Have you missed the BOAT?

BOAT is a new sector defined by leading industry analysts Gartner to over a group of products. (Reference : https://www.gartner.com/en/webinar/621105/1385624)

Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies becomes the acronym BOAT.

It reflects the evolution of various products to meet the growing demands from business.

As automation is being implemented what happens to the risks in these areas?

1. TLDR
2. What is changing with Automation?
3. What is Orchestration?
4. Automation in Parts or a unified whole?
5. Chat Bots and Virtual Agents – the unstructured processes
6. Do Business Processes have Grey Edges?
7. What happened to Hyper-Automation?
8. Is BOAT only for Enterprise Businesses?
9. Agentic Automation – Is that part of BOAT?
10. Does Case Management need BOAT?
11. Cyber Security in BOAT solutions

1. TL;DR

As established technologies expand capabilities there is a growing amount of overlap. BOAT recognises the convergence and the overlap of BPM, RPA, IDP and AI.

BOAT is projected to be one solution that can be used in different ways.

2. What is changing with Automation?

Automation has existed in different products for many years but with discrete functional areas. The emergence of AI and GenAI has accelerated the areas of overlap.

The core products are usually labelled as:

• Business Process Automation.
• Business Process Management
• Document Management
• Intelligent Document Processing (including OCR)
• Robotic Process Automation
• Workflow Management
• Platform driver automation / Automation as a Service

Each of the above evolved to have Low Code and No Code solutions in order to simplify the implementations.

The impact from the technologies is that people change from being the main operators “Doing” work, to Experts handling complex or unusual situations, to Supervisors checking audit reports, etc.

BOAT is positioned by the analysts as a user friendly, responsive and flexible solution.

BOAT is a recognition of how the market has evolved.

3. What is Orchestration?

The coordination and management of separate activities or tasks that in combination deliver the overall required result. It includes handling of time delays and sequencing through the management of “State” with the use of queues.

With multiple resources being used to complete activities, the transfer of information to achieve timely completion of the activity and consistency in processing outcome is why orchestration is necessary.

End to End orchestration of a business activity is a common goal, so that the “State” of any work item is known at all times.

4. Automation in Parts or a unified whole?

Often automation is introduced into a business in isolated areas. The solutions deliver a good ROI for the specific parts of the business. Automation of accounts payable is a good example.

The existing product categories of BPM, RPA, IDP, etc. have met the specific requirements of different parts of a business. This has created a fragmented approach which could benefit from a unified flexible solution.

5. Chat Bots and Virtual Agents – the unstructured processes

With customers and suppliers interacting with the business through the use of conversational dialogues, there has to be support for unstructured communication.

Where such interfaces are used to deliver transaction processes the precision of activity performed by customer service agents is replaced. This creates a greater need for process definition as the “Training” received by the agents will not be automatically part of the dialogue.

Process Orchestration at one level can be thought of as the management workflows across systems and teams. At another level is about the resources required to ensure that a process gets completed in a timely manner.

As conversational dialogues move beyond the information and knowledge patterns to require action, Enterprise Connectivity to satisfy the requests as to be available.

Conversations that occur at scale will demonstrate a wide mix of actions being requested in sequences that might not have been predictable when customer service staff operated the activities.

The execution of the processes should be discrete atomic transactions with the potential to manage “State” as a dialogue can often require a number of actions which are not necessarily specified at the start.

6. Do Business Processes have Grey Edges?

Initial thinking might suggest that a business process can be well defined and would be identical in similar companies. When the details are examined in the processing requirements, it becomes clear that there are many variations to reflect the different working practices of individual businesses.

Tolerances are essential details in engineering specifications. Similarly, they are often part of the considerations when using AI to determine acceptable levels of matching between expected and actual values. An example is the penny rounding issue that is seen on invoices.

Small differences that are too little to be worth investigating or are they a systematic way indicator of fraud or profit building.

7. What happened to Hyper-Automation?

Hyper-Automation is a business-driven approach to automate multiple functions using a range of software technologies.

Hyper-Automation can also be used to refer to the speed of adopting and implementing automation technologies across a business.

Hyper-Automation can be making use of BOAT to deliver consistency across the business and meet the variety of automation requirements.

8. Is BOAT only for Enterprise Businesses?

BOAT can be considered a collection of technologies including BPM, RPA, DM, etc.

Each of the technologies can be successfully deployed by Small Businesses and Medium Enterprises, it is reasonable to conclude that BOAT can used by the SME and SMB market companies.

The potential consistency offered by BOAT could be a benefit to smaller organisations as it is likely to require less staff training to make use of the software.

BOAT solutions are expected to adopt the BPMN standard for process descriptions by inheriting the BPM capabilities. This standard works for business processes independently of the size of the company.

9. Agentic Automation – Is that part of BOAT?

Agentic Automation is described as an “Agent Process” which are when presented with a requirement, plan how to deliver a response to the request and then execute the actions required to obtain the result.

There is a focus on the use of AI to understand the requirement and formulate the plan to achieve the Automation with Agentic.

Most business scenarios have predictable processes, as they are the services that the business provides. Unless a process is centred on creativity, it is expected that a similar requirement will follow a similar process to achieve a similar result.

BOAT is concerned with delivering gains for such predictable processes. Yes, AI might be used understand the data, etc., but there is likely to be very few requirements for Agentic Automation.

Where an Agentic Automation is deployed, it is quite likely that the plan created by the Agent will utilise BOAT technology to perform the specific steps in generated plan.

10. Does Case Management need BOAT?

Dynamic Case Management also called Adaptive Case Management is a specific type of processing that encompasses 7 activities:

• Engagement / Establishment
• Assessment
• Planning
• Implementation
• Monitoring
• Review and Analysis
• Outcome / Finalisation

The handling of the case itself may use BOAT software to reflect the long duration properties, the number of people involves and the management of the “State”.

The activities which are part of the case management are likely to use BOAT to achieve the interactions needed between the parties involved and the potential iterative nature of some tasks.

11. Cyber Security in BOAT solutions

BOAT has the attraction of one software solution performing a wide collection of activities. Although such an approach is technically attractive care is required to ensure that a Cyber Security exposure is not created.

The separation of Roles that occurs with people can still be necessary with automations to ensure that an access for one business function does not create a “Path” that could be exploited in any comprise of the system.

Building interfaces to APIs for core systems once rather than needing to create similar API interfaces for a collection of different technologies can a benefit to the deployment of BOAT.

Where APIs to key systems are not available, interfaces using the RPA bots functionality can be created and leveraged through other parts of the automations.

A unified approach that BOAT offers can provide better monitoring and alerting for a business as broader picture can be presented. Consolidated dashboards can be used to show the state of work as it progresses through systems to highlight bottlenecks, interruptions, etc.