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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Learn how to transform your business through process orchestration
Process orchestration became pivotal to building a foundation for business agility, speed, and innovation. A process that is orchestrated end-to-end can integrate existing systems, human work, and the latest technologies like AI. It is the basis to understand how your business operates, how to improve processes, and how to innovate your business model. But how to adopt process orchestration successfully on an enterprise level?
Enterprise Process Orchestration equips you with hands-on guidance on how to successfully deploy process orchestration in your organization – from anchoring the vision in company strategy, over the selection of the right use cases, technologies, and people, through the completion of the first project, to a truly transformed enterprise that is ready for a digital future.
Inside the book:
- Understand the transformative potential of process orchestration and create a compelling vision for your enterprise
- Explore how to establish the right team structure and enable your employees for your initiative
- Identify the right technology, define a business and enterprise architecture, and provide a process orchestration platform to accelerate time to value
- Best practices on implementing use cases and solution architecture
- How to measure and monitor the value you're achieving with your use cases
Perfect for IT and business leaders, business and enterprise architects, CoE leaders, business analysts as well as everyone who is aspiring to change their organization through broadscale automation and process orchestration
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Seitenzahl: 433
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Additional Praise
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Preface
About the Authors
Introduction
Chapter 1: Vision
Strategic Alignment: Bridging Vision, Strategy, and Stakeholders
Building a Business Architecture to Realize Digitalization and Automation Benefits
Advantages of This Business Architecture
Building Your Transformation Roadmap and Implementing Change
Getting Started on Your Adoption Journey
Questions to Assess Your Maturity
Takeaways
Chapter 2: People
How Software Is Being Built Today
Centralized Teams to Facilitate Process Orchestration
Delivery Models
Roles
Zooming in on the Adoption Acceleration Team
Defining Your Target Operating Model
Questions to Assess Your Maturity
Takeaways
Chapter 3: Technology
Implementing Your Business Architecture
Operationalizing AI for Autonomous Orchestration with Guardrails
Providing a Process Orchestration Capability to Your Organization
Operating a Process Orchestration Platform
Selecting the Right Process Orchestration Technology
Contrasting Process Orchestration with Adjacent Technologies
Tips on Evaluating Tools
Questions to Assess Your Maturity
Takeaways
Chapter 4: Delivery
Solution Creation Approach
Setting the Stage for Success: Your Early Projects
Derisking Your Start with Process Tracking
Typical Delivery Teams and Roles
Solution Design
Accelerating Solution Building
Questions to Assess Your Maturity
Takeaways
Chapter 5: Measurement
Why Metrics Matter
Value Drivers of Enterprise Process Orchestration
Understanding Metrics
Operationalizing Your Metric-Driven Approach
Questions to Assess Your Maturity
Takeaways
Closing Thoughts
List of Abbreviations
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Preface
Figure P.1 Customer satisfaction with outcomes, communication, and speed.
Figure P.2 Extracting the process into an orchestration layer makes it possible...
Figure P.3 Process orchestration is the central component of any large-scale au...
Figure P.4 The five key drivers of process orchestration maturity.
Figure P.5 An example maturity assessment for a company getting started on its ...
Introduction
Figure I.1 Process orchestration in the context of automation.
Figure I.2 An example of a bank account opening process.
Figure I.3 An onboarding process described in BPMN.
Figure I.4 Camunda Operate.
Figure I.5 Process orchestration stitches together new and existing business ca...
Figure I.6 An orchestration engine provides versioning, scheduling, and durable...
Figure I.7 The diversity of processes in an organization, and the ones this boo...
Figure I.8 Process ≠ process – there are typically some highly critical core pr...
Figure I.9 A possible taxonomy of process categories within an organization.
Figure I.10 Categorizing processes by their criticality and complexity.
Figure I.11 Using low-code tools to automate yellow use cases can be risky, espe...
Figure I.12 Visualizing investment opportunities for process orchestration in co...
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 Potential scopes of process orchestration initiatives.
Figure 1.2 Alignment is required among diverse stakeholders across the enterpri...
Figure 1.3 A business architecture that supports your digital future.
Figure 1.4 A sample customer journey, which is more basic than it should be in ...
Figure 1.5 Value stream example for the consumer loan journey.
Figure 1.6 End-to-end processes depict bursts of activity in value streams.
