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Digital transformation is often led from the top and executed by the middle and lower management. It involves a staggering volume of data, a complex network of tasks, and a large percentage of the employee pool. When it comes down to the tactical and administrative aspect of delivery, transformation projects often slow down as a result of workflow bottlenecks that are intractable and difficult to trace.
Manual handling of tasks adds latency to large projects, and many lower-priority tasks may get overlooked. The effects from this negligence snowball in the long run, resulting in major gaps in compliance or company policies not being strictly adhered to.
The ideal solution is to implement workflows that are discharged via the cloud, enabling the organisation to function holistically and with minimum friction. Digitalising workflows is one of the first steps organisations undergoing transformation implement, as they allow multi-campus environments to talk to each other seamlessly and automate manual, mechanical tasks. This automation lubricates the digital transformation process, and being cloud-based, it eliminates any difficulty in implementation that might arise, as many cloud-based workflow enhancements are simply plug-and-play solutions.
Workflow software has traditionally been deployed on premise; additionally, it has often been tied to a specific workplace or team within the organisation, making it a hassle to re-deploy for IT or access remotely for the employee. Cloud-based workflows remove that restraint, giving employees on the move the ability to tap into sophisticated process management even when they are on the public network.
The future of work is mobile, collaborative and 24/7, and cloud-based workflows will enable this modernisation drive. As many workflows have mobile-ready interfaces, they also free the employees from device dependence; additionally, as more work gets done at home and in dispersed locations, the freedom from intranet dependence adds a layer of convenience and efficiency.
Cloud-based tools account for growth — they scale with the company as it grows, and release IT teams from the tedious task of scaling the infrastructure manually as workflow management tools need to keep pace with large workforces. They are always-on, which means downtime and disruption of service issues can be handled by the cloud service provider, which is bound by SLAs, and not dependent on internal IT teams.
Legacy workflow applications often embedded themselves deep into the company’s systems — while this meant that they were responsive and tightly integrated, it also meant that any sort of customisation extracted tremendous resources from the IT team that had to deal with thousands of lines of code to keep pace with business needs.
Many enterprises are looking up to the cloud and migrating to multiple cloud environments to provide the speed and flexibility that their operations and processes require. Working in multiple cloud environments introduces an added layer of complexity when it comes to locating and securing dispersed data housed in numerous environments.
But cloud-based workflow solutions can be secured by design if careful consideration, planning and communication are applied to:
a) Vetting your cloud-based third-party provider;
b) Deciding if native or non-native cloud security tools are best for your organisation; and,
c) Addressing data privacy challenges head-on.
With a little guidance from a trusted partner, a cloud-based workflow can provide user access levels and granular controls to ensure that only the right people have access to data. Data isolation and encryption in the cloud can also safeguard sensitive information that the company is entrusted with, and permission-based admittance to data storage or databases gives the cloud administrator full view of his or her systems.
Cloud-based workflow software systems consist of far newer applications, developed with the cloud and the digital industry in mind; they abstract the code layer away from the end user, and often provide consumer-like interfaces and dashboards for administrators and users to make changes and operate without having to code.
Cloud-based workflow management gives the power back to the business user: they eliminate the stranglehold of IT over internal processes, and allow self-service automation that truly connects end-users within the enterprise to each other. They consolidate, order, and organise data that may be sitting partly in stacks of paper, on old servers and on employee devices to smoothen the internal processes of an enterprise.
Freed from repetitive, manual tasks, both IT and LOB stakeholders are able to focus on their own tasks. Workflow management on the cloud has the potential to become the collaboration engine of the enterprise — a crucial step in the digital transformation journey.
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