Practical Process Automation

Chapter 13. Parting Words

You’ve reached the end of the book—I hope you enjoyed the experience, and that it has improved your understanding of process automation. For me, as a process automation enthusiast, there are still many things left unsaid. This final chapter provides a very quick look at a few topics that I felt needed to be mentioned. It:

• Summarizes how architecture trends influence process automation, and where this is covered in this book

• Looks at how modern architectures influence user experience, customer journeys, and business processes

• Gives you some advice on what to do next

Current Architecture Trends Influence Process Automation

Currently there is a big trend toward using more fine-grained components that run in a distributed fashion. This is a key necessity to master the growing complexity and scale of modern systems.

It also has a few interesting implications, which were touched on in various places in the book:

• Business logic is distributed, and many components need to interact to fulfill customer demands and to implement end-to-end business processes. This was introduced in Chapter 7.

• Systems get more reactive and event-driven and thus need to balance choreography and orchestration, as described in Chapter 8.

• Remote communication introduces new challenges, especially around consistency, as described in Chapter 9.

• In order to enable developing, operating, and maintaining a large number of components, companies need to improve their practices ...