Figure 1.7 Process profile giving an overview of a process, including core KPIs.
Figure 1.8 The elements of a business capability definition.
Figure 1.9 Deriving business capabilities from the end-to-end value stream – ea...
Figure 1.10 Executable process model implementing the Customer Onboarding busine...
Figure 1.11 Executable process model implementing the Identity Verification busi...
Figure 1.12 In BPMN, you can easily push tasks to humans, even if only for excep...
Figure 1.13 The end-to-end loan application process as an executable process mod...
Figure 1.14 Mapping the value stream to an end-to-end process and to business ca...
Figure 1.15 Processes implement business capabilities: they might also be invoke...
Figure 1.16 In traditional organizations that are structured in functional silos...
Figure 1.17 A successful governance structure for establishing a transformationa...
Figure 1.18 Process orchestration work streams.
Figure 1.19 CoEs can also be federated to support scale; then, a central CoE ena...
Figure 1.20 A prioritization matrix for process orchestration projects.
Figure 1.21 Mapping out your use cases helps you get an overview of your transfo...
Figure 1.22 Adoption should happen in waves, making sure to cater for strategic ...
Figure 1.23 The three phases of enterprise adoption.
Figure 1.24 An example enterprise adoption roadmap.
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 Without a clear process owner, nobody has an overview.
Figure 2.2 The AAT can take on the role of both platform team and enabling team...
Figure 2.3 Today, all of these roles can participate in software development.
Figure 2.4 Developers create the components that enable other roles to develop ...
Figure 2.5 Spotify gives a great summary of why some standardization is necessa...
Figure 2.6 The AAT drives process orchestration across the enterprise, enabling...
Figure 2.7 The POG and AAT centralize specific activities to enable enterprise ...
Figure 2.8 Federated solution delivery with AAT as enabler.
Figure 2.9 Fully decentralized delivery with CoP.
Figure 2.10 Early days of the National Bank of Canada’s CoE (from CamundaCon 202...
Figure 2.11 AAT responsible for solution delivery (fully centralized).
Figure 2.12 How to design an executable process at Provinzial, as defined by its...
Figure 2.13 Delivery teams receive support and resources from the AAT and other ...
Figure 2.14 The AAT value pyramid.
Figure 2.15 The four phases of building an AAT.
Figure 2.16 The core activities of an AAT.
Figure 2.17 Common AAT challenges and how to solve them.
Figure 2.18 The target operating model dimensions.
Figure 2.19 Our greenfield target operating model.
Figure 2.20 The operating model of an organization that has not yet established ...
Figure 2.21 The operating model of an organization that is just forming its AAT....
Figure 2.22 The operating model of an organization with an evolving AAT.
Figure 2.23 Plotting the current and target state together can help you plan you...
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 High-level business architecture diagram.
Figure 3.2 Different options for implementing business capabilities.
Figure 3.3 When implementing a business capability as a microservice, you might...
Figure 3.4 You need to provide technical capabilities, platforms, and enablemen...
Figure 3.5 Technologies around process orchestration required to digitalize you...
Figure 3.6 Example customer architecture.
Figure 3.7 Composable platforms are integrated, yet flexible.
Figure 3.8 Components required for process orchestration.
Figure 3.9 Connectors with different levels of abstraction.
Figure 3.10 Connecting your process orchestration platform with your event bus.
Figure 3.11 Deutsche Telekom’s journey from manual process to RPA to orchestrate...
Figure 3.12 Operationalizing agentic AI with BPMN.
Figure 3.13 Various scopes and owners of technical and business capabilities.
Figure 3.14 Strong collaboration with delivery teams is required for the evoluti...
Figure 3.15 A typical Camunda deployment for advanced scenarios.
Figure 3.16 Different levels of solution isolation.
Figure 3.17 A typical setup of clusters/tenants in the banking domain.
Figure 3.18 Important decisions around tool selection.
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 The solution creation lifecycle.
Figure 4.2 The Camunda process house from Real-Life BPMN.
Figure 4.3 To derisk your start, you can introduce a process that only tracks w...
Figure 4.4 The tracking process provides a basis for introducing orchestration ...
Figure 4.5 Possible compositions of delivery teams.
Figure 4.6 The greenfield solution architecture for pro-code use cases.
Figure 4.7 An example journey (aka roundtrip) to create an executable BPMN mode...
