Lalitha Rajagopalan, Co-Founder and Head of Product Strategy & GTM, ORO Labs.
Workflow orchestration is the new hotness in IT. Startups are perfecting and commercializing the technology, VCs are investing and companies are rushing to adopt. So, what is it, and why should you care?
Let’s get some definitions out of the way. Workflow is quite literally the flow of work—the sequence of actions, data and tasks meant to accomplish an objective. It implies that each stage has a connection to the next—if there’s no connection, there’s no workflow. A related concept is automation—the use of technology to execute a specific task (robotic process automation) or a larger business process (digital process automation) without the need for human intervention.
Then, we come to orchestration. This takes workflow and automation and applies it to a broader business need that stretches across different systems, databases, organizational silos and so on. Orchestration allows human or automated systems to complete a holistic task by connecting the necessary disparate data and input sources throughout an organization.
What’s Driving Orchestration?
I mentioned that orchestration is hot. The question is, “Why?” Three factors are driving adoption.
The first is the long-term shift from centralized organizations and processes to today’s modern, decentralized enterprise. These may be geographically and even globally dispersed. More importantly, they’re broken into teams, departments and even separate companies that facilitate speed and agility but create organizational silos. Effectively coordinating shared activities across these silos is difficult, and the larger the organization, the more complex the challenge. Put another way, this desire for speed and agility ultimately conflicts with the organizational need for control and compliance. The result is maverick outcomes and significant duplication.
Simultaneously, there’s a proliferation of software and applications throughout modern organizations. Technology’s dynamism means that companies are inundated with the latest solutions, often designed around very specific vertical, line of business or departmental needs. The result is complexity that negatively impacts the employee and/or user experience. In short, the more solutions, the paradoxically harder it becomes to get work done.
It’s important to note that automation isn’t immune to proliferation. Although necessary for effective orchestration, different automation tools and vendors actually create silos. Multiple silos hinder a continuous and fluid experience—the opposite of orchestration.
Finally, many companies are far down the digital transformation path and are now focused on wringing increased ROI from progress made, as opposed to adopting new systems or rethinking additional aspects of the business. The thought: “We’ve adopted all these new systems. Now, how do we get them to work together?”
Orchestration Use Cases
These factors have inspired the development of workflow orchestration platforms designed to eliminate silos, which help increase efficiency and ROI for the organization. Done well, this can simplify the user experience and reduce system complexity and organizational boundaries. Here are two examples of common orchestration use cases.
1. Purchasing And Procurement
Traditional procurement follows a “procure to pay” (P2P) process, which is a rigid series of steps ranging from need identification and requisition through purchase order creation to invoice approval and vendor payment. This creates two issues for modern organizations. The first is that many purchasing workflows fall outside this rigid process. Bringing on a new services vendor, for instance, might entail receiving an invoice and then creating a purchase order—the opposite of the above P2P workflow. Or perhaps the purchase is a one-time spend that doesn’t require any steps beyond approval. Neither of these scenarios fits into traditional P2P processes, resulting in departmental maverick spend and an inability to track via backend corporate systems.
The second issue is that traditional procurement workflows don’t account for modern needs like legal approval, compliance checks and security verification. These involve systems and departments that are outside of financial and procurement processes.
2. IT Service Management
A common challenge for IT organizations comes from trying to manage the overwhelming volume of manual tasks: provisioning, installation, employee onboarding, password and identity management, data transfers, server administration and more. Automation is an obvious solution, but it can create its own set of challenges in managing, tracking and coordinating a disparate range of automation tools and scripts that stretch across different systems, environments and regions, resulting in automation silos, miscommunication and excess overhead.
There are many examples of workflows stretching across system and organizational boundaries, including supply chain management, order fulfillment and merchandise returns. In each instance, something beyond simple automation is needed: orchestration.
Why Adopt Orchestration?
Orchestrating systems and processes can provide critical advantages. First, it creates a fabric or layer that allows disparate systems and teams—inside and outside the organization—to integrate and collaborate. In the previous examples, a cohesive workflow is virtually impossible without some form of orchestration to connect the dots.
Second, orchestration can increase organizational control and visibility. Organizations are effectively blind to things like maverick spend, supplier fraud or return merchandise status without an orchestration layer to coalesce data from disparate sources.
Finally, orchestration can turn a single point of user engagement into larger, holistic processes. Employees don’t have to switch from system to system or department to department to accomplish what—from an organizational standpoint—should be a unified workflow.
Perhaps most importantly, organizations find orchestration to be additive to existing investments, allowing them to gain maximum benefit from transformation initiatives without needing to replace software or reimagine processes. In fact, it’s arguable that orchestration is the logical endpoint for digital transformation, allowing technology to extend workflows across system, organizational and data boundaries to create a more unified and agile business.
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