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Software-based automation is a relatively young concept that’s rapidly gaining popularity—as reflected by the veritable explosion of software as a service (SaaS) offerings in the last decade. Gartnre® estimates, “software as a service (SaaS) remains the largest market segment and is forecast to grow to $117.7 billion in 2021, application infrastructure services (PaaS) is anticipated to grow by a higher margin at 26.6%”.

This is the decade of hyperautomation—a decade when companies are doubling down on mating critical processes to drive sustainable growth. But here’s the problem. An eye-popping 60 to 80% of your organization’s processes may be running on unstructured data such as documents and email according to news reports. Which makes them that much harder to automate manage and audit.

Maybe these situations sound familiar to you… You want to enhance the activities of your company with digital, data-based approaches. The opportunities and challenges of digital transformation are obvious, so it makes sense to rethink certain business strategies based on data. You’ve built a strategy through creative methods like design thinking, and you know exactly what data-centric solutions you need to develop – but the technical departments are pushing back.

For financial services organizations, onboarding institutional clients is challenging. The process is complex and made even more so by increasingly distributed and decentralized work, which compromises visibility and transparency and makes connectedness difficult. It also introduces a high degree of risk, as manual processes expose organizations to errors and inconsistencies.

Appian surveyed 500 senior banking and asset management executives from around the world about the drivers, challenges, and opportunities on the path to automation maturity. We classified survey respondents as either automation leaders, laggards, or part of the mainstream.

Business process automation shifted into high gear during the COVID-19 crisis, making technologies such as low-code platforms, AI, and robotic process automation (RPA) critical success factors for any organization in the decade ahead. The same is true for the insurance industry where many companies are leaning into hyperautomation to streamline operations and take friction out of the customer journey as well. But pivoting from paper to digital isn’t easy.

Last month, we unveiled Appian 21.3 with new product enhancements that help customers develop apps and automations even faster. And now, we’re excited to announce updates to Appian RPA that simplify the already-easy Appian low-code experience even more—including the reveal of the new Appian RPA task recorder that allows you to record browser automations right from your workflow designer.

We talk about risk like it’s a bad thing. But all innovation involves risk. Which isn’t necessarily bad. Not if the consequences of being wrong about it don’t pose an existential threat. But businesses everywhere are struggling to cope with doomsday scenarios such as climate change, cyber smash-and-grabs, the global COVID-19 crisis, and more.

“As a gamer, I wish for it. But as a developer, I wouldn’t want to be working on backward compatibility. It’s soul-crushing maintenance work, man!” – A developer on our team who shall remain unnamed! Let’s call her Dev-I for now. Last week, I was talking to internal Appian developers on backward compatibility (BC) when one of them shared this quote.