Figure 4.8 A simplified solution architecture for low-code use cases that don’t...
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 When processes touch many organizational units and don’t have a clea...
Figure 5.2 Value drivers of process orchestration on different levels.
Figure 5.3 Example dashboard showing how to compare a metric to your goal, maki...
Figure 5.4 Connections between measurements, metrics, goals, KPIs, and SLAs.
Figure 5.5 Value relationship across different dimensions.
Figure 5.6 Tracking KPIs and SLAs across the different business capabilities of...
Figure 5.7 Measuring KPIs and SLAs for an onboarding process.
Figure 5.8 Executable process model implementing the Identity Verification busi...
Figure 5.9 Still a good tool: a hardware dashboard visible to everyone in the o...
Figure 5.10 Example executive dashboard showing operational project-level KPIs.
List of Table
Preface
Table P.1 The five maturity levels, across each key driver.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Additional Praise
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Preface
About the Authors
Introduction
Begin Reading
Closing Thoughts
List of Abbreviations
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Additional Praise
“This book is a comprehensive guide to Enterprise Process Orchestration, offering invaluable insights and actionable strategies to streamline workflows, align teams, and achieve operational excellence. With its focus on a holistic framework, it’s a must-have resource for embedding orchestration into any organization’s DNA.”
—Daivish Shah
Enterprise Architect, Atlassian
“Bernd and Leon deliver invaluable insights for achieving a successful digital process transformation, supported by their strong technical expertise. I especially appreciate the chapter on people and its impact on the transformation journey.”
—Joerg Meisterjahn-vom Bey
Head of Group 2nd Line Workflow Automation, Vodafone
“I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to establish effective process orchestration or seeking to improve organizational efficiency within their company. It’s an honor to see some of our ideas thoughtfully incorporated into its pages.”
—Niko Vogel
Responsible for BPM at Axa Germany
Enterprise Process Orchestration
A Hands-on Guide to Strategy, People, and Technology That Will Transform Your Business
Bernd Ruecker ⋅ Leon Strauch
This edition first published 2025
© 2025 Bernd Ruecker and Leon Strauch.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
The right of Bernd Ruecker and Leon Strauch to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
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Foreword
Organizations face an automation imperative, and for many it will be crucial to their survival. Automation at scale is no longer about driving efficiency or cutting costs; it’s focused on building a foundation for business agility and innovation. As an industry analyst, I’ve spent the last decade tracking the market’s interest in core automation topics like BPMN. I watched as interest in these topics waned until roughly eight years ago. Then, trends shifted dramatically. What happened?
Organizations began to get serious about the need for broadscale automation. We saw an increasing number of strategies coalesce around a very critical concept: orchestration. And one vendor became central to the trend – Camunda. So, when Bernd approached me to write a foreword for their book Enterprise Process Orchestration, my first thought was “Ooh, early access!”
I cracked open the book, and by the next day I had read it cover to cover. Our firm, Analysis.tech, was founded to address the reality that most automation initiatives currently fall short of driving true transformation. Enterprise Process Orchestration tackles this challenge head-on. I often use the analogy that huge automation projects are like turning an aircraft carrier, as they require massive budgets and resources. Make no mistake, most of these initiatives have been worth it; however, transforming your organization so it has a true process and automation mindset is like turning 5,000 speedboats in unison.
The central theme of this book is orchestration. From a business perspective, a focus on orchestration provides a context for breaking through silos created by legacy systems and organizational boundaries and driving true transformation at scale. This is where tomorrow’s innovation and disruption will come from – but it’s hard to get there.
What I truly appreciate about Bernd and Leon’s approach to this crucial topic is the pragmatic advice backed by real-world examples and strong technical underpinnings. It requires careful thought and planning to drive organizational change. It also requires a well-thought-out technical architecture. In Enterprise Process Orchestration, Bernd and Leon offer a detailed approach to technology selection, maturity models, and governance, and a guide to help your organization build a process-first mindset. I was particularly excited about the section that defined the different models for a center of excellence, a critical part of a successful process automation strategy.
If you’re serious about the challenges of driving deep and meaningful change through automation in your organization, Enterprise Process Orchestration is a must-read. Bernd and Leon tackle the issues head-on with a pragmatic approach to drive success. It’s a big job, but your organization’s survival might be at stake.
