Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies: Benefits, Examples, and What to Look For

In business, speed is key. When facing rapid change, adapting slowly eats into an organization’s revenue, opportunities, and market share. This has led organizations to deploy business process automation technologies to streamline processes, roll out products faster, and deliver services of a higher quality. However, organizations often stitch together disparate automation tools, leading to disjointed IT ecosystems and bloated licensing costs.

But things are changing. Gartner has recognized the emergence of a new platform category—business orchestration and automation technologies (BOAT). These orchestration platforms are the answer to the disparate automation tools on the market, consolidating everything you need to automate and orchestrate end-to-end processes. 

This post will cover the key benefits and features of BOAT platforms and give some examples of how they make a difference.

Automation is critical for any organization. The right tools help business teams with everything from simple, individual tasks to complex workflows requiring a mix of automation technologies and human intervention. But too often, businesses put together their automation ecosystem piecemeal, hampering resource allocation across IT and other business functions. 

BOAT platforms offer the chance to consolidate these technologies. What can this do for your business operations? Here are a few critical benefits:

IT teams have too much on their plates. When a business faces a problem, it’s tempting to add a new solution. But this adds work to teams already stretched thin—from development to configuration to ongoing maintenance.

BOAT brings everything into a single platform. When facing a new challenge or business opportunity, the teams have one place to draw from. Their BOAT platform can address the challenge without forcing you to invest in yet another new automation technology (such as more RPA bots or AI). They also reduce the amount of maintenance overhead and operational costs for the IT team.

Consolidating on a BOAT platform can help rein in costs. Adding an RPA solution in one department and a different IDP solution in another, for example, can quickly lead to increased licensing fees. This spikes your capital expenditures. Instead, you can use one platform to reduce the amount of licensing fees and vendor contracts required to address issues in the organization. Add this to maintenance overhead savings, and you greatly reduce budgetary bloat.

By centralizing automation and orchestration tools into one place, organizations have a single platform that can help them adapt to changing business needs. BOAT platforms typically offer low-code, which allows developers to build applications fast using drag-and-drop, prebuilt components. By combining this with other features, such as data fabric, API integrations, and RPA, businesses can more nimbly make changes and take advantage of new opportunities.

You’ve already invested a lot in your tech stack. BOAT platforms maximize the potential of all your other technologies. BOAT weaves together multiple software systems into a cohesive whole, all without extensive integration efforts. One-click APIs, data fabric, and even RPA where no API is available—these connect the data and systems you already have to make them even more effective.

With traditional approaches, automation often occurs in disconnected islands. Customer service might come to you with a specific problem, which you solve with a focused project. Then, the sales department has a different problem, and you have a separate project for that. This forces organizations to think locally on small workflows, rather than addressing global processes.

Instead, a BOAT platform helps you address processes across the enterprise. With the right tools, you can gain information about where your processes are breaking down to allow for continuous improvement and to transform your organization.

You’ll only reap the rewards of BOAT with a cohesive, complete platform. So what should a good BOAT platform include?

Automation is a critical part of BOAT. But automation tools come in multiple forms. So you’ll need to combine a few in one platform to truly succeed. 

First off, artificial intelligence. To gain transformative value from AI, it must be integrated within a wider platform and framework. A BOAT platform helps you improve operations through AI agents in existing processes or assist business users or developers in tasks with an AI copilot. These AI features can help with everything from document processing to generating customer service emails to answering questions around data in a conversational assistant. 

Second, robotic process automation (RPA) is a must. These tools can take over repetitive tasks, such as scraping information or entering data when no API is available. This offloads manual work, ensuring humans can focus on higher value efforts. By reducing human error and speeding up processes, RPA can significantly enhance operational efficiency. 

Finally, you’ll need built-in workflow orchestration. Workflow orchestration allows developers and designers to pass tasks and data between systems and humans and structure how each part of a process will interact. The best systems offer scheduling, error handling, routing, and data transformation. This makes it easier to automate full processes, regardless of complexity. 

In short, BOAT platforms need both automation and orchestration components to make everything work cohesively (and be that much more effective).

BOAT partly emerged from low-code application platforms (LCAP). Low-code enables organizations to develop applications faster using prebuilt, drag-and-drop components. These components are tested for security and performance, and with the right platform, they’re often backwards compatible. If you build an application using traditional software development techniques, you’ll have to update code and applications to deal with new security threats as well as rendering across browsers. A BOAT platform handles all this for you, allowing your applications to inherit these changes. This reduces your overhead and increases your organizational speed and agility.

All of this saves you time. It lets you develop applications fast and reduces maintenance overhead. Ultimately, low-code helps developers build applications faster, meeting the critical demands of agility in a fiercely competitive business environment.

A data fabric is also crucial for modern BOAT platforms, enabling seamless data integration and management across systems. By connecting data from various sources in a unified, virtual architecture, organizations gain a 360-degree view of their data and break down data silos. This helps data flow freely, makes it more accessible to applications, and enables better business decisions. 

And keeping with the theme—data fabric is a critical component of consolidation. By weaving your data sources into a data fabric, you collapse data silos while maintaining existing software investments. This interconnectedness is vital for ensuring other automation and orchestration capabilities have ready access to the data they need to function effectively. 

The main goal of BOAT is to automate, orchestrate, and optimize your processes. The best BOAT platforms will include additional tools to help you gain and monitor deep intelligence signals about your processes in the real world.

Process intelligence tools combine the power of process mining and machine learning to visually depict your processes and provide critical metrics and insights. This allows you to find process slowdowns and bottlenecks and further investigate ways to boost efficiency. From there, you can use the other capabilities of the platform to continuously improve and enhance your business.

Loan processing is a complex, multi-step operation involving multiple departments. Every department—from underwriting to compliance—might use their own automation tools like IDP for document processing or AI for risk assessments. This leads to fragmented systems and inefficiencies. 

A BOAT platform allows you to seamlessly integrate systems and orchestrate work across these departments from a single place, using the same tools. For example, the BOAT platform could allow you to design a process that takes a loan submission, routes it via AI to the correct departments, identifies and flags potential issues with AI-based risk assessments, automates document verification with RPA or API connections, and ensures compliance with rule-based workflows. This speeds up processing time, reduces manual errors, and increases customer satisfaction. More importantly, it brings everything under one roof and helps you connect your existing systems without having to rip and replace.

Government agencies need to deliver timely and efficient citizen services. But too often, agencies face the hurdle of siloed legacy systems, dragging down their ability to deliver services quickly to constituents.

Many services, such as contract approval, require multiple touch points across teams. BOAT allows these touchpoints to operate more cohesively. Using a BOAT platform, development teams can build process automations that collect data from various sources, orchestrate the process to ensure each department completes its task in a specific order, and automate messaging to provide status updates to citizens. The process intelligence tools can also help the organization identify which pieces of the process are taking an excessive amount of time to complete, then work to eliminate any logjams that slow down service delivery.

BOAT technologies are quickly becoming a necessity. They provide the cohesive infrastructure organizations need to not only keep pace with market demands, but also to drive innovation and efficiency across their operations. BOAT platforms allow businesses to operate with greater agility and precision and meet the challenges of the moment. By consolidating technology into a single, unified platform, BOAT not only transforms your approach to automation but also ensures better outcomes, more satisfied customers, and a stronger market position.