Practical Process Automation

Chapter 12. The Journey to Introduce Process Automation

This chapter will answer questions like: how can you introduce process automation into your organization? How can you make your first project successful? And how do you establish a company-wide practice to scale adoption?

To achieve this, it:

• Sketches two typical adoption journeys and derives a pattern from them

• Describes the first steps in this journey, which are the crucial ones (particularly in the first one to three process automation projects)

• Dives into scaling adoption across the entire organization, and all the challenges that come with that

You might wonder why you’re reading about these topics in a technical book. The reason is twofold. First, as a developer or software architect, you need be aware of certain challenges to be able to address them. Even if politics are beyond your direct control, you will be affected by them, and you need to take actions that will help avoid major problems with your projects.

Second, if you are an enterprise architect, it is vital to learn best practices on how to introduce process automation into your enterprise. Your job is not only to understand capabilities and architecture, but also to find the right balance between giving important guidance, defining necessary guardrails, and letting projects breathe. Instead of defining “the right architecture” for your company, you will much more likely end up as an internal consultant and facilitator. This chapter will equip you ...