—Rob Koplowitz
Former Principal Analyst at Forrester and Co-founder of Analysis.tech
Preface
At CamundaCon 2024 in New York, Sanjam Sarpal, a solution architect from Atlassian, joined us on stage1. You might know Atlassian from tools like Confluence, Jira, or Trello, which are ubiquitous in the business and software world. Sanjam explained how Atlassian had recently successfully completed a transition from one enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to another in just nine months. ERP transformations are complex, time-consuming projects that many organizations fail with, and they have likely cost many CIOs their role – yet, Atlassian managed it with a breeze. He further shared that when Atlassian acquired the company Loom, they were able to integrate Loom’s billing workflows into Atlassian’s systems in three or four months, whereas in the past such a procedure would have taken nine months to a year. What was the reason for these success stories, in which transformation projects not only were executed seamlessly but were completed in a fraction of the usual time?
You might have guessed it already: Atlassian had introduced process orchestration. This approach allowed them to understand, manage, and transform the billing and ERP processes with ease, swapping out systems where needed, incorporating new product variations, and adjusting data transformations and endpoint integrations along the way.
And they didn’t stop with the ERP transformation or the billing workflow. Atlassian made process orchestration a strategic technology on the enterprise level and developed an operating model that allows the organization to successfully reap its benefits: a central team (often known as a “center of excellence”) helps autonomous delivery teams (like the ones Sanjam led) apply the right technologies, patterns, and best practices easily and swiftly. This accelerated building of not only the billing workflow but many others, leveraging economies of scale, driving efficiencies, and improving the customer experience – for instance, by reducing ticket turnaround times within support requests by 93%2.
Earlier the same year, the research firm Forrester reported that TK3, a big German health insurance company, had reduced the happy path for its denture reimbursement process from about 1.5 weeks to 2.7 seconds (read: seconds!) through process automation and digital data exchange with dentists. This is another great example of hitting two targets with one arrow: Not only did they lower operational costs through process automation, but they also hugely improved the customer experience. What’s more, the newly orchestrated processes can be infused with innovative technologies (like AI) to drive further improvements.
Those successes are part of a broader pattern that is currently unfolding in the market. Recognition is growing that process orchestration can enhance business agility, increase employee productivity, improve customer experiences, and reduce business risks. As you will see in “The Benefits of Process Orchestration” starting on page 7, the benefits to organizations have been proven, with a 2024 Forrester report estimating a return on investment of over 400%. And according to Camunda’s State of Process Orchestration 2024 report4, 91% of companies surveyed have seen increased business growth due to process automation within the last year. In addition, 95% say automation has helped them achieve operational efficiency, and 93% say automation has helped improve customer experiences.
Process automation has become table stakes for organizations to remain competitive. And applying process orchestration strategically on the enterprise level allows you future-proof your enterprise architecture. That is, it not only gives you strong advantages right now, but ensures you will be able to make any needed changes to your business processes in the future – and if we know only one thing for sure, it’s that business processes need to adjust often and quickly. Adaptability is crucial for your organization to survive. As one of our marketing colleagues says, “Orchestrate or die!”
Consider Artificial Intelligence (AI), which has been taking the world by storm since the launch of ChatGPT. While ChatGPT and other generative AI tools have created tremendous hype about the possibilities of AI, to the point where no CEO can afford not to think about it, enterprise adoption is still lagging (as, for instance, technology analyst Benedict Evans points out in his article “The AI Summer”5). There may be multiple factors at play here, such as data readiness or compliance concerns, but one of them stands out: Most organizations are just not able to strategically integrate AI into their value streams, because their operations are – frankly speaking – too chaotic. Business processes are buried in a mess of wildly integrated legacy systems, with limited visibility and minimal understanding of how the full end-to-end process works. In such a scenario, you cannot magically transform your business by just throwing in AI. You need to build the foundation first; otherwise, you are betting your organization’s survival on fairy dust.
Don’t get us wrong: we are fully convinced of the transformative potential of AI (and are investing heavily in it ourselves). But it’s not a surprise to us that, on the whole, it hasn’t yet delivered the value organizations expect. A report from BCG6, for example, showed that 74% of companies struggle to generate and scale value with AI, and only 4% of companies are creating substantial value. As the report notes, “A common misconception is that AI’s value lies mainly in streamlining operations and reducing costs in support functions. In fact, its greatest value lies in core business processes, where leaders are generating 62% of the value.”
