Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023.  Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Process Orchestration, Developers, Automation and More

By Mary Thengvall, Director of Developer Relations, Camunda

Over the last year, the strained labor market and ongoing economic instability forced businesses to rethink their strategies not only around recruiting and retention but also around the technological investments made to overcome these obstacles. As a result, the role of automation has skyrocketed in adoption as organizations look to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and meet new customer demands. In Camunda's State of Process Orchestration Report, more than 9 in 10 (92%) described it as a vital element of digital transformation. The same percentage considered process automation critical to achieving business optimization and efficiency, and to helping them free up employees to take on more complex strategic jobs.

As we head into the new year, I asked some of my colleagues at Camunda to share their insights into what companies need to be on the lookout for 2023 and more specifically, what's ahead for this growing market as it pertains to automation.

Amara Graham, head of developer experience, believes more organizations will rely on existing business processes in the coming year as opposed to architecting new ones. 

"Process automation will begin focusing on optimizing existing processes, rather than designing or architecting new ones. Companies should focus on auditing processes, services, and data to run faster and leaner. Transitioning to reusable components and flexible architectures allows for fast implementations and integrations. One size doesn't fit all. Any out-of-the-box solutions need to be flexible with availability- for example, APIs, SDKs, and other programmatic implementations."

Employers should know their hiring prospects likely come with new expectations from their employers.

"Hiring is predicted to continue as a candidate's market. A growing demographic for IT companies to be aware of is recent college graduates and college-level interns that are expecting a remote or remote flexible environment. They've dealt with disruption to traditional learning formats and are now entering the workforce with altered expectations. Organizations should expect direct questions from these candidates and accommodate their low tolerance for long, drawn out interview cycles." 

Across the board, developers have proven to be integral to an organization's business success. As developers continue to be in high demand, Amara predicts that companies will need to get ahead of developer pain points to ensure these employees feel supported. 

"The three biggest pain points facing developers in the new year are likely to be tighter budgets, fewer developers (or hiring freezes), and high potential to accrue tech debt. To get around these potential obstacles, development teams need to invest in reuse, automation, and knowledge sharing that allow for scaling up or down in terms of budget, teams, and tech debt. On top of this, organizations need to consider rotations for regular tasks like on-call or support. This gives developers opportunities to learn and explore new areas and skills but also ensures the knowledge is shared, which is good for onboarding and offboarding. There is nothing worse than a teammate who leaves and takes all the expected knowledge with them. 

"In addition, organizations should be transparent about the year ahead, upfront. Being coy about a hiring freeze when developers are already feeling stretched will do no favors. Similarly, if there is no budget for a re-platform or new tooling, make that apparent within the organization so there is no false hope." 

When looking at the evolving state of automation adoption, Bernd Ruecker, Camunda co-founder and chief technologist, expects organizations that are investing in their process orchestration practices may reach their full automation potential. He believes that embracing these tools will help to support the complexity of business processes as organizations automate more tasks that continue to grow in complexity. 

"Business processes will continue to grow more complex at the same time that the number of endpoints increase. Legacy systems, microservices, manual tasks, RPA bots, AI/ML tools, and IoT devices that already adequately automate individual tasks in a process must be reconciled. Process orchestration tools will be critical to ensure these various tasks run smoothly within a process since they coordinate the end-to-end process and integrate a wide variety of endpoints. If companies don't manage to orchestrate their processes end-to-end, they only automate and optimize locally and don't exploit the full potential that automation offers. 

"In addition, process orchestration supports companies in gradually migrating from legacy systems to modern, microservice-based architectures. A good orchestration tool is software and device agnostic, works within an organization's existing tech stack, and allows individual tasks to be gradually automated outside of a legacy system. Another trend is the increased use of low code in process orchestration. Low-code tools are typically applied to automate simple processes. A smarter way of approaching low code is to use flexible and extensible tools, often in a domain specific way, which allows to apply low code development to more complex scenarios in process orchestration, counteracting the lack of skilled software developers for core and mission critical processes."

As we enter 2023, organizations need to create strategies that set themselves up for business growth and efficiency. If they're successful in retaining developers and adopting process automation practices, organizations will be one step closer to tackling the challenges that loom ahead while continuing to fuel their digital transformation journey. 

From supporting developers to adopting tools in support of increased automation adoption, organizations will be one step closer to tackling the challenges that loom ahead while they continue to fuel their digital transformation journeys to reach the next level. 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary Thengvall, Director of Developer Relations, Camunda

Mary Thengvall is a connector of people at heart, personally and professionally. She loves digging into the strategy of how to build and foster developer communities and has been doing so for over 10 years. Mary is the Director of Developer Relations at Camunda, an open source process automation company that helps companies around the world automate their systems. She's the author of the first book on Developer Relations: The Business Value of Developer Relations (© 2018, Apress).