Reimagining Processes Through Digital Transformation

Process Management

Processes are part of daily life, whether it be in our professional or personal lives. We adhere to them to communicate between parties in order to receive a service or product. Almost every organization has processes that start with a form.  For many of those processes we first acquire a form that we then need to print, fill out and then mail in. The fundamental issue with this process is time.   Users want to receive a notification of a successfully completed process as quickly as possible.  Yet, an analog process is slow and error prone.  Physical documents take time and effort to move, manage, sign and archive.

Fast forward to 2020, and we are going through what is unquestionably going to be the fastest digital process transformation era ever. That said, what makes a good process? What makes a process scale? What drives adoption for a digital process?  We need to look beyond just digitizing the current analog process, we need to reimagine it. 

Digital transformations are a perfect time to look at what blockers and issues the current processes had and find ways to better those processes when going digital. Many transformations are a pure replacement of the old process with new technologies leaving the same problems present. For example, Adobe was victim of software piracy for years, after transforming the process that clients used to acquire software, software piracy had dropped to an all time low in Adobe.

Looking at how other organizations have accomplished digital transformations we can see that there were different metrics used to create their processes and define a successful one.  The majority of these metrics focus on usability, for a process to be successful it can't be a challenging experience. Processes are always going to be used by people and need to be catered towards them.

At AFTIA, we spent weeks analyzing one of our clients' culture and business inputs prior to redefining one of their processes. After the implementation of the process; 85% of documents were signed, approved, and onboarded within the same day. Median completion time, 11 minutes from email notification to signature, aggregation and migration of 11 forms and a minimum viable product release in 8 weeks.

When implementing a new process, always look at what current issues exist, consider how clients and users interact with the process. Don’t be afraid to fail, and fail early. A successful process drives a healthy culture.