review of policies and procedures)	Amy Brown	Moderate
Technology	Assets	End-of-life asset is accessed.	Security audit (ensure frequent patching and establish refresh cycle)	Amy Brown	Low
	Data	Data breach by third party.	Security audit	Amy Brown	Low
			Contractual provisions	Amy Brown	Moderate
	People	Lack of education creates incident.	Security audit (including training)	Amy Brown	Moderate
	Process	Poor configuration.	Security audit (including change and configuration controls)	Amy Brown	Low
		Data transfer error.	Data validation	Amy Brown	Low

1.3.2 cont'd

Security risk

Risk	Detail	Risk Event	Control	Owner	Appetite
Information	Cyber	Ransomware attack on organization's ERP system	Deploy and test offsite backups	Lily Sanchez	Low
			Air-gapped backups	Lily Sanchez	Low
			Next-gen anti-exploit endpoint agents	Lily Sanchez	Moderate
		Wiper malware attack to critical system	Regular vulnerability scanning	Lily Sanchez	Moderate
			Security operations center	Lily Sanchez	Moderate
			Regular updates and software patches	Lily Sanchez	Moderate
		Phishing attack on employee	Email security and spam protection	Lily Sanchez	Low
		Business email compromise (BEC)	Security awareness training	Lily Sanchez	Low
		Employee uses external website and downloads malicious script	Endpoint protection	Lily Sanchez	Moderate
		Organization or threat group gains unauthorized access to network and remains undiscovered	Implementation of security information and event management (SIEM) or security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) capabilities	Lily Sanchez	Moderate
			Intrusion detection systems (IDS)	Lily Sanchez	Low
			Intrusion prevention systems (IPS)	Lily Sanchez	Low
		Botnet attack	Network monitoring and mitigation (ISP protection)	Lily Sanchez	Low
		Compromise as a service attack	Define network perimeter and apply network controls	Lily Sanchez	Low
	Governance	Enforcement action related to failures in cybersecurity policies and procedures	Trigger risk assessment/enhance governance practices	Lily Sanchez	Moderate

1.3.2 cont'd

Security risk cont'd

Risk	Detail	Risk Event	Control	Owner	Appetite
Physical	Facilities	Servers or equipment stolen during a break-in	Surveillance/CTV	Lily Sanchez	Low
			Permission to access	Lily Sanchez	Low
		Overheating of assets	Fire suppression	Lily Sanchez	Low
		Damage to critical assets (e.g. manufacturing equipment, water treatment plant)	Biometric security, key management	Lily Sanchez	Moderate
	Climate	Data center flooded	Efficient sealing solutions, flood walls	Lily Sanchez	Low
Operational Technology	Servers and systems	Malfunction of sensor	Monitoring of sensors	Lily Sanchez	Low
		Backup sensors		Lily Sanchez	Low
		Power outage	Backup generators Alternative sources of energy (renewable)	Lily Sanchez	Low
	Humans	Software configuration error	System configuration management policy	Lily Sanchez	Low
	Industrial control systems (ICS)	Programmable logic controllers (PLC) failure	Remote monitoring	Lily Sanchez	Moderate
		Exploitation of Internet of Things (IoT) and internet-connected systems	Continuous logging and analysis of network traffic	Lily Sanchez	Low
	ICS network	Fieldbus network failure	Fully redundant environment	Lily Sanchez	Low
		IoT attack on facility or plant	Zero trust practices (network segmentation, remote access control jump box system )	Lily Sanchez	Moderate
Personnel Controls	Access privileges	Software is set up with generic access and employee gives password information to another employee	Access control policy	Lily Sanchez	Low
	Human behavior	Information solen via USB	Security policy	Lily Sanchez	Low
		Employee leaves laptop in cab	Device usage policy	Lily Sanchez	Low

Focus your initial efforts on the areas of least resistance and risk

The success of your BPA effort is dependent on end users', stakeholders', and IT's change and risk tolerance, whether from a people, process, or technology perspective. While an application or a line of business may benefit the most from BPA, the potential user resistance to change or the complexity of legacy applications can quickly derail your initiative. Review your assessment to identify where BPA can be the most valuable considering the organization's flexibility and tolerance of change and risk. With the right foundation using lessons learned, more complex BPA initiatives can be undertaken.

Change & risk factors

Application system
The capability of the entire or part of the application stack (from business capabilities down to the infrastructure) to change considering business operations complexities, vendor lock-ins, and existing legacy technologies.

End users and stakeholders
The flexibility of an end user to adopt a different way of working. Business strategies, product roadmaps, and governance models can readily adjust to lessons learned and evolving priorities. Ideally, BPA impediments can be mitigated and removed, or a workaround can be easily deployed.

IT delivery and operations
IT can modify their own practices to best deliver and operate BPA and modified systems, and provide satisfactory end-user support to ensure the technology meets their needs.

Phase 2

Define your BPA objectives & opportunities

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

• Step 2.1: Define your BPA expectations
• Step 2.2: List your guiding principles
• Step 2.3: Envision your BPA target state
• Step 2.4: Build your opportunity backlog

This phase involves the following participants:

• IT and business leadership
• Business process and unit owners
• Application and product owners
• IT delivery and operational teams

Develop Your Value-First Business Process Automation Strategy

Phase 2 Insight Summary

Phase Info-Tech Insight
Treat automation like any other enterprise technology. Optimizing and automating business processes involves more than understanding how it impacts the user. It relies on how these improvements meet risk and change appetites and tolerances and how the outputs drive customer satisfaction and business priorities.

Step 2.1	Implement BPA with clear objectives to maximize learning and establish a scalable foundation. A key to successful BPA is thoughtfully introducing automation capabilities into existing technologies with the ultimate goals of transforming inefficient processes, building a good practice and strengthening technology support.
Step 2.2	Embrace ethics in your process optimization. The removal of humans in key process decisions can be unsettling for certain stakeholders. Automation leads must not only think of how a solution operates at a technical level or what goals it is trying to achieve, but why it is worth doing and how the outcomes of the automated tasks will impact the broader internal and external audiences' reputation, morality, and perception.
Step 2.3	Create your recipe for scaled BPA success. AI/ML is not the only direction to a successful BPA target state. Your scaling BPA recipe (approach) can involve multiple different flavors (e.g. business managed automation, AI/ML) of various quantities to fit the needs and constraints of your organization and workers.
Step 2.4	Focus BPA on the least resistant but impactful processes. The crux of successful BPA is the strategic, well-informed, and onboarded adoption of relevant changes in key business areas, capabilities, and processes while being conscious of the risks they introduce.

Step 2.1

Define your BPA expectations

Activities
2.1.1 Create your BPA value canvas

This step involves the following participants:

• IT and business leadership
• Business process and unit owners
• Application and product owners
• IT delivery and operational teams

Outcomes of this step

• BPA problem statement, objectives, and metrics

Focus on the problem, not the solution

People are naturally solution focused. The onus isn't on them to express their needs in the form of a problem statement!

When refining your problem statement, attempt to answer the following four questions:

• Who is impacted?
• What is the (user or organizational) challenge that needs to be addressed?
• Where does it happen?
• Why does it matter?

There are many ways of writing problem statements. A clear approach follows this format:

• "Our [who] has the problem that [what] when [where]. Our solution should [why]."
• Example: "Our system analysts have the problem that new tickets take too long to update when working on user requests. Our approach should enable the analyst to focus on working with customers and not on administration."

Adapted from "Design Problem Statements – What and How to Frame Them," Toptal

Derive your BPA mission and vision statements

Begin the process by identifying and deciphering the business strategic goals, stakeholder expectations and risk and change profiles.

Strategic Business Goals & Value

Risk & Change Profiles

Stakeholder Expectations

Write your statements and ensure alignment between the business and IT.

Note: Mission statements may remain the same unless the BPA mandate is changing.

A mission statement:

• Focuses on today and what the BPA practice does to achieve it.
• Drives the BPA practice.
• Answers: What do we do? Whom do we serve? How do we service them?

A mission statement focuses on the purpose of the brand; the vision statement looks to the fulfillment of that purpose.

A vision statement:

• Focuses on tomorrow and what an organization ultimately wants to become.
• Gives the company direction.
• Answers: What problems are we solving? Who and what are we changing?

A vision statement provides a concrete way for stakeholders, especially employees, to understand the meaning and purpose of your business. However, unlike a mission statement – which describes the who, what, and why of your business – a vision statement describes the desired long-term results of your company's efforts.

Source: Business News Daily, 2020

Set realistic BPA goals

Automation is more than a tool. It brings a cultural and operational shift that many organizations struggle to adopt.

