As Covid-19 continues to reshape how work gets done, organizations in every sector from banking to manufacturing to healthcare are investing in digitizing their “old-school” processes such as order management, RFP handling, customer onboarding and customer service. These multiyear, multimillion-dollar projects generally support aggressive business goals like an 80% reduction in processing cost, 50% increase in execution speed and even 200% business or customer growth.

Unfortunately, according to the results of a Gartner survey, 67% of companies don’t achieve their expectations regarding profit growth from digital initiatives. But in 2021, a Gartner CEO survey showed that the top ask of CIOs is digitization.

The Trouble With Aggressive Targets

To enable these targets, organizations implement complex architectures that span multiple solution sets such as business process management (BPM), robotics process automation (RPA), customer relationship management (CRM), the cloud and ticketing. Business process orchestration, automation and artificial intelligence are typically three new capabilities introduced to enable the desired business efficiency gains. Buzzword bingo aside, these are all complex technologies with complex workflows of their own that require seamless orchestration to execute effectively.

Transformation projects touch multiple business and IT groups that must collaborate for success. Often, these stakeholders don’t have a common understanding of the existing business ecosystem other than a dated Visio diagram that might exist and also don’t have a shared vision of the new ecosystem that’s required to meet the desired targets.

Any organization contemplating or implementing an Application or Process Transformation Project should check out this Forbes article by Pyze CEO Prabhjot Singh for best practices and typical pitfalls.