To tie this back to Atlassian’s story, with their process orchestration layer in place, it is clear how they could integrate AI into their billing workflow: for example, by leveraging a large language model for fraud detection. Once you have the foundation, AI simply becomes an endpoint in your process that can be orchestrated.
At the same time, according to the State of Process Orchestration report, on average just 50% of organizational processes have been automated so far, many of those in a scrappy fashion. So, there is a huge opportunity on the table.
How can you set up your company to drive the right process architecture across your business, to realize value today and be ready for tomorrow? With this book, we aim to provide a recipe for achieving this. It’s about adopting process orchestration to automate more while being faster at it at the same time, and transforming your organization’s enterprise architecture to a future-proof model centered around business processes and business capabilities. The focus of this book is less on the nitty-gritty details of technology stacks and more on how to scale usage across the organization to benefit the company. This includes shaping your business architecture, staffing teams, getting the wider organization and management on board, anchoring the technology in the organization, and a lot of other sociotechnical elements. That said, it’s also critical to create a technically sound foundation to build great solutions, and we’ll show you how.
The book you hold in your hands is based on our experiences over the last decade helping numerous customers drive enterprise process orchestration adoption to an impressive scale to transform their business. We hope you’ll join them.
Why Automation?
If you’re not yet fully convinced of the transformative potential of process automation and the pivotal role of process orchestration, let’s take a closer look at how they deliver impact step by step.
A while ago, one of our customers, a Top 10 insurance company in Germany, was startled by the results of its latest customer survey. The company found that customer satisfaction with the speed of claim processing had declined dramatically over the last three years (Figure P.1). However, digging deeper into their performance, they found that the process time had remained stable over that period. So, why had customer satisfaction gone down? The most likely explanation: Customer expectations have shifted massively. We’ve all gotten used to the lightning speed of the digital economy on our smartphones. Have groceries delivered to your home in a few minutes? No problem. Instantly open a bank account online? Done. Get a new eSIM in a matter of seconds? Easy. Wait 10 days for your insurance claim to be processed? No thank you!
Figure P.1 Customer satisfaction with outcomes, communication, and speed.
This story of increased customer expectations is the reality in almost any business domain, and digitally minded organizations are beginning to eat up incumbent market share by providing a superior customer experience with high operational efficiency.
For example, a recent study around the Know Your Customer (KYC) checks7 that banks need to do when onboarding new corporate clients found that 48% of banks lost clients because of slow and inefficient onboarding, and four out of five of those banks attribute that loss to delayed processing. To give you an idea of what “delayed” means, banks took on average 95 days to complete a KYC review in 2023. That’s more than three months! And this finding needs to be viewed against the background that customers have more choices by the day, be it via FinTechs or BigTechs like Amazon Finance for Business. Those new players are disrupting with speed and agility. This has led to more and more traditional banks partnering with these players (for example, using Plaid for eKYC). But is your company ready to make such fundamental process changes?
At the same time, we are at the end of a decade-long period of virtually free money through near-zero interest rates. We’re currently seeing a profound, global macroeconomic shift, with interest rates unlikely to return to pre-COVID levels. Accordingly, organizations will have to hone in on efficiency and achieve more with less.
The same goes for the looming threat of demographic change. As the US Bureau of Labor Statistics8 points out, the size of the workforce in the United States will continue to decline over the next decade – and this amidst an already existing shortage of skilled workers. The situation is the same in the European Union and especially in Germany, where The Economist9 reported in 2022 that almost 50% of companies said that they were unable to secure enough skilled workers (with the public sector being especially battered by this trend).
And it’s not only market pressure that organizations are facing today. The ever-growing regulatory pressure is another hurdle, especially in the finance industry. In May 2024, the US security settlements cycle will be reduced to what is known as “T+1,” which essentially means that a trade needs to be settled within 24 hours. Before that change, the cycle was two days. This is a huge challenge for banks. According to BNP Paribas10, “The execution through settlement phases will need to be automated and modernized to enhance straight-through processing and minimize exceptions. While that will take investment, it will strip out manual workflows and bring operating efficiencies, cost savings and risk reduction.” But at the time of writing, most banks are struggling to achieve T+1 through process automation. Until they do, they will need to do what is known as “throwing people at the problem,” meaning they’ll need to rely on an increasing number of people working on trade settlements under extreme time pressure. This is expensive and harms the employee experience; it is thus not sustainable and ultimately risky. Such regulatory pressure is not only evident in the finance industry, but among other verticals too; just think of healthcare, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, utilities, and other areas where stringent regulations shape operations and compliance is paramount.