Stakeholders recognize the importance and want to innovate, be differentiators, and find new ways to deliver more value. The slow IT response and low barrier to entry for many traditional technologies motivated stakeholders to invest in process automation technologies to achieve advertised benefits without the traditional IT headaches. But they may be oversold.

In the case for RPA (a popular enabler of process automation), 90% of organizations believe that RPA has met or exceeded their expectations¹ on improved productivity, improved compliance, and cost to implement. However, these organizations likely have built a practice around their automation tools that goes beyond the technology, which heavily contributed to their success.

In fact, only 25% of the mistakes or problems experienced have to do with the RPA technology. Of those, 75% are more to do with management of the technology.²

Bottom Line: The entire organization must change how it works and operates in order to see the full benefits of business process automation.

¹ Deloitte, 2018.

² Robotic & Cognitive Automation, 2019.

Benefits are not equally felt across the industry. In the case of RPA:

22% of organizations did not see their expectations of timeliness/ ability to work 24/7 met.

20% of organizations did not see their cost reduction expectations met.

19% of organizations did not see their expectation of flexibility to scale capacity met.

Source: Deloitte, 2018.

Measure success with the right metrics

Establishing and monitoring metrics are powerful ways to drive behavior and strategic changes in your organization. Determine the right measures that demonstrate the value of your BPA efforts by aligning them with your business objectives, business value drivers, BPA goals, and non-functional requirements.

Select metrics with different views

01 BPA Practice Effectiveness
The ability of your practice to deliver, support, and operate BPA.
Examples: Solution quality and throughput, delivery and operational costs, number of defects and issues and system quality.

02 Automation Value
The outcome of your optimized processes and BPA solutions.
Examples: Time and money saved, use of products and services, speed of process execution, number of errors, and compliance with standards.

03 BPA Journey Goals and Milestones
Your organization's position in your BPA journey.
Examples: Maturity score, scope of BPA adoption, comfort and confidence with BPA capabilities, and complexity of automated processes.

Leverage Info-Tech's Diagnostics

End-User Feedback

• Value of automation platform and scope of adoption
• Value of the apps enabled or modernized with automation
• Improvement in end user support

CIO Business Vision

• Improvements to IT satisfaction and value
• Changes to the value and importance of IT core services with BPA
• The state of business and IT relationships
• Capability to deliver and support BPA effectively

2.1.1 Create your BPA value canvas

1-2 hours

1. Complete the following fields to build your scaled business process automation canvas using the outcomes of the previous exercises:

1. Document your findings in the Business Process Automation Strategy Template.

Output

BPA problem statement, objectives, and metrics

Participants

IT and business leadership Business process and unit owners Application and product owners IT delivery and operational teams

Download the Business Process Automation Strategy Template

2.1.1 cont'd

Scaled BPA value canvas template:

Problem Statement
The problem or need scaling BPA is addressing

List of Stakeholders
List of key resources, stakeholders, and teams needed to support the process, systems, and services.

Business Processes / Applications / Functions in Scope
List of business capabilities, processes, and application systems related to this initiative.

Vision
Vision, unique value proposition, elevator pitch, or positioning statement

Business and IT Objectives and Metrics
List of business and IT objectives or goals for the scaling BPA initiative.

Constraints / Roadblocks / Challenges
List of constraints, roadblocks and challenges that may restrict or block your success.

Step 2.2

List your guiding principles

Activities
2.2.1 Define your guiding principles

This step involves the following participants:

• IT and business leadership
• Business process and unit owners
• Application and product owners
• IT delivery and operational teams

Outcomes of this step

• BPA guiding principles

Collaboration is key to BPA success

Collaboration
IT, business, and end users work together to design, deliver, and support BPA. The goal is to ensure that the right process and automation design and technologies are selected and that the system is configured correctly to support them.

Clarity
Clearly understand the BPA goals and their alignment to the broader business strategy. This transparency sets reasonable expectations, motivates stakeholder participation, and strengthens business process and automation ownership.

Integration
Explore methods to integrate the workflows, toolsets, and data among those using, delivering, and supporting BPA. The goal is to gain a broader picture of process adoption, application usage, truly understand end users, and commit to value-driven work.

"Collaboration is the best way to deploy automation. Each business is an expert in its own field, in its own needs and processes – but not necessarily in automating those processes."
– Guy Kirkwood (Fujitsu)

Process automation requires quality-first thinking

Meet your quality standards without overly investing effort.

Quality assurance does not simply mean that you are building the right things, but that you are building things right. Business process automation is no exception. See the Build a Software Quality Assurance Program blueprint for more information on quality definitions and quality assurance practices.

Create a glossary to achieve a common understanding of the units, techniques, and terminology used in your process automation practice and the standards that make automation delivery and management high quality.

Use this glossary to build working agreements with the roles involved in process automation and to optimize the productivity of delivery and management practices by reinforcing key QA techniques:

• A team designs, plans, delivers, and maintains automation with the business.
• The benefits of the whole outweigh the gains of the individual.
• Discuss significant business and technical roadblocks for automation delivery (e.g. missing requirement, hidden complexity).
• Focus on the entire application stack, not just on the process.
• Monitor and manage the value of automation with system dashboards and regular consultations with end users.

Develop automation solutions that align with your quality standards

• Testability – Solutions can be verified and validated for all processes they automate.
• Reusability – Components and practices of automation delivery are suitable for use in other business processes and lines of business (LoBs).
• Modifiability – Capability to address the risks and costs of change, considering what can be changed and its likelihood, when and who makes the change, and the costs for change.
• Supportability – Ability to provide insights for identifying and resolving issues when automation delivery and operations fail.
• Compliance – Adjust automation programming to meet changes in industry standards, regulations, ethics, and company policies.

Take an ethical stance

The lack of industry-wide accepted ethical standards motivates organizations to develop their own.

Automation leads must not only think of how a solution operates at a technical level or what goals it is trying to achieve, but why it is worth doing and how the outcomes of the automated tasks will impact the broader internal and external audiences' reputation, morality, and perception. As you begin to determine what you should automate or not automate, ask these key questions:

1. What operating environment are you building for the end user, line of business, and organization? What capabilities are you enabling or removing from human workers?
2. What type of person, department, and organization are you becoming with automation?
3. What are the norms and identities automation is establishing? Will automation uphold the existing duties and responsibilities defined and implied in the organization?
4. What are the consequences of process automation? Do they improve the common good or the individual worker?

See our Mitigate Machine Bias blueprint for more information.

"I think you're going to see a lot of corporations thinking about the corporate responsibility of [organizational change from automation], because studies show that consumers want and will only do business with socially responsible companies."
– Todd Lohr

Source: Appian, 2018.

Automate with the user at heart

BPA value is only delivered when the end user and stakeholders are happy and satisfied with the change.

User experience (UX) is critical for BPA success. It includes a user's emotions, beliefs, and the physical and psychological responses that occur before, during, or after interacting with a service or product. Good UX produces, builds, and strengthens the business-IT relationship because of the end user's trust that IT has their needs at heart. Designing for a high-quality, fulfilling user experience requires more than just focusing on the UX. It also requires merging multiple business, technical, and social disciplines, which can be foreign to some business and IT decision makers and delivery teams.

Instill Gemba
Many process and technical assumptions are made by decision makers who are disconnected from users, risking value delivery. Gemba motivates decision makers to go to "the place where value is created" to learn about and understand their end users so that modernization efforts reflect their needs.

Democratize Technology
New technologies and intuitive UX enable and empower non-IT roles to access and use BPA capabilities and other corporate services and products in sophisticated and meaningful ways without being burdened by IT constraints and processes. However, IT still maintains the guardrails and steps in when technical issues get out of hand.

Empathize with Frustration
End-user frustrations go beyond functional completeness or system stability. Emotional friction can be created by a negative response to the UI or because the technology is mentally overwhelming to use. IT must be ready to work with end users to make necessary changes to bolster the technology's adoption and value.

For more information, see our Use Experience Design to Drive Empathy With the Business blueprints.

Embrace a common BPA mindset with guiding principles

Teams may have their own perspectives on and practices for how they can deliver value. These attributes can motivate you to adopt guiding principles that will lay out your core values to cement a consistent organizational perspective on how to improve your business processes. Guiding principles can help you achieve the following:

• Embrace different perspectives in process analysis by fostering collaboration within business teams and functional roles.
• Accommodate the social, ethical, and personal needs of end users and stakeholders in process optimization.
• Ensure all teams are driven toward the same business and technical goals even if teams are operating differently.
• Build operational consistency and maximize the value of enterprise applications and cross-department processes.

