Security and Privacy Concerns and Difficulty in Management Among Top Challenges with Tools
The desire to improve organizational processes, reduce costs, and propel digital transformation are driving widespread adoption of process discovery and task mining tools despite disconnects in the benefits and challenges with their usage, according to “The State of Process Discovery 2021” report by Blueprint Software Systems. These tools help organizations identify, visualize, and improve business tasks, documenting all possible variations of recorded tasks and identifying opportunities to automate those processes.
Blueprint surveyed 400 executives, directors, department heads, senior managers, lines of business managers, and analysts from both the U.S. and the U.K. and found that 56% of respondents have implemented process discovery or task mining tools within their company. The two main reasons companies use these tools are to improve tasks by eliminating waste and automating tasks.
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“Process discovery tools are surging in implementation and interest as more companies move toward digital transformation through automation, especially in the wake of COVID-19 as they rethink their technology needs,” says Dan Shimmerman, CEO, Blueprint. “While there are challenges associated with these tools, companies across most industries are experiencing positive returns on their process discovery investments when properly deployed and managed and plan to grow their existing programs.”
Financial services and retail companies are the most common adopters of process discovery tools, while finance and accounting, and IT are the most common adopters by department.
While Blueprint’s research shows most companies are leveraging these technologies to their benefit, it also suggests a mismatch between expected and realized benefits. The top realized benefit of process discovery tools is the improved quality of task execution. However, the expectation of increased efficiency of tasks and improved employee experiences hasn’t materialized.
The challenge related to security and privacy concerns expressed by 31% of task mining users directly impacts employee experiences. Task mining tools commonly use recorders that sit at the desktop level and record users’ tasks. This is often viewed as invasive to employees, while highly regulated departments or industries present difficulties with consent and privacy.
Another top challenge is the time, effort, and resources required to manage and monitor these tools. As a relatively new technology, process discovery usability presents some barriers—mainly task models being incompatible with output tools like RPA platforms for automation and overwhelming data sets. These hurdles differ by industry.
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Financial services and insurance companies identified privacy concerns as their greatest challenge, while telecoms and manufacturers reported a lack of resources to manage as their biggest barrier. Healthcare organizations identified a lack of dedicated teams to manage process discovery as their greatest pain-point. Retail companies – one of the leading adopters of process discovery – claimed prioritizing and identifying which areas of their business to apply process discovery to as their biggest issue.
In terms of costs, companies spend an average of $336,000 on process discovery and task mining tools each year. Eighty-one percent of those using or considering using process discovery expect their investment to increase in the next six to 12 months, with none indicating they would stop using the tools. Respondents’ top plans are to apply process discovery more widely across the organization and increase the size of the team responsible for it. Marketing is the most popular department businesses plan to apply these tools to next.