Increasing customer expectations, cost pressure, demographic change, a growing regulatory regime, and more – how are organizations supposed to react to this? The intuitive answer is by leveraging technology to drive innovation, automate more, and optimize processes. But isn’t this what most organizations have already been doing for a while now? Well, yes and no.
Avoid the Value Trap of Local Automations
When it comes to process automation, we have seen plenty of organizations driving improvements locally. For example, you might have used robotic process automation (RPA) to automate data entry in one of your core systems, or implemented a chatbot to automatically answer simple customer questions, or installed a new AI-fueled system for fraud detection.
Many of those initiatives doubtless generated initial business value and yielded local improvements. The challenge is that those are isolated projects and point solutions. Accordingly, they do not create an ecosystem within which an organization can improve its end-to-end customer journey. In fact, the data suggests exactly the opposite: As more and more tasks get automated locally, the overall end-to-end process becomes more difficult to maintain due to the increasing complexity of the IT landscape (so say 68% of IT decision-makers in our State of Process Orchestration 2024 report11). Point solutions tend to be brittle and hard to maintain, and due to their local nature they are often not embedded in a global corporate strategy.
This leads to a value trap for process automation. By automating locally, your organization accumulates technical and organizational debt that undermines the initially achieved value. Managing all those point solutions effectively makes it harder to control the core business processes, leading to reduced flexibility, longer time to market, and a lack of business visibility.
So, ironically, adding the local automations can make things worse in the long run, even if everything looks successful in the first place. The loss of process control hampers the ability to adapt or innovate, and you end up getting bogged down with maintaining your spaghetti integrations and legacy systems. This unfortunate situation nurtures the cliché of IT as a bottleneck for innovation instead of a business enabler, and widens the gap between business and IT. This can further diminish IT’s influence in the decision-making process.
Notably, the current hype with AI fuels exactly the same pattern, as organizations try to take shortcuts and apply local AI solutions. These may yield some local ROI, but by failing to consider the bigger picture, they end up falling into the same trap.
Focus on Processes
So, what to do? One of our customers recently described it very well: “We have our IT systems running, and somehow everything works, but it’s very hard to change anything. What we need to do is think more in terms of processes.”
This is where enterprise process orchestration comes into play. We have seen an increasing number of organizations successfully escape that value trap by orchestrating customer journeys end to end, which means that you do not need to rip your IT landscape apart but seamlessly integrate all the existing systems along the process chain, using graphical models that can be directly executed by process orchestration platforms. This is visualized in Figure P.2.
Figure P.2 Extracting the process into an orchestration layer makes it possible to manage the process end-to-end while easily integrating with existing systems.
The central component to achieve this is a process orchestration capability (Figure P.3). Without it, you simply can’t achieve broad-scale automation. This is increasingly being recognized by analysts such as Gartner12, who have declared that “The Future Is BOAT” (stands for “business orchestration and automation technologies”).
Figure P.3 Process orchestration is the central component of any large-scale automation effort.
As you will see in this book, building a successful process orchestration capability requires more than just a technical platform that allows you to integrate various systems and endpoints – you also need to define a vision, consider your people and their skills, define a delivery model, and identify and measure performance indicators. You will find information about all five of those pillars in this book.
Establishing a process orchestration practice allows you to tame the complexity of your existing systems and focus on generating business value today, while increasing your business agility for future requirements. Process orchestration brings together stakeholders across business and IT, with process models providing a common view and thus transparency on value streams. This enables you both to automate more processes to a higher standard of quality and to adapt to changes faster, all while bringing down technical debt.
The Methodology Behind This Book
Sounds good so far? Yes, indeed. Let’s explore how to get there.
In contrast to siloed integrations, enterprise process orchestration is, as the name suggests, applied globally across an organization. This means that you need to involve a lot of people throughout the whole enterprise to drive the change you want to make, from top management to subject matter experts to software developers.
To help our customers with that, we have developed the process orchestration adoption framework. This framework can help you to transform your business by aiming for a strategic, scaled adoption of process orchestration. It provides guidance on all the steps of an iterative and agile journey that you can follow to generate value incrementally and learn fast.