Info-Tech Insight
Following methodologies by the book can be detrimental if they do not fit with your organization's needs, constraints, and culture. The goal of all teams is to deliver value. Any practices or activities that drive teams away from this goal should be removed or modified.

2.2.1 Define your guiding principles

0.5-1 hour

1. Discuss how you, your teams, and your stakeholders want to view yourselves when it comes to process optimization and automation.

1. Mark the words, phrases, and themes that dominated the discussions. Also indicate the topics that your teams found highly important.
2. Discuss your business process automation guiding principles. Your guiding principles should consider key organizational priorities, team and personal objectives, good practices, and team and organizational culture as they pertain to process optimization and automation.
3. Document your findings in the Business Process Automation Strategy Template.

Download the Business Process Automation Strategy Template

Output

BPA guiding principles

Participants

IT and business leadership Business process and unit owners Application and product owners IT delivery and operational teams

2.2.1 cont'd

Example:

• Low-risk, high-volume, repeatable, streamlined, and technically sound business processes should be prioritized for automation. Sensitive and complex processes should come later, as directed by stakeholders. Start small and simple. Consider additional monitoring controls for mission-critical processes. A strong intake process will identify automation opportunities.
• Automation practitioners should have a "what can go wrong?" mindset and plan for countermeasures. Consider sunny- and rainy-day scenarios, extreme cases, and edge cases as part of design, development, and implementation, and address the necessary risks and impacts.
• Automation solutions need to undergo robust risk-based design, functional testing, and user acceptance testing (UAT). Build in quality assurance and risk-based thinking early in the delivery lifecycle. Business and IT stakeholders define the risk factors they care about that must be included in the automation's design, development, testing, and deployment. Decision makers are accountable for signing off on deployment, and the necessary workflows and plans are in place to address surfaced or escaped issues.
• Watertight processes around security and compliance are critical. Some automation solutions (e.g. robotic process automation [RPA], AI) have usernames and passwords. Prevent misuse and unauthorized access by encrypting these usernames and passwords and controlling access based on employees' assigned privileges. Have steps in place to ensure compliance with regulations and industry standards.
• Strong change-control processes are critical. Make automation teams aware of system interface changes so they can make timely updates. As automation efforts expand, risk management is a critical line of defense in the governance of these programs.
• Communication is paramount. Everyone is aware of and understands the impacts of the process, application, data, integration, and other strategic and tactical changes to automation technologies.

Adapted from EY, 2019

Step 2.3

Envision your BPA target state

Activities

2.3.1 Envision your BPA target state

This step involves the following participants:

• IT and business leadership
• Business process and unit owners
• Application and product owners
• IT delivery and operational teams

Outcomes of this step

• Desired scaled BPA target state

Create your recipe for BPA success

Your recipe (approach) for scaling BPA can involve multiple different flavors of various quantities to fit the needs and constraints of your organization and workers.

Which ingredients you need and how much is dependent on three key questions:

1. How can we ease BPA implementation?
2. How can we broaden the BPA scope?
3. How can we loosen constraints?

Your desired scale state will influence which capabilities you want to establish and mature first.

Align your target state to your BPA expectations and risk and change profiles

Extend BPA across business units (horizontal)

Integrate BPA across your application architecture (vertical)

Embed AI/ML into your automation technologies

Empower users with business-managed automations

Combine multiple technologies for end-to-end automation

Increase the volume and velocity of automation

Automate cognitive processes and making variable decisions

Describe your BPA target state by answering these questions

Seeing the full value of your scaling approach is dependent on your ability to support BPA adoption across the organization

How can we ease BPA implementation?

• Good governance practices (e.g. role definitions, delivery and management processes, technology standards)
• Support for innovation and experimentation
• Interoperable and plug-and-play architecture
• Dedicated technology management and support, including resources, documents, templates and shells
• Accessible and easy-to-understand knowledge and document repository

How can we broaden BPA scope?

• A unified experience across processes, fragmented technologies, and siloed business functions
• Improve cognitively intensive activities, challenging decision making, and complex processes with more valuable insights and information using BPA
• Proactively react to business and technology environment and operational changes and interact with customers with unattended automation
• Infusing BPA technologies into your product and service to expand their functions, output quality, and reliability

How can we loosen constraints?

• Processes are automated without the need for structured data, optimized processes, and having to work around or avoid legacy applications
• Workers are empowered to develop and maintain their own automations
• Coaching, mentoring, training, and onboarding capabilities
• Accessibility and adoption of underused applications are improved with BPA
• BPA is used to overcome the limitations or the inefficiencies of other BPA technologies

2.3.1 Envision your BPA target state

0.5-1 hour

1. Discuss what you want to gain from scaling BPA using your BPA value canvas, guiding principles, and risk and change profiles.
2. Discuss the different "flavors" of scaled BPA and how each flavor can meet your BPA goals while adhering to your guiding principles and risk and change profiles. Ask yourself these key questions:

1. Discuss what this target state may look like.
2. Document your findings in the Business Process Automation Strategy Template.

Download the Business Process Automation Strategy Template

Output

Desired scaled BPA target state

Participants

IT and business leadership Business process and unit owners Application and product owners IT delivery and operational teams

Continuously review and realign expectations

Optimizing your scaled BPA practices and applying continuous improvements starts with monitoring the practice after implementation.

Purpose of monitoring

• Diligent monitoring confirms your scaled BPA practice and implementations are performing as desired and meeting initial expectations.
• Holding reviews of your BPA practice and implementations helps assess the impact of marketplace and business operations changes and allows the organization to stay on top of trends and risks.

Metrics

Metrics are an important aspect of monitoring and sustaining the scaled practice. The metrics will help determine success and find areas where adjustments may be needed.

Hold retrospectives to identify any practice issues to be resolved or opportunities to undertake

The retrospective gives your organization the opportunity to review themselves and brainstorm solutions and a plan for improvements to be actioned. This session recurs, typically after key milestones. While it is important to allow all participants the opportunity to voice their opinions, feelings, and experiences, retrospectives must be positive, productive, and time boxed.

Step 2.4

Build your opportunity backlog

Activities
2.4.1 Capture and backlog your opportunities

This step involves the following participants:

• IT and business leadership
• Business process and unit owners
• Application and product owners
• IT delivery and operational teams

Outcomes of this step

• Prioritized BPA opportunities

Build your BPA opportunity backlog

Your backlog gives you a holistic understanding of demand for business process optimization and automation.

A minimum viable automation (MVA) focuses on a single and small process use case, involves minimal possible effort to improve, and is designed to satisfy a specific user group. Its purpose is to maximize learning and value and inform the development of a full-fledged process automation practice.

See our Build a Winning Business Process Automation Playbook blueprint for more information.

Explore industry examples for insights and inspirations

Industry Research and Standards

Business Process Automation and Mapping Vendors

Industry Examples

Build your opportunity assessment framework

Refine and shortlist your backlog of business process automation opportunities by first reviewing their risks and organization changes:

• Risk Assessment – What are the business and IT risks of each opportunity? What is the probability and impact of it occurring?
• Organizational Change Assessment – What is the readiness and ability of the people, processes, and technology to change?

Then, weigh the degree of delivery effort against the expected benefits of each opportunity.

Realize not all opportunities will be suited for business process optimization and automation:

• Optimize & Automate – Focus on the opportunities with the least resistance and tolerable risks.
• Decompose – Break down these opportunities into smaller items that are lower risk and involve more acceptable changes.
• Reassess – Remove the low-value, inefficient, and low-impact opportunities from consideration and combine with another opportunity to strengthen its case.
• Backlog – Work with stakeholders to reposition the scope of changes so that they are easier to accommodate.

Narrow your automation focus by prioritizing your opportunities

You will see an endless supply of automation and optimization opportunities from various stakeholders, but you will not be able to address them all. You need to prioritize these ideas to identify which ones you should tackle first – or at all. Support your prioritization through these three lenses:

• Feasibility – Do you currently have the capabilities to deliver on this opportunity? Do you have the right partners, resources, or technology?
• Desirability – Is this opportunity a change the stakeholder needs? Does it solve a known pain point?
• Viability – Does this initiative have an impact on the business value drivers of the organization? Is it a profitable and productive opportunity that will support the business model? Will this opportunity require a complex cost structure?

