Democratizing Process Orchestration: Accelerating Automation with Flowable

Summary

IT democratization enables a wide range of users, from developers to business users, to create workflows using low-code tools, reducing reliance on internal IT departments. Organizations can scale automation efforts more efficiently by focusing on reusability and modular design. Open standards and AI-driven tools further accelerate process automation, ensuring that innovation and efficiency are accessible to all levels of the organization.

Takeaways

• Low-code platforms can empower non-technical users to design and manage workflows, reducing reliance on IT and speeding up automation efforts across the organization.

• Reusable components and modular workflows can help organizations adapt processes more quickly and efficiently, minimizing the need for recreating solutions.

• AI tools can simplify workflow creation, allowing faster automation and enabling business users to refine processes without heavy IT involvement.

Defining IT democratization

Automation is crucial for businesses to streamline operations and optimize costs, but IT departments often face project backlogs of 3 to 12 months, slowing progress. Equally, with 54% of global organizations experiencing a skills shortage in 2023, particularly in technology, we must find a solution.

IT democratization is the process of broadening access to IT resources, tools, and expertise, enabling a wider range of individuals (from technical to non-technical and business users) and organizations to leverage technology. This approach bridges the gap between business and IT by enabling a wider range of "roles" within an organization to create workflows. At Flowable, we have seen many different roles within organizations take on the task of creating workflows. These roles range from developers to automation engineers and business analysts . Flowable serves this complete spectrum of users and aims to empower cross-departmental collaboration by offering the proper tooling for a broad range of individuals within an organization.

However, specifically focusing on non-developers, low-code is widely seen as a key enabler for IT democratization. Flowable's low-code capabilities allow non-developers (aka citizen developers ) to model workflows fast with a visual drag-and-drop workflow designer. By doing so, Flowable reduces reliance on IT departments and democratizes the delivery of process orchestration across the enterprise.

At the same time, developers can rely on Flowable's flexibility and extend the code whenever needed to generate further value from the tool. This creates a symbiosis between teams, where developers can focus on the extension of the tool while citizen developers focus on building the necessary workflows that answer their needs.

Modularity as the foundation for reusability and composability

Flowable is model-based; in fact, almost everything is based on a model. For users, this offers a platform for rapid, low-code development, deployment, and application updates. The Flowable approach of "model more, code less" accelerates reusability and composability within an organization.

In real-world scenarios, we often see these two concepts coming together via a "center of excellence (CoE)." An organizational CoE sees a cross-departmental collaboration of developers, modelers, and business users specifically to create reusable models. These models can then be used and reused across several applications, processes, and departments.

Organizations that reuse components can adjust existing workflows dynamically without starting from scratch each time. This design principle allows organizations to iterate quickly, safely, and effectively. Global Bank, LGT, is an example of an organization that fosters cross-departmental collaboration using a "center of excellence." Modelers, developers, and business users within LGT collaborate to estimate, develop, and implement automation projects, all within the Flowable platform.

The modular, composable design approach has numerous benefits:

• Businesses can rapidly develop models for processes, forms, and case management.

• Users can reuse models across various projects. For example, a customer onboarding process model can be adapted to vendor onboarding with minimal changes.

• Reusable components ensure consistency and reusability across different business processes, allowing for faster implementations, reducing errors, and improving overall efficiency.

• Model versioning allows to confidently iterate on workflows, knowing that previous versions are readily available if new changes disrupt operations.

While models aren't code, with Flowable, it is possible to extend the platform through configuration and the provided application programming interfaces (APIs). This offers flexibility for all roles involved in an automation process within an organization, from citizen developers to highly experienced software engineers. Even skilled IT developers can benefit from the low-code approach, allowing them to iterate faster and simplify many everyday tasks (such as integration) and not have to reinvent the wheel for each new project.

Embracing open standards

Open standards support IT democratization by providing universally accessible guidelines and frameworks that enable interoperability between different technologies and platforms. This allows a broader range of users, including non-technical individuals, to adopt, integrate, and use IT tools without being locked into proprietary systems. By promoting compatibility and reducing technical barriers, open standards make it easier for users to build and customize solutions, driving greater participation in IT processes.

Flowable utilizes the three critical open standards: BPMN, CMMN, and DMN. These standards provide organizations with the necessary foundation to deploy a successful modular and reusable approach to automation.

AI and IT democratization

Artificial intelligence (AI) further accelerates IT democratization by offering radical simplification on many levels. AI-driven process development is the purest expression of what low-code aims to achieve, given that absolutely no code is used. AI-assisted modeling, for example, allows users to get moving with AI-generated case management or process automation in seconds.

Flowable offers a range of AI-assisted capabilities to further bridge the gap between business and IT. It provides faster and easier model creation while giving organizations total flexibility to integrate AI on multiple levels as they see fit.

Empowering business users to drive innovation

Democratized process orchestration is an actionable strategy that allows businesses to scale automation efforts by empowering non-technical users. Organizations can accelerate process development, reduce reliance on IT, and foster more responsive business environments by leveraging low-code platforms, reusable models, and AI-assisted tools.

Flowable enables users across all levels of the organization to embrace the modular process automation approach. From software developers to modelers, non-technical roles and citizen developers, tools such as low-code, reusable components and a model-based framework help them adapt, innovate, and harness the power of process orchestration quickly and effectively.