How Leaders Can Get the Most out of Process Innovation

Organizations are always looking for ways to boost productivity and optimize resources. Process innovation—the practice of leveraging technology and human ingenuity to dramatically improve organizations’ operations, output, and impact—is a powerful approach for achieving those goals. We do this by linking systems, unifying content, and automating tedious tasks to increase efficiency and accuracy while alleviating tedium for your skilled employees.

Understanding Process Innovation

Process innovation isn’t just about automation. It’s a comprehensive approach that involves examining a given process, identifying its strengths and weaknesses from multiple stakeholder perspectives, and reimagining it to align with your current and future needs. It turns real-world experience and problem-solving into an ongoing practice of optimization.

To achieve process innovation, you must first understand the tools your organization already has. Changing how you use these investments requires a blend of inventiveness and courage. It’s about moving beyond the status quo and being open to reshaping processes for better outcomes.

The Pitfalls of Workarounds

When processes break down, employees often invent workarounds—highly specific human solutions to business challenges. While these may get tasks done, they often add unnecessary manual time and effort. Workarounds also create problems by making individuals responsible for institutional knowledge. When the person who developed the workaround is unavailable, successors may find their fix impossible to replicate, leading to disruptions.

Even when ad hoc solutions are effective, they may still be inefficient, outdated and potentially unsecured. This raises the question: Is your organization truly leveraging all that your technology investments offer, or is it failing to unlock the full potential of process innovation? Your organization must identify and address process challenges before they reach critical status.

Harnessing Automation and AI

Automation is a critical element of process innovation. Technologies like workflow engines, robotic process automation (RPA) and REST API’s can eliminate hours of tedious labor. Rather than replacing knowledge workers, these tools enable humans to accomplish more backed by the power of technology.

The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) brings new opportunities to elevate human productivity. AI doesn’t just perform operations; it accelerates outcomes by intelligently performing several steps in almost any given process sequence. It can analyze and understand content, identify patterns, make predictions and decisions, and suggest actions based on an organization’s real history.

How to Leverage Process Innovation for Your Organization

Leaders can maximize the value of process innovation by focusing on the following areas:

Time Savings: By linking systems and unifying content, businesses can leverage process innovation to reduce the time spent on manual data entry and retrieval. Automated processes streamline workflows, allowing employees to focus on more strategic tasks.
Increased Efficiency: Automation and AI eliminate bottlenecks and reduce errors, leading to smoother operations. Processes that once took hours can now be completed in minutes, significantly boosting efficiency.
Enhanced Accuracy: Automated systems ensure consistency and accuracy in data handling, minimizing the risk of human error. This is particularly crucial in industries where precision is critical, and mistakes can lead to fines.
Employee Satisfaction: Look to relieve your employees of repetitive and mundane tasks. This will allow them to engage in more meaningful and fulfilling work, leading to higher job satisfaction and retention rates.
Scalability: As your organization grows, process innovation enables solutions to adapt to new requirements. Automated systems can add new functionality and handle increased workloads without compromising quality or speed.
Competitive Advantage: Organizations that embrace process innovation are better positioned to stay ahead of the competition. Process innovation enables you to respond quickly to market changes, leverage new technologies and continuously refine your operations for better outcomes.

Navigating Obstacles

In helping organizations implement their technology vision, we see three common obstacles:

Solving for short-term problems while ignoring larger opportunities for real transformation. This is generally driven by budget considerations combined with time-sensitive needs. In such situations, leaders should encourage broader technology reviews and weigh the benefits of stretching the budget or the schedule. These moments open excellent opportunities to evaluate business processes or workflows and consider innovative process improvements like AI or cloud solutions.
Technical or organizational myths like “we can’t integrate that application” or “IT won’t be helpful in this situation.” Leaders should encourage process owners and infrastructure support teams to re-examine long-held beliefs while also leveraging external partner-experts to inform the organization’s overall technology strategy. You may find that the rapid pace of change, especially in integration abilities, REST APIs, screen scraping and similar tools, may have resolved your organization’s previous limitations.
Managing dissention. Territorial claims, historical preferences, and departmental expertise can all lead to aversion to change. An agile, project management-driven approach that documents stakeholder feedback to inform decision-making is a proven method of turning critics into allies. You’ll likely find that they have invaluable, practical details on how a current process works or doesn’t. When you listen and address those areas, you’ll arrive at a better approach to solving problems and may even turn dissenters into champions.

Process innovation is a dynamic and continuous journey that requires a willingness to rethink and reshape existing processes. By joining cutting-edge technology with human ingenuity, your organization can achieve remarkable gains in efficiency, accuracy, and outcomes. Automation and AI are pivotal in this journey, enabling employees to focus on strategic initiatives and drive organizational success.

As you move forward, leverage process innovation’s benefits to help your organization achieve significant, sustainable success in an ever-evolving landscape.

ImageSource has a 30 year track record of making process innovation easy for customer-partners in Tribal administration, government, financial services, healthcare, and more. Schedule a conversation to find out how our team of experts can help you streamline operations for better outcomes.