Opportunities	Feasibility (L/M/H)	Desirability (L/M/H)	Viability (L/M/H)
Centralized repository for research knowledge	H	H	H
Streamlined course-creation toolkit	H	H	H
Connectivity self-assessment/ checklist	H	M	H
Forums for students	M	H	H
Exam preparation (e.g. education or practice exams)	H	H	H

Pitfalls in selecting BPA opportunities

Ignoring synergies and reusability between automated processes Some processes use the same applications or same logic. Therefore, parts developed for the first process can be used in the second process, effectively easing and shortening its development. So, there may be 4 processes, each not worth automating, but all are using the same application and similar logic, so developing them together reduces the costs by 40% and now the business case is valid.

Automating processes for the sake of automation, ignoring business case calculation Sometimes automations are developed because a stakeholder has to achieve a KPI 'automate 10 processes in the following year,' even though the automated processes do not bring enough business value compared to costs of development and upkeep. Following this path will effectively hurt BPA-related KPIs and will create a negative perception of the automation.

Starting with a high value, high complexity process
Innovative BPA technology is released, and attractive promises are announced. Due to lack of experience in process engineering or architectural insights, the process is even more complex than expected, some solution functionalities can't be added, and the project takes twice as much time as planned. Where there's a possibility always start with a more straightforward process.

Source: Flobotics, 2021.

2.4.1 Capture and backlog your opportunities

1-3 hours

1. Brainstorm the various BPA opportunities with your stakeholders, IT teams, and business executives. See Info-Tech's Build a Winning Business Process Automation Playbook for more tactics to identify BPA opportunities.
2. Review your business value drivers, stakeholder assessments (e.g. personas, journey maps), risk profile, organizational change profile, and your desired target state.
3. Modify the risk and change scoring criteria to emphasize the factors that have greater influences in your opportunity selection. Info-Tech suggests having each factor equally weighted.
4. List the top five business value drivers, top stakeholder needs/concerns, and desired BPA target state in the scoring criteria. Info-Tech suggests business value driver and stakeholder needs equally weighted.
5. Assess each opportunity against your risk, change, and expected benefit (high, medium, low) scoring criteria and average them.
6. Estimate the degree of effort and cost to deliver each opportunity.
7. Plot each opportunity on the framework using risk and change scores as the axis position, using the expected benefits score for plot color (low = red, medium = yellow, high = green), and using delivery effort estimation plot size (small effort = small size, medium effort = medium size, large effort = large size).
8. Prioritize your opportunities to determine which ones should be delivered first.
9. Document your findings in the Business Process Automation Strategy Template.

Output

Prioritized BPA opportunities

Participants

IT and business leadership Business process and unit owners Application and product owners IT delivery and operational teams

2.4.1 cont'd

Mainstream Risk

Risk	Definition	Assessment Score
Financial	The ability to obtain sufficient and timely funding capacity.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Non-Financial	Non-financial risks are risks that are not considered traditional financial risks such as operational risk, technology risk, culture and conduct.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Reputational	Potential negative publicity regarding business practices regardless of validity.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Strategic	Risk of unsuccessful business performance due to internal or external uncertainties, whether driven by events or trends. Actions or events that adversely impact an organization's strategies and/or implementation of its strategies.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Sustainability (ESG)	This risk of any negative financial or reputational impact on an organizations stemming from current or prospective impacts of ESG factors on its counterparties or invested assets.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Talent and Risk Culture	The widespread behaviors and mindsets that can threaten sound decision making, prudent risk taking, and effective risk management, and can weaken an institution's financial and operational resilience.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)

Talent and Culture Risk

Risk	Definition	Assessment Score
Capacity	Insufficient and diverse workforce or depth of talent stifling growth.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Capability	The lack of depth of internal talent due to difficulties retaining key people, failure to develop skills, lack of sufficient pipeline of future leaders, or lack of clarity on roles needed to deliver business value.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Cost	The risk of insufficient budget to develop existing or obtain new talent.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Culture	An organization's lack of willingness to change workforce expectations or lack of agility due to legacy talent practices or failure to innovate and learn (mobility policies).	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Compliance	The risk of not being compliant with regulations (employee relations, DEI, workforce safety, employee conduct, accessibility).	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)

2.4.1 cont'd

Technology Risk

Risk	Definition	Assessment Score
Change (Transformation)	Risk arising from the inability of an institution to manage IT system change in a timely and controlled manner in a particularly large and complex change programs.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Performance	The risk that IT infrastructure will not perform at required levels due to inferior internal processes, technology, or external relationships that may threaten demand.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Availability/Continuity	The risk that performance and availability of ICT systems and data are adversely impacted, including the inability to timely recover the institution's services, due to a failure of ICT hardware or software components; weaknesses in ICT system management; or any other event.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Delivery (Execution Risk)	Risks associated with the execution/completion and operation of a specific project. It is the degree of exposure to negative events and their probable consequences.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Disruptive Innovation	It is an innovation that completely changes the way people do something (for instance, e-commerce versus physical in-store shopping). It describes innovations that improve products or services in unexpected ways. This innovation changes both the way things are done and the market. The smartphone is an example of a disruptive innovation. It completely changes the way in which users connect to the computer services and each other.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Asset Management	The risk to a tangible technology asset (e.g. hardware, infrastructure) or intangible asset (e.g. software, data, information) that needs protection and supports the provision of technology services.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)

2.4.1 cont'd

Data Risk

Risk	Definition	Assessment Score
Data Quality	The risk that data is not in a condition to be used as inputs for qualitative or quantitative decision making leading to mistrust or lack of confidence in the data.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Data Culture	Negative impact on decision making due to insufficient organizational wide practices and collective behaviors and beliefs that support the value of data.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Data Architecture	The risk that data cannot support business needs due to poorly designed models, assets and policies and standards.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Data Privacy	Operational risks associated with data processing that results in direct or indirect loss to individuals. GDPR definition of data processing is the set of operations including but not limited to the collection, storage adaption or alteration, disclosure by transmission and dissemination of data.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)

Security Risk

Risk	Definition	Assessment Score
Information	The risk of loss from failure to protect information assets by addressing threats to information processed, stored, and transported by internetworked information systems.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Physical	The risk of loss from failure to protect systems buildings and supporting infrastructure against threats associated with the physical environment.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Operational Technology	The risk of loss from failure of programmable digital systems or devices that interact with the physical environment or manage devices that interact with the physical environment.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Personnel Controls	The risk of loss due to human risk from lack of adherence to rules, procedures and practices dealing with operational effectiveness, efficiency and adherence to regulations and management policies.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)

2.4.1 cont'd

Third-Party Risk

Risk	Definition	Assessment Score
Legal and Compliance	The risk of legal or regulatory sanctions, material financial loss, or loss of reputation an entity may suffer as a result of a third-party supplier's failure to comply with laws, regulation, rules, related self-regulatory organizations standards and codes of conduct applicable to the business.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Performance	The risk that the third party does not meet required performance levels or agreed upon services or delivered goods due to inferior internal processes, technology or external relationships that may threaten demand.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Supply Chain Management	The risks related to subcontracting arrangements entered by third parties, including the impact on concentration risk.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Financial	Risks from financial instability, insolvency, or poor market performance of a third party.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Strategic	Risks posed by a third party resulting from a change in business model, practice, or value alignment that impacts the strategic relationship.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Security (exception: may go under IT Security for smaller organizations or be managed holistically)	The risk that the third party is exposed to a data or security issue. The risk of unauthorized access to IT systems and data from within or outside the institution (e.g. cyber-attacks). An incident is viewed as a series of events that adversely affects the information assets of an organization. The overall narrative of this type of risk event is captured as "who did what to what (or whom) with what result?"	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
Technology	Risk arising from the use of information technology (assets, data, people, processes) that could result in negative impacts and/or loss to the organization.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)

Strategic Risk

Risk	Definition	Assessment Score
IT-Business Alignment	IT and business work together on reciprocal involvement in strategic planning.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)
IT Capabilities and Performance	IT capabilities and performance are baselined and continually assessed.	1 (Low) – 2 – 3 (Moderate) – 4 – 5 (High)

