Automate & Elevate
Welcome to ‘Automate & Elevate’ – a podcast brought to you by FlowForma. In every episode, we interview thought leaders or one of our own customers and ask them about their Digital Transformation journey to a paperless office. Tune in to learn best practices and recommendations directly from your peers!
Automate & Elevate
Vendor Spotlight (AIIM): Adopting a No Code Technology Stack into Your Portfolio
Welcome to disrupting business process management, a podcast brought to you by flow farmer. We're in every episode. We interviewed todd leaders or one of our own customers and ask them about their digital transformation journey to a paperless office.
Speaker 2:I'm the director of market intelligence group and with me today from aim, we have Bob Laravee and we also have neil young from flow format by. There's an internationally recognized, a subject matter expert and thought leader with over 30 years of experience in the fields at the information and process management and is the recipient at the Cenotaph. Brazil's ecm pioneer award. Bob Is an author, lecturer, musician, photographer and poet, and as an Aba techie with a focus on process improvement and the application of advanced technologies to enhance and automate business operations. Bob's passion is to share his experience and expertise with individuals and businesses seeking to improve their information and process management practices. And we also have with us neil young and neil was the CEO of flow forma. Flow form is a leading provider of business process management tools for Microsoft office. Three 65 meal. Has spent a number of years driving flow form as a sas business model and is passionate about revolutionizing the traditional bpm space to enable the business user to meet the needs of today's demanding digital workplace all through an innovative no code approach. And I'm very fascinated by this technology, the flow form it has. I'm really looking forward to hearing about that. The first, I'm going to turn things over to Bob Laravee to begin his talk today. Bob. Well, thank you theresa, and thank you neil for joining us. I too, I'm very fascinated with the whole concept of no code. For many, many years I believed that the power should be placed in the hands of the users and the people who make the decisions and the concept of no code certainly does help us get there a lot faster and a lot closer to where we should be. So, ah, as Theresa mentioned, I am chief analyst at aim and uh, one of the things that the group does, of course there's a lot of research and our recent research, um, as we were preparing for this, we from the most recent research that we have, a in relation to process automation and one of the things that we found, um, was a focus on modernization and that 81 percent of organizations recognize that modernizing their Iam strategy as a must, they can't live in the days passed and we can't serve, certainly can't work at the speed of paper anymore and not just from a capture standpoint, from a processing standpoint. So where you have to look at, uh, the realities of today and we have to modernize our strategies and modernize our infrastructure. Process Automation is actually one of the keys to this. And one of the things that we found was 75 percent of the respondents, 75 percent of those people that we polled said that process automation is a must do in their business models today is no longer a nice to have. They, they realized that they actually have to do this, they have to automate these business processes in order to, uh, be much more efficient, be much more consistent, and that's something that I keep hearing over and over again is they're looking for consistency in their businesses, business processes, but also to gain tighter controls and insight into the business as well. So process automation is a must do in the business models. And this leads to the idea of effectiveness. How effective are we operated, right? As an organization or as a business. And so when we looked at this in relation to that survey, the majority of organizations feel they do a fair job notice I said fair in managing their business processes effectively. And so they understand, yeah, okay, we're okay at this. Um, but they understand that there's a lot of room for improvement and a lot of areas that they could be much better in. And so just kind of leads us to a question, a very basic question. What is the CIO is supposed to do today? If they're facing these challenges of modernization, automation in effectiveness, how are they supposed to go about doing this and how do they do it in a way that's conducive to a flexible invent a business environment. So agility is key, being able to respond to changing business requirements, changing regulatory requirements and so on, but at the same time I'm being much more impactful, I guess is a good term to use when it comes to making changes within the organization and, and placing some of that power to change and change the way they work into the hands of the people who actually do the work. And so at this point what I'm going to do is I'm going to call on a nail and Neil's going to share with us how flow Pharma has seen this and how the idea of no code or the, the ability to use no code approaches really does have a positive impact on these businesses. So Neil, thanks again for, for being with us today. And at this point I'm going to turn it over to you and I'm, I'm all ears waiting and looking forward to the scene. And what you have here,
Speaker 3:thanks for having me and hi everybody. So I'm a cio and now what we're finding in the marketplace, and we'll be dealing with or uh, the hundreds of customers on a daily basis, um, role of the CIO is changing compared to five years ago. Uh, so they, they now have a cease and you all across the board, they now have a seat at the top title and presenting different, different goals, the strategic goals that they're dealing with, they're working with or a fellow c level leaders in terms of addressing these strategic goals and the business. So it's no longer seeing seen as an operational cost centric focus. It's so some of that still exists obviously, you know, keeping the lights on, but it's also working around customer experience initiatives. How would they, how can they improve how they're interacting with the customers on the day to day work. I think that's really shifting in terms of demands for the CIO and those demands are coming across and we're seeing this, you know, out at a high level what are the, what are the tree things, right as a top of their agenda. And there is this phenomena, Monster Colada crisis. So there is a global shortage, um, all companies and you will hear