The framework defines various maturity stages your company can be in, and it calls out the five drivers that are most important to look at when you want to define your current maturity and derive a roadmap from this. The five drivers, as visualized in Figure P.4, are:
Vision:
Are people aware of what process orchestration is and why it is valuable to the organization? Is there awareness of typical use cases? Why does enterprise process orchestration matter to the organization? What goals is the organization trying to achieve through its process orchestration practice?
People:
What people and skills do you need? How can you set up the right team structures? Who will define the standards and policies for how process orchestration should be used? Who is responsible for driving the change? What does the operating model look like? Are the right people empowered and enabled to do the right things?
Technology:
What technology philosophies, platforms, and solutions power the organization’s process orchestration efforts? How does this fit into your overall enterprise architecture?
Delivery:
How are concrete process automation solutions being developed and deployed?
Measurement:
How does the organization define process orchestration success, and how well can the organization track that success?
Figure P.4 The five key drivers of process orchestration maturity.
You can rate your own organization’s maturity for each of these drivers individually on a scale from 0 (undeveloped) to 4 (excellent). Doing so not only helps you understand your strengths better, but also your gaps. This allows you to develop an enterprise strategy and roadmap to build the required capabilities to succeed with enterprise process orchestration.
Table P.1 lists the different levels of maturity for each of these drivers as we have experienced them through our customer engagements.
Table P.1 The five maturity levels, across each key driver.
Figure P.5 shows an example of what your maturity assessment might look like when you have started to apply process orchestration in a handful of first projects driven by IT (a situation we often see with our customers). You have some strength around process orchestration technology and solution delivery, but you need to evolve your vision, establish scalable structures in your teams, and improve at measuring success.
Figure P.5 An example maturity assessment for a company getting started on its process orchestration journey.
The process orchestration adoption framework, and hence this book, provides concrete hands-on guidance on how to increase maturity in all of those drivers.
In addition to the individual drivers discussed earlier, we also rate the overall degree of process orchestration adoption in the enterprise along five levels, which again will help you get an idea of where you stand and communicate the status quo alongside the target state internally:
Level 0 – No process orchestration:
No process orchestration solutions.
Level 1 – Single project:
Adoption in a single project or team, maybe as a proof of concept (PoC).
Level 2 – Broader initiative:
Multiple initiatives in one domain (e.g. the health insurance department in an insurance company may be orchestrating multiple processes).
Level 3 – Distributed adoption:
Multiple domains, with multiple initiatives (e.g. the health insurance and also life and composite insurance departments are strategically using process orchestration).
Level 4 – Strategic, scaled adoption:
Multiple end-to-end customer journeys across domains, automated intentionally through a holistic enterprise strategy.
We discuss the drivers and adoption levels further in “Introducing the Process Orchestration Maturity Model”13 on the Camunda website.
The process orchestration adoption framework serves as a holistic methodology that organizations can use to drive their process orchestration maturity. We derived this framework by speaking to hundreds of our global customers about their successes and failures, best practices, and lessons learned – and we’ve distilled that knowledge into this book.
How to Read This Book
The drivers described in the previous section form the five main pillars (or chapters) of this book: vision, people, technology, delivery, and measurement. We have planned the book so that you can read it cover to cover, but you can also start with the section that is most important to you at the moment.
In the “Introduction”, we will explain the basics of process orchestration and the business value you can achieve by adopting it. Understanding this is crucial to building a vision to get both IT and business stakeholders onboard for your initiative. Building that vision is the focus of “Chapter 1: Vision”. In that chapter, we will also discuss how you can align your stakeholders, set up a proper business architecture as well as governance to implement the changes associated with process orchestration, and develop an adoption roadmap.
“Chapter 2: People” is all about people and team structures. We will look at how software is being built today, and how this will affect your process orchestration initiative. We’ll also explore the delivery models organizations can choose to realize these initiatives, and which roles need to be involved. Then we will discuss a concept that’s key to successful adoption: how to set up the right operating model for your adoption acceleration team (AAT), a center of excellence to support your goals and company culture.
Getting the technology right is, of course, equally important. In “Chapter 3: Technology”, we will focus on the process orchestration tech stack and (enterprise) architecture. We will look at the components you will need, the accelerators you can build, and how to operate and run an internal platform.