2.4.1 cont'd

Example

Change Factor – Application Stack	Description	Assessment Score
Value Stream	The value stream can be streamlined and modified to take advantage of BPA to maximize value generation.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)
Business Capability	The business capabilities supporting your value stream can be streamlined and modified to take advantage of BPA to maximize value generation.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)
Business Process	The business processes supporting your business capabilities can be streamlined and modified to take advantage of BPA to maximize value generation.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)
Application UI and UX	The application's user interface and user experience can be modified to best suit the user's functional and personal needs, which include device accessibility, the format of information delivery, and visual and audio designs.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)
Application Logic/Code	The application's business logic and code can be modified with modern language, frameworks, and architectures to meet their accessibility, scalability, maintainability, and other quality needs.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)
Integration	The application, data, and infrastructure integration strategy and technology can be modified to address new system dependencies and implement the desired architecture.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)
Data Architecture	The rules, policies, standards, and models that govern and define the type of data collected and how it is used, stored, managed, and integrated within the organization and its database systems. These can be modified when needed.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)
Master Data Management	Your organization established and has control over master data values to enable consistent, shared, contextual use across systems, and it can be modified when needed.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)
Infrastructure	The infrastructure and its architecture can be modified when needed.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)
Security	The security rules, policies, standards, and models that govern and define how an application should be managed, accessed, consumed, and protected.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)

2.4.1 cont'd

Example

Change Factor – IT Delivery and Support	Description	Assessment Score
IT Resource Capacity	The availability and ability to shift IT resources to complete BPA considering their knowledge, their skills and expertise, the tools at their disposal, and their other priorities and commitments.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)
Team Structure	The team can be restructured, and roles can be redefined to best suit the delivery, support, and management of BPA.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)
Intake, Analysis, and Backlog Management Practice	The project and work intake, analysis, and backlog management practice can be modified to best leverage and support the value and benefit opportunities of BPA.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)
Design and Architecture Practice	The design and architecture practice can be modified to best leverage and support the value and benefit opportunities of BPA.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)
Development and Configuration Practice	The development practice can be modified to best leverage and support the value and benefit opportunities of BPA.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)
Testing Practice	The testing practice can be modified to best leverage and support the value and benefit opportunities of BPA.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)
Deployment and Implementation Practice	The deployment and implementation practice can be modified to best leverage and support the value and benefit opportunities of BPA.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)
Application Support, Maintenance, and Management Practice	The application support and maintenance practice can be modified to best leverage and support the value and benefit opportunities of BPA.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)
Application and System Monitoring	Application and system performance monitoring, dashboards, and instrumentations can be reconfigured to gauge the success of BPA.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)

2.4.1 cont'd

Example

Change Factor – Business Stakeholders	Description	Assessment Score
Modified Way of Working	An end user's ability to adopt new and modified workflows involving modernized or removed technologies.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)
User Experience	An end user's mental, behavioral, and psychological capacity to accept and adopt changes given available training, onboarding, coaching, and communication.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)
Shift in Business Model	The business' ability to shift their primary source of business value and realign their business model to fit this new value stream.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)
Organizational Reputation and Image	The perception, morality, and image of the organization amid changes to the business and operational model.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)
Process, Application, and Product Ownership	The ownership structure of the technical stack of the application or product and the role's/team's ability to drive growth and maturity of the process, application, or product.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)
Application System Control	The degree of control and accessibility to the application stack and the organization's ability to make fine-tuned configurations and customizations.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)
Business Strategy	The ability to shift the focus, approach, and objectives of the business strategy to lessons learned from this BPA effort.	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)
Industry Compliance	The organization's ability to pivot or budge on meeting or being guided by regulations (e.g. HIPAA, SOX) and industry standards and frameworks (e.g. ITIL, COBIT).	1 (Not Ready or Able) – 2 – 3 (Ready to Change) – 4 – 5 (Able to Change)

2.4.1 cont'd

Expected Benefits and User Fit

	Business Value Sources					Stakeholder Needs Assessment					Support Target State BPA
Opportunity	Increase market reach	Minimize operational costs	Improve brand recognition	Align to ESG standards	Increase worker satisfaction	Access by mobile device	Enable French and English language	Use existing UI design standards	Have preference for images, diagrams and videos	Enable for user-defined modification of BPA	Business-managed automations
Help Desk Intake	Low	High	Low	Medium	High	Medium	High	Medium	Medium	Low	High
Email Marketing Campaign	High	Medium	High	Medium	Medium	High	High	Medium	High	Medium	Medium
HR Recruiting	Medium	High	Low	Low	High	Medium	High	Low	Low	Low	Low

2.4.1 cont'd

Example

Score Factors (Average)	Opportunity 1: Help Desk Intake	Opportunity 2: Email Marketing Campaign	Opportunity 3: HR Recruiting
Organizational Change Assessment Score All factors are equally weighted	4.5	1.5	3.5
Risk Assessment Score All factors are equally weighted	2	4.5	2.5
Estimated Delivery Effort	Low	High	Medium
Expected Benefits	High	Medium	Low

Manage your automation backlog

Your backlog stores and organizes your BPA opportunities at various stages of readiness. It must be continuously refined to address new requests, maintenance, and changing priorities.

Adapted from Essential Scrum, Kenneth Rubin

A well-formed backlog can be thought of as a DEEP backlog.

Detailed Appropriately: Opportunities are broken down and refined as necessary.

Emergent: The backlog grows and evolves over time as opportunities are added and removed.

Estimated: The effort an opportunity requires is estimated at each tier.

Prioritized: The opportunity's value and priority are determined at each tier.

(Perforce)

See our Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision for more information on backlog practices.

Phase 3

Assess your BPA maturity

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

• Step 3.1: Assess your BPA maturity

This phase involves the following participants:

• IT and business leadership
• Business process and unit owners
• Application and product owners
• IT delivery and operational teams

Develop Your Value-First Business Process Automation Strategy

Phase 3 Insight Summary

Phase Info-Tech Insight
Mature your practice as you scale your BPA technologies. Good skills, resources, and governance and management practices are critical for the successful scaling of BPA tools and technologies. BPA is not a set-it-and-forget-it asset; it needs to be delivered with quality mind and be continuously monitored, reviewed, and maintained.

Step 3.1

Build for the future. BPA motivates the implementation, modernization, and enhancement of key tools and technologies to maximize the return on those investments. The resulting technology governance and management practices act as building blocks in your organization. We must expect that more BPA and other enabling technologies will be done using these earlier investments.

Step 3.1

Assess your BPA maturity

Activities
3.1.1 Assess your BPA maturity

This step involves the following participants:

• IT and business leadership
• Business process and unit owners
• Application and product owners
• IT delivery and operational teams

Outcomes of this step

• BPA maturity assessment
• Brainstormed solutions to address BPA gaps

Mature your BPA practice to scale it

The scale and complexity of the BPA solutions you want to adopt are dependent on the maturity of key capabilities in your BPA practice.

While all capabilities are important for the target state of your BPA practice, Info-Tech suggests the capabilities with an asterisk (*) should be the initial focus.

Tailor your maturity assessment for each automation tool and unique implementation

Core Capabilities to Support Maturity and Scaling of BPA

Risk & Change Management*
Continuous process to analyze, evaluate, control, and address the probably negative impacts of risks and changes.

Vision & Objectives*
Clear direction and goals of the business process automation practice.

Business Process Management & Optimization*
The tactics to document, analyze, optimize, and monitor business processes.

Governance
Defined BPA roles and responsibilities, processes, and technology controls.

Business Process Automation Platform Management
The capabilities to manage a BPA platform and ensure it supports the growing needs of the business.

Business Process Automation Delivery
The tactics to review the fit of automation solutions and deliver and support according to end users' needs and preferences.

Learn the five states of BPA maturity

01 Consideration
Your business processes are mapped and optimized for business units that are motivated and supported to change. You have identified and are ready to pilot your automation opportunities.

02 Exploration
A single BPA tool has been or is in the process of being piloted. New processes are introduced to improve an individual's productivity with the goal to evaluate workers, system fit, and define support needs.

This is an acceptable state for only team-based BPA solutions

03 Incorporation
The BPA tool and dependent systems are configured and arranged to enable and execute complex processes within a single business unit. Resources are available to support the delivery and operations of the BPA tool. A case is made to justify further scaling in other areas of the organization, and more pilots are planned.

04 Proliferation
The BPA tool is strategically configured and orchestrated with other tools to improve cross-functional business processes from end to end. Resources are allocated to support organization-wide tool adoption, continuous improvement, and modernization.

05 Optimization
Products and services incorporate automation to deliver engaging, innovative, and insightful experiences. Leading-edge BPA use cases and tools are welcomed, experimented, and piloted. BPA delivery practices are optimized to realize the full benefits at the organization level.

3.1.1 Assess your BPA maturity

1-3 hours

1. Select one BPA tool and roles overseeing its use, management, and governance. Review your desired BPA target state. This will be the scope of the maturity assessment.
2. Complete the BPA Maturity Assessment tool on your organization's capabilities to support the selected BPA tool and roles and desired BPA target state.
3. Review the maturity of each capability grouping and the overall practice on tab 3, "Assessment Summary."

