Nintex, a global standard for process management and automation, has published a whitepaper highlighting the key findings from a new SharePoint360.de Digital Transformation study. The research surveyed 280 IT decision makers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and identifies an enterprise need for cloud-based automation solutions including those ideally-suited for automating business processes.
The study surveyed IT leaders in companies with more than 500 employees in German-speaking countries about their usage scenarios, strategies and satisfaction with SharePoint and Office 365. A total of 76% of these decision makers expect increased productivity as a result of Digital Transformation initiatives. A total of 53% anticipate cost reductions and improvements in their employee experience.
To drive Digital Transformation, 59% of IT departments use employee collaboration tools, 53% leverage automation and workflow tools and 39% have turned to cloud infrastructures. Roughly three-quarters (74%) of respondents are already using the cloud or consider it to be part of their IT strategy.
Further, Office 365 and SharePoint Online use rose to 48% in 2018, up from a meagre 15% in 2016. A total amount of 55% surveyed use SharePoint to automate processes — with 30% planning to do so in the future. The study reveals that only 11% of current users are satisfied with SharePoint’s Workflows and Designer tools.
“Even though the Microsoft Office app ecosystem grows in complexity every day, business users support long-time favourites like OneDrive,” said SharePoint360.de Founder, Wolfgang Miedl. “Organisations in the region will continue to evaluate emerging applications from technology providers that help transform their businesses, with those providers catering to demands for in-region data centres will pull ahead.”
Though only 22% of participants remain sceptical of cloud-based solutions, the majority (60%) of cloud sceptics would opt for solutions from European data centres, finds the SharePoint360.de study.
IT leads in process automation with HR, finance and customer service departments following
IT is the pioneer in process automation and continues to be the lead department responsible for automating processes (74%) with others quickly following suit. The survey findings show the degree of deployment of process automation is rising sharply within HR (41%), in finance (39%) and also in customer-oriented areas such as customer service (33%), marketing (29%) and sales (28%). The results reveal that nearly every third company surveyed is active in process automation.
“It is critical for IT leaders to have confidence in the tools intended to advance their operations, including those tailored for collaboration and process management and automation,” said Felix Gremlich, Nintex’s VP Sales EMEA. “Solutions like the Nintex Process Cloud that combine power with ease-of-use are ideally suited to help IT and business leaders rescue enterprise-wide Digital Transformation efforts with visual capabilities for configuring, not coding, the automation of business processes.”