companies say, you know, every, every company today is becoming a software company. Uh, so, you know, they could be in the electronics business, but they are now moving into software with Iot, etc. So there's a huge demand for coders to sell, obviously talented coming true that won't move away, but cal oes need other options are viable options to be able to call it a crisis. Um, digital tranSformation, you know, we go back a few years again, we would've seen a, you know, is this a new, are these new buzzwords, new terminology, um, but it, it's absolutely real today. And there's a couple of drivers here, one, one being added to the next generation of employees and staff that are coming in very talented and you see that. They expect everything to be digital. They don't understand why your invoices and contracts, some silly exists, true to post or physical copies of contracts. They assume everything will be digitalized and true to nature of it. They're just so used to social media and everything being digital and also they expect everything to be on their mobile phones. So you know, you're dealing with the next generation of workers and then you're also dealing with in terms of customer demands, so dealing with time to value, um, on projects and solutions and what customers are expecting, let alone what your internal staff are demanding, how fast they want things solved so they can deal with the customers better and those solutions better. So there are the challenges that, that we're, we're, when we, when we speak to ceos, were that, that's, that's where we're seeing, um, and that's why they're liking a, the approach around the nalco technology such as ourselves. You know, and I, I heard a great phrase a few weeks back around the consumeration of it, you know, it's pretty much becoming the future where technology is that becoming more consumerized so they can be dealt with by the business users and by the next generation of, of staff coming into the organization. So you know, how does flow form itself help with these challenges? So we focus a lot on, you know, the original idea. We have been very much around empowering the business analyst on that. We're very much seeing that as empowering the business user would, using that code on what you find with the technologies they coexist. So this is not a rip and replace against sorta technologies that have existed in the organization such as crm, erp, two sets of data doing, you know, very strong solution providing very strong solutions for the business. But it's about augmenting that and adding, adding to the and you think of gaps in apps within those technology platforms. It's what, it's what technologies such as ourselves can bring to the table and we'd use that code at amanda and imperative business. And also what we find is the business know this, the, the process problems better so they understand what they need to solve. So let's arm them with the tools, um, and you know, lit and allow the cio with his team allowed the it division to provide governance, training, advice, you know, and integration capabilities. And I will. That's what we have seen. We have, we have worked with very progressive it directors, it managers, sales data, um, we're realize the demands are very strong and how can they connect better with the, with the, with the business audience. And if you, if you, um, if you see the demand and you keep those amounts, just went in it, then the backlog will just be too severe to deal with. So that's our, we're helping today. Um, in terms of digital transformation on the different types of solutions, we tend to categorize them to help with our what our customers and help them deal with their challenges that they received. Categorized them into three buckets. Essentially you have your everyday processes. So these coUld be or it finance hr forms. So your other main within your organization that can be dealt with internally focused, they can be dealt with quite quickly, you know, a couple of hours, we've seen people build out some of these processes and get them live to technology as you, um, and then you're moving up into more organizational specific. So in your industry, on, in your business and the processes that exist, I'm a already, um, are managed, but the colby spreadsheets would email combined. I'm moving around the organization on how can you solve those process problems because you realize when someone's not there for two weeks, uh, that there's a gap on, on, on a larger scale that can have huge ramifications. So that's another area and that are a level that we look to solve. And as you move up this spectrum you're, you're solving or achieving more roi on your, having more of an impact on, on the digital transformation strategy. And then the final piece. And we, we typically see customers starting in either the forest, the second bucket, and then moving into cx impact processes once the familiar. So extending processes that are internal with our external customers. And connecting to seamlessly with the customers, suppliers, what have you, so external customers to the business, um, and that's really advancing the digital process transformation and in terms of just how in getting to time to value and what we find with, uh, with these types of technologies. Um, you know, you want an onboarding program, uh, the, you know, you can't call it with no code and then offer a large volume of consultant today is to get people working with the product, so on a custody, low volume of training. So we very much engage your customers around what we call our shortstop program. Let's boat onboarding fairly quickly, pick a process, get them on boarded with the process until they enter their company, but also at the same time gives them learning resources, give them implementation advice. Um, when we go on after we go live, then we'll also provide advice as well. But it's very much for getting that quick tons of value and enabling the end customer with the noto technologies. And we call it, it's pretty much you talk about waterfall agile. We were, you very much talk about test and learn delivery and keep refining. So there's no time boxes, there's no constraints on the sprints, but keep refining the process with your audience and move it into, into life, by all means. Take a trial and as a guided tour in there and, and you know, you can request a deeper demo when we can help you with that. Um, were featured in one of the latest forrester reports. So by all means, you know, request your free copy of that, uh, from the, from our website on will have no problem providing that to you. And appreciate everybody listening to me today and I'm just going to hand back to bob now for some questions.