1. Brainstorm solutions to address gaps in your maturity.
2. Repeat this assessment for other BPA tools and unique implementations.
3. Document your findings in the Business Process Automation Strategy Template.

Download the Business Process Automation Strategy Template

Output

BPA maturity assessment Brainstormed solutions to address BPA gaps

Participants

IT and business leadership Business process and unit owners Application and product owners IT delivery and operational teams

Reimagine the role of IT

Today's BPA tools enable greater empowerment for end users to create their automations, but they do not remove the need for IT. IT must now envision how they will best support the new environment.

See our Embrace Business-Managed Applications blueprint for more information.

Build and maintain your BPA toolbox

Understand the fit of today's BPA technologies to your functional needs.

Backend Integration
Enables the ability to bring together data from multiple sources to be analyzed, sorted, transformed, and used.

AI/ML
AI is a technology that mimics the thinking and decision-making capabilities of humans. ML learns and improves AI algorithms through experience.

Configuration
Altering the parameters and properties of the system to change its behavior at runtime.

Native Workflow
Designing and tailoring process workflows within an application system to improve its usability and practicality.

App Builder
Platform to develop, test, deploy, and maintain custom, cross-platform applications.

iPaaS
Cloud platform enabling the development, management, and governance of integration flows across on-premises and cloud services and technologies.

Chatbots
Program that simulates and processes human conversations whether they are spoken or written.

iBPMS & Rules Engines
iBPMS is the combination of BPM tools with AI and other intelligence capabilities. Rules engines manage business rules and decisions using predefined logic.

Robotic & Intelligence Automation
RPA leverages an app's UI rather than programmatic access. Automate rules-based, repetitive tasks performed by human workers with AI/ML.

Point Solutions
Solutions that specialize in a specific industry, business domain, and/or business or IT capability.

Use Info-Tech's research to learn more

Select your automation solution with Info-Tech's Rapid Application Selection Framework

Custom & Outsourced Development
Refer to this Info-Tech research:
Modernize Your SDLC
Select a Sourcing Partner for Your Development Team

Configuration & Native Workflow
Refer to this Info-Tech research:
Get the Most Out of Your HRMS
Get the Most Out of Your CRM
Get the Most Out of Your ERP

AI/ML & Chatbots
Refer to this Info-Tech research:
Create an Architecture for AI
Get Started with Artificial Intelligence
Build a Chatbot Proof of Concept

iBPMS, Rules Engines & RPA
Refer to this Info-Tech research:
SoftwareReviews: Business Process Management System
SoftwareReviews: Business Rules Management System
Build Your First RPA Bot

Data Integration & iPaaS
Refer to this Info-Tech research:
SoftwareReviews: Data Integration & iPaaS
Build a Data Integration Strategy

Low-/No-Code & Point Solutions
Refer to this Info-Tech research:
Satisfy Digital End Users With Low- and No-Code
SoftwareReviews: eForms, eDiscovery, Marketing Automation, Document Management, Data Center Automation, Contract Discovery and Analytics

Refer to Info-Tech's blueprints to mature your BPA practice

Build a Winning Business Process Automation Playbook
Automation is not the silver-bullet solution to your workforce productivity challenges. Optimization and automation must be used together to remove root-cause inefficiencies and best use the features and capabilities of your automation solutions.

Satisfy Digital End Users With Low- and No-Code
Low- and no-code promises enticing benefits, but they come with caveats. Without the right training, adoption plan, and governance structure for low- and no-code, IT will be quickly overwhelmed with product quality and management challenges and maintenance will become a nightmare.

Embrace Business-Managed Applications
The traditional model of managing applications does not address the demands of today's rapidly changing market and digitally minded business, putting stress on scarce IT resources. The business is fed up with slow IT responses and overbearing desktop and system controls. Business-managed applications offer an attractive approach to enable and empower the business within the comfort of the IT.

Checkpoint: Does your maturity challenge your BPA goals?

Delivering valuable automations should be done in parallel with strengthening your practice because:

• A disciplined and continuous improvement practice ensures the requirements, assumptions, and constraints of past automation solutions are correctly incorporated into today's priorities and designs.
• The return on BPA investments can be further enhanced by enforcing reusability, scalability and other quality standards in BPA delivery and by working with end users to ensure broader BPA adoption.
• IT is properly equipped and skilled to support the growing and evolving BPA needs of the business and meet the future state vision.

Phase 4

Roadmap your BPA initiatives

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

• Step 4.1: Roadmap your BPA initiatives
• Step 4.2: Assess & mitigate your risks
• Step 4.3: Complete your BPA strategy

This phase involves the following participants:

• IT and business leadership
• Business process and unit owners
• Application and product owners
• IT delivery and operational teams

Develop Your Value-First Business Process Automation Strategy

Phase 4 Insight Summary

Phase Info-Tech Insight
Maximize the learning of your minimum viable automations (MVA). Mature the foundations of your BPA with the knowledge and experience you gained in your MVA as you build and refine your case to scale your BPA implementation across the organization.

Step 4.1	Start small to evaluate the fit and acceptance of new and modified roles, processes, and technologies. High implementation costs can jeopardize success in big-bang deployments. Nominal adoption with well-understood business capabilities and cooperative stakeholders helps end users focus on solution fit rather than fighting the status quo culture.
Step 4.2	Understand the risks of your proposed BPA solution. BPA is an enabling and abstracting capability to technically complex and/or IT-managed technologies. The proposed BPA solution must be compatible with the architecture, data, and policies of existing business systems, and IT must accept and be willing to enable access across traditionally restricted technology and data.
Step 4.3	Position your BPA strategy as a collectively owned and managed artifact focused on sharing, enabling, and teaching others. BPA requires various roles, capabilities, and technologies to harmoniously work together to gain the business outcomes our stakeholders expect to see. Everyone needs to participate in the strategic planning and decision making to ensure a proposed change or design from one area does not negatively impact or impede the others.

Step 4.1

Roadmap your BPA initiatives

Activities
4.1.1 Roadmap your BPA initiatives

This step involves the following participants:

• IT and business leadership
• Business process and unit owners
• Application and product owners
• IT delivery and operational teams

Outcomes of this step

• List of BPA initiatives and roadmap

MVAs are the keys to your automation success

Info-Tech Insight
We recommend thoughtful introduction of minimum viable automations (MVAs) into existing processes and technology with the goal of transforming processes through gradual iterative and incremental people, process, and technology changes.

An MVA focuses on a single small process use case, involves minimal possible effort to improve and is designed to satisfy a specific user group. Its purpose is to:

• Maximize learning.
• Evaluate process change and automation acceptance.
• Inform the development of an automation practice.

The build-measure-learn loop suggests process optimizations should perpetually take an idea and develop, test, and validate it, and then expand on the MVA using the lessons learned and evolving ideas. In this sense, the MVA is just the first iteration in the loop.

Consider the following practices as you build and scale BPA

Break through the noise. Most companies have numerous, often competing business priorities. [...] CEOs need to convince their executives that automation is central to reinventing the business. And reinvention requires not only that business and functional leaders, supported by an automation CoE, identify and execute on automation ideas, but also that every employee contributes to achieving the automation goals. Business leaders will need to adjust the traditional view of automation as an initiative imposed on employees to an initiative alongside, or in collaboration with, employees.

Inspire employees. [...]Awareness is low. Just as a CEO must rally the senior management team to the cause, automation leaders need to inspire employees to take an interest in automation for their everyday work. Hackathons, big prizes for great ideas, and bonuses for people who come up with winning proposals are among the ways to inspire. Companies will also have to think through what they do with the savings derived from an automation project, and how to reward the employees who enable it. Just as companies get consumers excited about buying a product, they can use similar marketing techniques in service of selling automation internally.

Formalize the democratization. Success with automation entails coaching employees on how to spot use cases and how to navigate the transition to automated and optimized processes. [...] Employees should be able to share automation projects with other employees through power users. Having one enterprise-wide platform [...] makes it easy for anyone to develop an automation without going through the IT group. And the IT group or automation CoE can provide the right governance to avoid tool proliferation, assist business users in building their automations, and provide the right frameworks to scale up these automations.

Invest in culture change. Smart leaders recognize, and act quickly to address, employees' fear of losing their jobs to automation. They communicate early and often on the impacts that automation will have in their companies. Democratizing automation ultimately requires employees to adopt a digital or automation-first mindset. And to do so, employees need clarity on what is in it for them as individuals. It's important to highlight how automation empowers employees with better skills, allows them to focus on higher-value activities, and ultimately leads to greater advancement and rewards over their careers. And companies should celebrate the successes of employees who innovate the use of automation to add business value.

