By Kim Arora

Large organizations with global reach rely on new technologies—ranging from cloud computing to robotic process automation—to make their operations and workflows smoother, faster and more efficient. The pandemic has only concentrated efforts in this direction. 

In a recent Forbes Insights survey of more than 500 CIOs, 59% said that the pandemic has caused them to increase their reliance on their workflow solutions. As many as three quarters of these surveyed executives believed workflow transformations are what would set them apart in the market going forward.

During Episode 2 of the Forbes CIO Summit Series, Cynthia Stoddard, senior vice president and chief information officer at Adobe, shared her vision of optimal workflow transformations. She was joined by Neeraj Tolmare, global chief information officer of The Coca-Cola Company. Here are their main takeaways.

Streamlining The Tech

Stoddard said she spoke to her information technology team about creating the type of workflow where the technology could easily vanish into the background. With Adobe Document Cloud, for example, the minor but time-consuming hurdles of attaching, reviewing, re-attaching and reworking PDF files are taken care of. One can instead seamlessly create, store, fill out, sign and review PDF documents, all on the cloud. 

“When you go shop online, it’s very easy to do. You don’t even think about it. I want IT to be that way,” she said. This notion of making IT invisible isn’t about doing away with tech tools. “It’s really about getting closer to the business and eliminating the toil within IT that causes a lot of lead times.”

This is one way, according to Stoddard, that IT can be a real partner within the business. Cloud processes, according to Stoddard, have opened the door for IT to focus on business capabilities instead of focusing on the infrastructure.

Moving To The Cloud

Though cloud capabilities have widespread applications for businesses across the globe, both Stoddard and Tolmare cautioned against taking a one-size-fits-all approach. Before transitioning to the cloud and adopting automation, companies need a clear strategy.

“It’s very easy to fall into the trap of technology for the sake of technology or automation for the sake of automation,” said Tolmare. “You can’t just take inefficient processes and automate them and expect simplification.”

Before moving forward with automation, Tolmare said leaders need to rethink and simplify their processes—and companies need to take a collaborative approach. For his team, that meant embracing “the product approach and the DevOps approach where the engineering and the developers were put together to make this possible.”

Adobe’s strategy, rather than moving everything to the cloud, was to create a tailored roadmap. 

“What we chose to do is really look at the cloud journey with the applications that we have, and break them up into different components or roadmaps to move to the cloud,” Stoddard said. “And while we were doing that, add capability for the business, because that is important.”

Integrating Agility

The roadmap approach has also helped Adobe with integrating agility into operations and services. One challenge, Stoddard said, was that the business and data/analytics teams weren’t fully integrated—so the business side couldn’t plan for change.

The company then reexamined its analytics dashboard and products that support personalization. “We segmented this into different product groups and moved from having a set of projects that are never-ending into roadmaps,” Stoddard said. “And when you start having that roadmap discussion with the business it’s totally different.”

IT can benefit, too, by having greater visibility into what they can deliver and the impact that they’re having on the business, “because that relationship is so tight.”

Despite the many clear advantages of software-driven modes of introducing agility into business operations, the uptake continues to be low. The Forbes Insights survey found that, currently, only 15% of respondents employ advanced techniques like RPA, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Stoddard recommended taking a transparent approach within the organization to encourage adoption.

“We started with a proof of concept. This gave people the ability to be hands-on, understand the technology and understand what their roles would look like when the technology became real,” she said. “People are happy because now they have their bots helping them out.”