In “Chapter 4: Delivery”, we will explore best practices for successfully delivering solutions across all the project stages, from modeling a process to implementing typical solution architectures.
Once you have your solutions in place, you will need to continuously measure and monitor the value you are achieving with those solutions. In “Chapter 5: Measurement”, we will look at ways you can do that successfully, to sustain your gains and get further buy-in.
Who Should Read This Book
We wrote this book as a practical guide for every person involved in your process orchestration initiative – all the way from the C-suite to the operational level.
Those who are driving initiatives holistically – especially IT leaders, CoE leaders, and business, enterprise or IT architects – will benefit from reading the book cover to cover. If you are one of those leaders, ideally you will then pass it around, pointing others to specific parts that are relevant to their roles. This can help you get stakeholders on board with process orchestration across your organization. For example, business leaders that you want to get interested in process orchestration should at least read through the “Introduction”.
Many roles can benefit from the information in this book. Here are a few pointers:
C-suite executives
(especially CIOs) that want to transform their business with process orchestration should read the “
Introduction
” and “
Chapter 1: Vision
”, as they are most often responsible for kicking off the necessary changes and getting relevant stakeholders on board (the CEO, CFO, IT leaders, and different business domains). CIOs should also read about team structures, mapped out in “
Chapter 2: People
”, as well as the technological underpinnings discussed at the beginning of “
Chapter 3: Technology
”.
CoE leaders
can read this book from start to finish to learn how to drive enterprise adoption of process orchestration.
IT leaders
that are enabling process orchestration initiatives should mostly focus on the “
Introduction
”, “
Chapter 2: People
”, “
Chapter 3: Technology
”, and “
Chapter 4: Delivery
”. But typically, it makes sense to also look at “
Chapter 1: Vision
”.
Business leaders
should read the “
Introduction
” to identify use cases for their lines of business.
Business and enterprise architects
who are playing a key role in the process orchestration initiative should read the book in full, as they are instrumental in unifying all parts of the business around a shared process orchestration vision.
Developers
will benefit from reading “
Chapter 3: Technology
” and “
Chapter 4: Delivery
” to understand the technology behind process orchestration and how solutions are built. They should also at least skim through the “
Introduction
” and “
Chapter 1: Vision
”.
Business analysts
will benefit from the overview of the project lifecycle in “
Chapter 4: Delivery
”. This will help them understand their contributions in context. “
Chapter 5: Measurement
” is also important to understand how to measure performance and business impact, and we recommend reading the “
Introduction
” as well.
Of course, there are even more people that can benefit from this book. If we didn’t mention your specific role, please don’t put it down just yet. Skim through, read the parts that are of interest to you, and let us know if you think we should call out your role explicitly in the previous list.
We wish you happy reading, and great success with your transformation initiatives!
About the Authors
Bernd Ruecker is co-founder of Camunda, the leading process orchestration platform, and has over 15 years of experience innovating process automation deployed in highly scalable and agile environments of industry leaders like Atlassian, ING, and Vodafone. Over the years, he has witnessed the evolution of process orchestration from small-scale implementations to transformative, enterprise-wide initiatives in some of the world’s largest organizations, giving him unique insights into what drives success at scale. With a strong technical background, Bernd has contributed to multiple open-source workflow engines and authored the books Practical Process Automation and Real-Life BPMN. A sought-after speaker and technology writer, he draws on his extensive real-world experience to share both the opportunities and challenges of process automation and orchestration in this book.
LinkedIn profile:https://de.linkedin.com/in/bernd-ruecker-21661122
Author title(s) and affiliation(s): Co-founder and Chief Technologist at Camunda
Author pronouns: he/him
Email:[email protected]
Leon Strauch is a Process Orchestration Strategist at Camunda, dedicated to helping organizations achieve their digital transformation goals. With experience across diverse roles in the software industry, Leon has guided a wide range of enterprises in navigating the complexities of process automation and adopting new technologies. With an interdisciplinary background spanning B2B management, communication studies, SaaS, and enterprise software, he develops and applies strategic methodologies to effectively scale process orchestration in large organizations.
LinkedIn profile:https://www.linkedin.com/in/leon-strauch/
Author title(s) and affiliation(s): Process Orchestration Strategist at Camunda
Author pronouns: he/him
Email:[email protected]
