Ian presented on this topic in a session at Microsoft Inspire 2017.
Digital transformation is a popular topic today—although the concept isn’t new.
The workplace has been undergoing transformation for decades, as each major wave of new technology ushers in an era of opportunity to fundamentally change widely applied means and methods.
Even digital transformation itself has witnessed several waves in a relatively short period. Cloud, mobility, IoT, and advancements in machine learning, natural language interaction, etc., have established an environment for the creation of new, truly exciting customer and employee experiences.
Navigate the Ocean of Digital Transformation
However, moving beyond simple “buzz word” adoption to evolving your organization into a digital business requires an approach that scales beyond a single, epic project or relies solely on IT—no matter how sophisticated the business scenario.
More to the point, the industry analyst firm Forrester Research remarked that, for many organizations, “hundreds, if not thousands, of manual processes stand in the way of digital transformation.”
It should then come as no surprise that knowing where to get started can feel like an enormous task.
For more than a decade Nintex has been providing workflow automation technology that makes it easy for businesses to transform their work.
As the recognized global leader in workflow and content automation, Nintex has partnered with thousands of customers to catalyze many of these recent waves of digital transformation within their own businesses. In this time, we’ve also learned that while every organization has acquired, implemented, and now relies on a growing number of different business applications, our experience has allowed us to develop a model that can greatly simplify the transformation process.
It’s all about connecting the people whose decisions your business relies on, with the processes that your business runs on to the systems of record and content your business has been built on.
The digital business transformation that is possible at the intersection of these three critical parts of your organizational DNA is Workflow and Content Automation.
Enter: Workflow and Content Automation
As Jim Lundy of Aragon Research describes it, Workflow and Content Automation (WCA) “represents the consolidation of traditional workflow and content generation into a new category to support the needs of a Digital Business.” Among the many benefits of WCA, the biggest is its ability to be the platform for your digital business transformation.
We couldn’t agree more with this point of view, as Nintex has spent more than decade continuously innovating our Nintex Workflow Platform to accelerate this process.
It began with Nintex Workflow for Microsoft SharePoint. Our technology made it easy for businesses already working in SharePoint to create their own custom workflows. We then expanded the Nintex Workflow Platform to Office 365 and became the industry leader in Workflow Automation.
Today, we’re approaching 50 million workflow executions on Office 365 alone.
Earlier this year we launched the Nintex Workflow Cloud®, platform agnostic workflow and content automation solution built on our decade of experience and the millions of business processes automated by thousands of Nintex customers and partners.
Nintex Workflow Cloud empowers anyone in your organization to unlock the transformational benefits of a digital business. Using just clicks—not code—those closest to the business process can easily automate them to ensure that the customer (or employee) experiences is agile and fluid. Most important, it connects your people (customers or employees) with the processes and content they need to get their jobs done.
I had the opportunity to demonstrate one of these scenarios in my session at Microsoft Inspire.
In my session, I showed how easy it was to build a web form and workflows to truly digitalize the new apartment rental application process for my fictitious organization, Safalo Realty.
Using our drag-and-drop design experience, I crafted a modern and dynamic form to deliver the customer experience. This utilizes our next-generation Nintex Forms (codename: Zinc), which is currently in advance preview for Nintex Workflow Cloud.
The real magic (that is, automation) comes moments after the prospective renter clicks the “Submit” button. This triggers an automated workflow I created—in just a couple of hours—with the Nintex Workflow Cloud that executes all of the previously required manual steps involving numerous systems and people.
This includes:
- Checking Safalo’s Microsoft Dynamics CRM via the native Nintex Connector to see if this is an existing contact (if not, create a new contact)
- Creating a new opportunity in Dynamics CRM using the information captured in our form
- Querying the CRM to see if the prospective renter has completed a credit check
- If not, dynamically generate the authorization form with Nintex Document Generation
- Send the authorization form (via the native Nintex Connector) for eSignature with DocuSign
- Storing the signed document in the Safalo OneDrive for Business
- Creating a new list item in Microsoft SharePoint Online to track the review process
- Notifying the group responsible for the credit review and assigning them a task
- Upon approval, automatically updating both the CRM details and the SharePoint list item
Informing the prospective renter via email and the apartment’s management via Microsoft Teams to give the new renter the white glove treatment.
This might not seem like a lot of steps, but just imagine all the places in this process where the customer’s experience could suffer if just one phase is missed or slowed.
Why risk losing your competitive advantage when a better alternative is just a mouse click away?
Through the power of the cloud, the ease of use, and interconnectivity between these various systems and people, what the Nintex Workflow Platform really delivers is Workflow-as-a-Service. It empowers virtually anyone in your business to take these crucial business processes, and with just clicks, digitally transform them, and create an unmatched experience for the people that are your business.
Not bad for taking seemingly the latest industry buzzword—Digital Transformation—and making it an actual catalyst to transforming how your business gets work done.
Interested in learning more? Watch the webinar with Aragon Research “Empower your Business to More Effectively Serve Your Customers.”