Source: UiPath and Bain & Company, 2021.

Roadmap your MVAs against your milestones and release dates

See our Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision blueprint for more information on roadmaps.

4.1.1 Roadmap your BPA initiatives

1-2 hours

1. Review your list of BPA opportunities. Brainstorm the various supporting activities required to implement your opportunities.
2. Prioritize your opportunities to identify the initial focus.
3. Use your high-priority opportunities to define your MVAs using a release canvas, as shown on the following slide.
4. Identify what the critical steps to deliver your MVA.
5. Review your BPA Maturity Assessment, the gaps that were revealed, and the brainstormed solutions to fill those gaps.
6. Group each critical step and solution by how soon you need to address it:

1. Document your findings in the Business Process Automation Strategy Template.

Download the Business Process Automation Strategy Template

Output

List of BPA initiatives and roadmap

Participants

IT and business leadership Business process and unit owners Application and product owners IT delivery and operational teams

4.1.1 cont'd

MVA Name

4.1.1 cont'd

Example:

Now

• As a prospective customer, I want to learn more about the organization through their website so that I can build my trust in them and give them my business.
• As a marketing specialist, I want to learn more about my customers so that I can tailor promotions and services to prospective and existing customers.
• As an end user, I want to have a seamless user experience across mobile and desktop devices so that I can find the resources I need and increase my productivity.
• As a security specialist, I want to strengthen security controls and practices so that my applications and data are secured from unauthorized access.

Next

• As IT, I want to easily maintain and scale the web infrastructure so that system operations and licensing costs can be minimized, and applications are stable and resilient.
• As an account representative, I want to automate my manual and error-prone tasks and workflows so that I can process more opportunities and focus on new value channels.
• As an end user, I want to chat with an account representative when I have a question or with my peers regarding their experiences so that I can have peace of mind on my concerns and readily adjust my account.

Later

• As IT, I want to migrate my applications to a cloud environment so that we can remove the legacy challenges that are inhibiting our ability to innovate.
• As a business end user, I want to access corporate information and services and receive notifications on a mobile application so that we can complete sales and transactions at customer sites and work from home.

Plan beyond the initial rollout

Validate your BPA adoption path during your phased rollout against three scenarios.

Nominal automation
Business processes, workers and business systems that are deemed fit for automation as-is; strategic lines of business participate in the delivery of BPA.

Minimum automation
Low business buy-in and little motivation to adopt organizational change to leverage and support BPA. Future efforts may need to be scaled down.

Maximum automation
All lines of business want to optimize and automation and to participate in BPA activities; the business is driven to fully incorporate BPA in its operations.

"The sheer volume of business and technological change presented to the CIO means that the technology estate must constantly evolve. It must now be designed for constant and scalable evolution. That's what enterprise-scale agility is, and it is essential for being digital."
– DXC Digital Directions

Continuously monitor your automations

Optimizing your automations and applying continuous improvements starts with monitoring the automation after implementation.

Purpose of monitoring and sustaining

• Diligent monitoring confirms the automation is performing as desired and meeting initial expectations.
• Holding process reviews helps assess the change in the market and in business operations and allows the organization to stay on top of trends and risks.

Metrics

Metrics are an important aspect of monitoring and sustaining the automation. The metrics will help determine success and find areas in the process where adjustments may be needed.

• Make sure the improvement target is regularly being tested against the implementation curve.

Step 4.2

Assess and mitigate your risks

Activities
4.2.1 Assess the risk of your BPA initiatives

This step involves the following participants:

• IT and business leadership
• Business process and unit owners
• Application and product owners
• IT delivery and operational teams

Outcomes of this step

• BPA initiative risk assessment

BPA without a plan is risky

Avoid the common pitfalls:

• Not considering BPA as a business and IT partnership, which requires continuous formal engagement of all participants.
• Not having a good pilot to demonstrate the value of BPA and justify the organizational transformation to support it.
• Not adequately accommodating feedback and changes after automations are deployed and employed.
• Not treating BPA as a motivator for potential future IT optimization efforts and incorporating BPA capabilities in strategic business planning.
• Not involving HR, management, and other leaders to facilitate the organizational change BPA brings.

Consider the various scenarios that risk the success of your BPA initiatives

Common Reasons for BPA Failure

1 The process is more dynamic than you think

2 The target interface changes, but your automation solution does not receive a reminder

3 You underestimate the political implications

4 You have unrealistic expectations

5 Lack of a coherent platform and the ability to scale modules and intelligence

6 Lack of consistency with stakeholders

7 Choosing the wrong process for automation

8 Too much complexity

9 Impossibility of scaling beyond the functional design of the automation solution

10 Lack of business-IT collaboration and visibility into automation deployment

Source: Karl Mielnicki, Flobotics, 2021.

Assess the risk of your BPA initiatives

Even if you received business and IT buy-in for BPA, you may find yourself encountering new people, process, and technology hurdles from within or outside your organization as you optimize and automation. Collaborate with various roles that are involved with or impacted by BPA to discuss the potential risks, including the risks of maintaining the status quo. This assessment is a critical component in your roadmap, as it will evaluate the robustness of your BPA approach against known risks and assure stakeholders that critical risks are mitigated or within tolerable ranges if accepted.

4.2.1 Assess the risk of your BPA initiatives

1-2 hours

1. Review your BPA roadmap, initiatives and opportunities.
2. Conduct a risk assessment of the upcoming and near-term items of your roadmap.
3. Indicate whether a risk should be accepted or not. If not, brainstorm the mitigations that should be included in your BPA roadmap.
4. Document your findings in the Business Process Automation Strategy Template.

Download the Business Process Automation Strategy Template

Output

BPA initiative risk assessment

Participants

IT and business leadership Business process and unit owners Application and product owners IT delivery and operational teams

4.2.1 cont'd

Example:

Business Risk Factor	Tolerance	Probability	Impact	Mitigation
Organizational change management challenges	Low	High	High	Gradually deliver changes in a predictable and well-communicated manner. Allocate coaches, mentors, and experts to facilitate the adoption of changes.
Business inefficiency and costs	Medium	Low	Medium	Continuously monitor the value gained from the changes. Inject additional BPA efforts and changes to address the realized challenges.
Business continuity risks	Low	Medium	High	Continuously monitor the system and proactively address business continuity risks.
Strategic misalignment	Medium	Medium	Medium	Review the alignment of the BPA effort to the business strategy once it is adopted by end users. Routinely review the backlog and reprioritize and rescope work when necessary.

4.2.1 cont'd

Example:

Technical Risk Factor	Tolerance	Probability	Impact	Mitigation
System instability and interoperability issues	Low	Medium	High	Continuously monitor the system and proactively address system instability risks. Understand and accommodate vendor solution and integration updates through vendor collaboration. Be up to date with integration technologies.
Application maintainability issues and technical debt	High	High	Low	Define and standardize coding standards and frameworks. Build code refactoring and documentation into upcoming development work.
System scalability challenges	Medium	Medium	Medium	Continuously monitor the system and proactively address system scalability risks. Investigate load balancing solutions and cloud opportunities.
Security breaches and risks	Low	High	High	Continuously monitor the system and proactively address system security risks. Be up to date with latest security risks. Build in security earlier in the BPA delivery life cycle.

4.2.1 cont'd

Example:

External Risk Factor	Tolerance	Probability	Impact	Mitigation
Noncompliant with laws and regulations	Low	High	High	Be up to date with changes in laws and regulations. Consult legal and other experts to prioritize the work that ensures system compliance.
Vendor lock-in and solution relevance	Medium	High	Medium	Maintain vendor engagement on upcoming solution changes. Leverage open integration standards and transition to a loosely coupled architecture.
External resources, skills, and knowledge unavailable	High	Low	High	Develop cross-functional teams by sharing knowledge. Transition away from technologies that require legacy skillsets that are difficult to find in the industry.
Industry standards misalignment	Low	Medium	High	Be up to date with changes in industry frameworks. Consult legal and other experts to prioritize the work that ensures system compliance.

