Automation and Orchestration Technologies Are Converging: Here’s 4 Reasons Why

Automation has unleashed unprecedented productivity and profits for organizations. By automating formerly manual tasks, businesses see efficiency gains, reduced human error, cost savings, and improved innovation. Automation frees employees for creative work and work that requires human intervention.

To facilitate this, many organizations have stitched together a wide range of automation tools. This includes robotic process automation (RPA), generative AI, predictive AI, and business process management.

Analysts at Gartner® have noted that organizations are increasingly consolidating their automation solutions. Business orchestration and automation technologies (BOAT) combine automation tools into a single platform that can handle any complex process across the enterprise.

So why would you choose a BOAT platform? And what makes a good one? We’ll dive into both questions today.

Organizations start by needing to accomplish a business goal. They may want to automate a single task, a single workflow, or multiple larger workflows across departments or business units. Yet, too often, this leads to investing in a series of overlapping technologies. Quickly, organizations end up with a slew of platforms and solutions, often with duplicative feature sets. 

This happens organically when organizations don’t start with a strategic plan. Here are four critical reasons why this approach causes trouble:

More solutions means more to manage. Whether it’s patching servers, managing vulnerabilities, or modifying code for integrations, complex IT means more work. These tools increase overhead for managing security settings, configurations, compatibility between systems, and compliance tracking. Ultimately, this leads to more work and higher costs of maintaining the systems.

Building an IT infrastructure requires that each element remains working. An issue with one application can grind operations to a screeching halt. If you have an issue with an API connection for your CRM, the sales or customer service teams may have trouble accessing critical information for customer communications. Consolidating under a single platform helps solve this issue. And it lets one vendor take responsibility for critical elements like uptime or security.

Businesses need to think holistically. While you can focus on individual tasks or workflows, automating end-to-end processes should be the real goal. Pulling together overlapping technology, often requiring a lot of development work to integrate, can restrict automation to a department or a single task, like intelligent document processing (IDP) for billing only.

Choosing a BOAT platform means you can orchestrate tasks across multiple systems, passing work between humans and digital workers like AI or RPA bots. Additionally, a strong BOAT platform with a data fabric architecture makes data management and integration easier, giving you a complete view of your enterprise data.

Running multiple overlapping solutions can quickly run up the tab on your IT budget. Licensing feeds on multiple solutions can balloon costs out of control (and can grow depending on your contract terms). Plus, vendor contracts become a nightmare to maintain. Any enterprise will already have a lot to manage on this front, but there’s no reason to add to this burden.

But the previous points also add line items to your bill. Maintenance adds IT labor hours and opportunity costs. Downtime in one system can hold up operations. Regulatory fines can crop up more easily if one system falls out of compliance. Frankly, users switching between systems causes a drip, drip, drip of inefficiency that can eat into your automation and orchestration gains.

The artificial intelligence boom has led to AI rollouts across industries for specific tasks. This includes intelligent document processing (IDP) to classify documents and extract critical data, predictive AI for planning, and generative AI to offload tasks like email writing.

Why choose a BOAT platform for AI? First, AI must only play a role in a wider, orchestrated process. This lets you deploy AI where it makes the most sense and can have the most impact (versus deploying AI in a piecemeal fashion or to take over a single task). Second, using a platform can add protections against risks and cyberthreats. BOAT platforms often have strong security and compliance certifications to support data privacy. 

Finally, it’s worth noting the availability of AI copilots in BOAT platforms. An AI copilot assists users or developers with tasks. Some might allow users to dig into their enterprise data using plain language conversations without having to know and use complex queries. Others might help speed up application development by enabling teams to generate test cases or test data. These copilots can help you accomplish tasks much faster and more efficiently.

Rather than adding multiple new solutions for automation orchestration, a BOAT platform can connect your existing software applications and extend your investments while simplifying the complexity. 

Two components are required for this. First, API integrations (and RPA bots when APIs aren’t available) help consolidate your IT system into a cohesive whole. Second, data fabric helps break down data silo walls to give you a 360-degree view of your enterprise data.

While AI gets most of the press, RPA is still a key automation player. Repetitive tasks like data entry or scraping information from pages can be offloaded to RPA to save time, improve productivity, and reduce human error. Integrating RPA into an automation orchestration platform helps you avoid increasing your IT overhead.

Low-code capabilities offer visual interfaces that enable developers to build applications faster than with traditional high-code approaches. This allows you to rapidly adapt processes to changing needs—such as shifting market demand, bottlenecks in your processes, or heightened compliance or regulatory burdens.

While not necessarily strictly required for BOAT, process intelligence can be extremely helpful. Process intelligence capabilities combine process mining, data, and AI to enable you to gain real-world insights into how your processes are operating. This allows you to find and fix bottlenecks or note areas for improvement in a workflow. Process intelligence helps you strategize on how to improve your processes and allows you to track their performance in real time.

Finally, sitting above nearly all of this is process orchestration. Having a strong orchestration layer allows you to move tasks and data to the right people or systems. The key here is orchestration. Having an orchestration layer to funnel tasks and systems allows you to automate processes based on a given trigger, such as incoming email or an approval from a review process. Orchestration lets you move tasks and data easily throughout a process. Having strong business rules and orchestration capabilities is critical to effectively automating any end-to-end process.