The transformation of “workflow” shapes the future of your company

A little story of a great hundred-year concept

Flashback: In 1921, at the turn of an article on locomotive construction, British JW Smith invented the term “workflow”, promising a bright future: this concept will indeed be the center of organization and reorganization for 100 years company. This powerful tool for understanding companies and their organizations is emerging in three main periods.

The first run started at the end of 19^electronic Century to World War II. In 1887, American engineers Frederick Taylor and Henry Gantt (the Gantt chart was named after him) laid the foundation for the systematic management of work processes in the steel industry. The torch was lit in the 1920s: Therefore, in 1921, the term “work flow” was born, and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth proposed the concept of operation diagrams (“flow charts”) to reduce the number of actions workers were performing an item. Task. This is the modern heyday of Taylorism and Charlie Chaplin.

After the war, the theory of workflow rationalization, especially W. Edwards Deming’s theory, was exported to Japan and inspired the famous “Kaizen”, which is the continuous improvement system created for Toyota. This is the golden age of “Plan-Do-Check-Act” (plan, execute, check, act).

The third era began in the 1980s and 1990s, with the digitization of tasks and the birth of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning). A major new development in the 2000s: the cloud drives new digital services to optimize complex processes. ServiceNow was founded in 2004 to provide digital workflow solutions to organizations around the world. By 2021, it will specifically manage traffic related to the distribution of vaccines against Covid-19 to more than 20 million people.

« A century ago, we never thought that machines could define workflows in the human world to improve efficiency. », Souligne Dave Wright, Chief Innovation Officer chez ServiceNow.

Work flow, clearly defined

The era of the steam engine is gone, the era when the term workflow was born is gone… However, this concept still allows us to present the main organizational challenges of the time. Today, workflow is defined as a set of interdependent processes and tasks, and results can be obtained by executing these processes and tasks. -For example, closing the company’s quarterly accounts. The modeling of the sequences and actors (people and software) involved in each stage is now based on tools driven by artificial intelligence and robotics.

Trends in 2022: Automation of parts of the entire workflow

New upheaval since 2020: The pandemic has made economic participants more than ever need to operate in agile ways to improve the experience of employees and customers, and completely reform their processes…with the help of smartphones Next, the use of digital has simplified our daily lives considerably, and the professional world has begun to renew. The productivity potential is huge: daily tasks still occupy up to 60% of employees’ time! Therefore, it is time to “cancel pilot” business functions in order to realize the necessary information sharing and the automation of time-consuming tasks with lower added value.

Emergency management, the need to ensure business continuity, remote collaborative work that has become the norm…These issues require powerful and evolving tools. Hyperautomation According to Gartner, it is therefore part of, From Nine major technology trends in progress. ” Digital workflows enable companies to define the processes needed to meet a given requirement in the best way, and to understand exactly where they are in the process. », explique Dave Wright.

However, automation does not mean to replace humans, but to equip them with tools that “improve” efficiency and free them from time-consuming tasks. Provide commitment boosters for employees who have regained their position in the value chain, which is particularly important when work is mixed. In short, lWorkflow has not yet completed a complete transformation of our way of working.