4.2.1 cont'd

Example:

Delivery Risk Factor	Tolerance	Probability	Impact	Mitigation
Stakeholders: Stakeholders are not identified, resulting in the project driving to the wrong requirements.	Low	Low	High	Identify stakeholders before project commitment. Maintain continuous communication with stakeholders.
Similar projects: Similar BPA initiatives in the past have failed, increasing the difficulty of acquiring buy-in.	High	Low	High	Conduct a root cause analysis behind past project failures by consulting the project teams.
Project scope: Application teams are incapable of managing scope changes and lack of stakeholder accountability for changes.	Low	High	High	Empower a product owner or business representative to manage scope creep in collaboration with business and IT.
Resource availability: Critical resources are unavailable for the BPA project.	Medium	High	High	Consult team or functional leads for available resources before committing to BPA effort.
Timeline certainty: Initiatives are not accurately estimated, and timelines are not realistic.	High	Low	High	Decompose BPA effort into minimum viable automations that can be delivered iteratively. Collaboratively estimate work with business and IT.
Forecast certainty: Stakeholders are not comfortable with benefit and cost forecasts.	Medium	Low	High	Clarify the scope, unknowns, and risks in the estimates. Suggest best- and worst-case estimates.
Cost overruns: There is a high probability that costs may grow beyond the allocated budget.	Low	Low	High	Deliver changes in iterations, validate their successes in production, and confirm the continued allocation of budget to the next BPA milestone.

Step 4.3

Complete your BPA strategy

Activities
4.3.1 Complete a cost/benefit analysis

This step involves the following participants:

• IT and business leadership
• Business process and unit owners
• Application and product owners
• IT delivery and operational teams

Outcomes of this step

• Completion of BPA strategy

Complete your BPA strategy

Document your BPA objectives, approach, and roadmap with Info-Tech's Business Process Automation Strategy Template:

• Level set your BPA goals and objectives.
• Define the high-priority opportunities for BPA.
• Communicate your desired scaled BPA target state
• Describe your framework to assess your BPA maturity.
• Lay out your BPA initiatives and roadmap.

Identify the different types of benefit your initiatives may achieve

Benefits are not one dimensional, particularly when it comes to BPA investments. There may be impacts in multiple areas – cost, agility, process efficiency, and even engagement.

Strategic
Strategic benefits typically examine positive outcomes that relate to meeting a corporate goal or objective. A strategic benefit gives insight into the strategic value gained from the proposed investment.

Example:

• Improving customer satisfaction
• Gaining competitive advantage
• Bolstering decision-making ability

Tactical
Tactical benefits are more visible enhancements associated with the implementation of the proposed changes. They are typically short term and are prerequisite steps to achieving strategic benefits.

Example:

• Enhanced technology capability
• Integrated application environment
• One source of data for reporting

Operational
Operational benefits highlight process efficiencies and the effect of the examined option on day-to-day activities. Operational improvements typically include quality improvements and workflow automation.

Example:

• Increased customer call intake
• Faster invoice processing
• Process improvement

Consider the costs you are likely to incur

Assessing the cost of your BPA initiatives is essential to making a sound case. Cost assessment will drive the cost-benefit evaluation and related capacity planning.

Licensing
Licensing represents the recurring operational cost of the BPA solution and tools. The number of users who will have access to the system will determine per-user license cost.

Implementation
The one-time cost of installation and configuration of the BPA solution and tools. Implementation is often divided into phases and includes both a configuration and a resourcing component.

Professional services
Customization work and additional services provided by vendors are billed as time and materials and can include expenses like travel and accommodation.

Maintenance and support
Recurring cost for vendor and internal support for the BPA solution and tools.

Project management
Costs related directly to administering and steering the BPA project, including coordination activities, status reports, and tracking.

Business readiness
Recognizing that different business units will need to be involved in the project, business readiness costs represent time and resources drawn from the business.

Training
Vendors and internally provided training as part of the implementation and change management process for use and support of new or amended capabilities, processes, and applications.

Infrastructure
Capital costs of infrastructure (including hardware) required to support the BPA solution, which can be depreciated over the life of the solution or expensed as operational costs.

Data transformation
Data transformation may involve costs associated with conversion, migration, and cleansing. Usually a one-time cost, but may become recurring if archiving is considered.

Integration
Integration costs related to connecting the BPA solution with current systems and third parties. One-time or recurring depending on customization.

Change management
Change costs include communication and internal marketing to increase adoption and buy-in, as well as training provided beyond vendor training.

Resourcing
The cost of internal permanent and temporary employees, as well as those required to backfill for individuals expected to be involved in the initiative.

4.3.1 Complete a cost-benefit analysis

0.5-1 hours

1. Review your BPA roadmap, initiatives, and opportunities.
2. Conduct a cost-benefit assessment of the upcoming and near-term items of your roadmap by using previous experiences and projects, public information, and case studies as insights.
3. Document your findings in the Business Process Automation Strategy Template.

Download the Business Process Automation Strategy Template

Output

Cost/benefit analysis

Participants

IT and business leadership Business process and unit owners Application and product owners IT delivery and operational teams

Manage the communication among all BPA roles and stakeholders

The way you design and structure your BPA practice and position your BPA initiatives affects how delivery roles, end users, and stakeholders complete BPA on their own and with each other. Where you invest in communication and reporting channels and the way you manage your relationships with the business and IT has a significant impact on what BPA tasks get done, when they get done, how they get done, and what the business and IT stakeholders think about it.

Strengthen the relationship and communication channels that exist among all of the roles that are directly or indirectly involved in BPA. Begin to think about how BPA will collaborate and report to each other and to stakeholders, who will be ultimately accountable for the success of BPA, and the degree of each role's involvement and dependency for all technologies and processes.

Enhanced Communication Channels Can Help Overcome the Following Costs:

• Wasted effort and opportunity when a change or delivery complication takes attention away from accomplishing committed BPA work or leads teams to make assumptions.
• Increased overhead expenses when a channel is too broad and complex, requiring additional effort to coordinate dependent BPA work, or when there is duplicated effort on a single BPA task.
• Confusion and delays due to the lack of clarity and transparency around responsibility and accountability for dependent BPA activities.
• Unmotivated teams when management does not provide sufficient support to remove BPA impediments (e.g. silos) and provide a suitably productive environment.

Leverage a flow diagram to understand the communication among stakeholders

Pitch your roadmap initiatives

There are multiple audiences for your pitch, and each audience requires a different level of detail when addressed. Depending on the outcomes expected from each audience, a suitable approach must be chosen. The format and information presented will vary significantly from group to group.

Audience	Key Contents	Outcome
Benefit and cost owners	Costs or benefits estimates	Sign off on cost and benefit projections
Executives and decision makers	Business value and financial benefits Notable business risks and impacts Business rationale and strategic roadmap	Revisions, edits, and approval
IT teams	Notable technical and IT risks IT rationale and tactical roadmap Proposed resourcing and skills capacity	Clarity of vision and direction and readiness for delivery
Business workers	Business rationale Proposed business operations changes Application roadmap	Verification of proposed changes and feedback

Summary of Accomplishment

Develop Your Value-First Business Process Automation Strategy

• Business strategy involving business process automation
• Business value definition
• Stakeholder needs assessment, e.g. persona and customer journey
• Risk and change profiles
• BPA value canvas, including problem statement, vision, objectives and metrics
• BPA guiding principles
• BPA target state vision
• Prioritized backlog of BPA opportunities
• BPA capability maturity and gaps
• BPA initiatives and roadmap
• Risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis

If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through an Info-Tech workshop or Guided Implementation.

Contact your account representative for more information.

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Research Contributors and Experts

Gurpreet Dhaliwal, MBA
Managing Enterprise Architect
Region of Peel

An accomplished technology leader with 25+ years of extensive and diverse experience in building award-winning architecture and strategy teams. A collaborative leader responsible for the delivery of digital strategy, enterprise architecture program, IT governance, target state roadmaps, and IT operating models. Awarded the Top Chief/Head Architect 2019, Global Architecture Ratings & Awards.

Alex Bazin
Chief Technology Officer
Lewis Silkin LLP

Alex is chief technology officer at Lewis Silkin, responsible for leading their technology and information teams. His focus is on all aspects of how users experience technology, both within the firm and as clients. His teams work to maximize the benefits users get from existing systems and to accelerate the application of leading-edge technologies.

He has over 15 years of experience in technology management and strategy, including with leading global IT and Business Services companies. He has also led a software startup and innovation unit on behalf of an international logistics firm. He is passionate about developing high-performing, diverse teams and inclusive, agile company cultures. He is a Chartered Engineer and member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology.

Benjamin Palacio
Senior Information Technology Analyst
County of Placer

Benjamin Palacio has been working in the application development space since 2007 with a strong focus on system integrations. He has seamlessly integrated applications data across multiple states into a single reporting solution for management teams to evaluate, and he has codeveloped applications to manage billions in federal funding. He is also a CSAC-credentialed IT Executive (CA, USA).