Speaker 2:Hey neil, thank you very much. That was, that was really enlightening. I got to tell you. So yes, we do have a couple of questions deal. Um, first one, and this is kind of an interesting one because we all know that office three, 65 is out there and you know, microsoft is kind of everywhere. And this particular question, it says we have office three, 65 is onboarding the flow. Former product simple.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So, um, we have found so effectively it's a three to five day exercise. We typically bring customers through that over the space of time that works with them. So that might be over a time period of four weeks, coby over two weeks, but typically, typically it's over four to eight weeks, um, which suits them less time, get up to speed, less than come back and ask more questions. But it really is a, it's, it's from a working day perspective. It's three to five days working days. Yep.
Speaker 2:Three to five working days. That's great. Another question that we have here is I liked the idea of enabling external people to participate in our process. Is, is that a big project? Is that a big project to undertake?
Speaker 3:No, no. So we've had a. So we had a recent deployments of, um, of our customer experience platform, which is the external facing a version of the product, a wood in three weeks, including the process and effectively route hop. There's already a connection feature within their secure connection, so effectively what happens is we spin up another environment and we place a public facing version of the process on that and they have the existing process internally and we did that for a customer recently. Within three weeks they already had the existing internal process, but uh, on security and all those areas are covered so that can be quite quick, quickly approached with all what else security concerns addressed.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. Yeah. It's a term that you used a little bit earlier in your answers to these questions are certainly addressing that hears the term filling the gaps in the apps. I really love that term because it's exactly what you're describing is you're filling in those holes, right? You're helping people fill in those gaps in the app and inner processes. The final question that I'm going to give because we're kind of getting close here, but I do have one more that I'm going to ask you and this one reads, do you need to have any technical skills to automate and deploy processes within flow former? That's a really good question.
Speaker 3:Slightly longer answer is we like to connect to it to make sure the applications like orange, but the, I am, that's always dependent on the customer's requirements. Uh, but uh, so the, the, one of the key areas that would have demonstrated very, very quickly around would have been the security was so essentially it may give somebody a site in sharepoint, uh, they were down there for business, use it to go and work away and build out their hr processes, for example, on slow form of will allow the business user tests laron build, deploy and roll out the processes. We always like to connect with it. I think that's advisable and not there. They're there to government, but that might be just them providing us. So yes, absolutely it is designed to, the premise of the product is designed for business users.
Speaker 2:Awesome. And, and you're right, you know, keeping it engaged is something that's very important. Um, and it's brilliant. It's a team effort, right? It comes down to being a team effort, a team sport. So. Well thank you very much. Nail at this point, I am going to turn it back over to teresa as we are coming up to the end of the session here, theresa. Thank you bob. I've been listening to neil young of format and very much want to thank bob laravee, uh, with his insights from the research and they came out and if you're interested in getting more information on, on that research that bob was mentioning, if you go to[inaudible] dot org slash research, you'll find a whole bunch of, uh, information and lots of other articles and ebooks and whole bunch of other things that bob and his team have written. Um, we have a great staff of analysts here that just has a lot of really wonderful insights to share. So check that out. Um, so as we bring this to a close, I just want to, I'm asking you to our speakers for closing thought or a key takeaway. And let me start first with bob larrivee from aim. Your closing thought, well thank you teresa, and thanks everybody for being with us. I think what we've learned here today is that the reality is it is possible to help transform business processes without the need for extreme technical skills. Um, you know, as neil pointed out, we should have it involved, of course, but I'm putting the power back in the hands of the users. This is something that's really important to businesses today in order to keep that flexibility and agility that they need and responding to customer requests and enhancing the customer experience. Um, so I encourage everybody, check it out, check out this whole no code approach. Thank you. Bob and neil young from flow forma. Your closing thoughts today.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think bob's points there. Um, I think if you look at the decoder crisis on maybe a crisis is coming across a bit extreme, but, but it is something that's valuable there. And um, those, uh, you know, we're seeing technologies across the board around consumerization, consumerization of it, and it's pretty much becoming a reality. So I, I think, um, it's, it's, it's the right approach that allows them to the technology stack, um, when, when companies. And so it was just seeing my fits, um, um, but it's, it's a reality on the technologies out there today now to deal with that. so I think that will be my closing, closing view.
Speaker 4:thanks neil, and thank you everyone for your time today. I greatly appreciate that from aim. This is teresa rest and we will see you at our next event.