Year End Insights in the Process Intelligence Space
Google Trends : 2022 Edition
As 2022 winds down and we look forward to what 2023 might bring, I thought it would be interesting to investigate some Google Trends data to review the past year. While we are unable to view the detailed records, I think on a macro level there are some interesting insights.
World Wide vs US Comparison
Based on the analysis, in the world there is more interest in Process Mining compared to Process Intelligence. Process Intelligence tends to be more of a catch all term, encompassing any technology where you are automatically collecting and processing data about a process – which would include Process Mining, Task Mining as well as some potential RPA and AI tools.
I think it is interesting that from a world perspective, a more granular search term is in greater use compared to the United States where they are being used interchangeably. It is unclear if there is any long-term trend or insight, but an interesting observation to track throughout the year.
Tool Comparison in Germany
When it comes to process mining and preferred toolsets, Germany looks like a country divided and I would argue a country with broader implications in terms of existing capabilities, adoption and new capability development.
Celonis was born out of a German University and has very strong ties within the country
Signavio was purchased in 2022 by SAP an ERP company based in Germany and with a highly vested interest in improving their processes
UIPath has offices within Germany and was founded within Europe
Germany has been a leading country in terms of adoption and usage
I think monitoring interest and seeing how these preferences change would be valuable to track into 2023. I would anticipate greater competition between all these firms, new capabilities to differentiate themselves and more fluidity in preferences over the next year.
RPA & Six Sigma Inflection Point
There seems to be the idea that we should automate everything without little thought into driving to the ideal process. This makes some sense as if it is a truly automated process, who cares if it is inefficient. I think you can see this playing out somewhat in the chart below showing relative interest in RPA vs Six Sigma.
As a Six Sigma person, we know that we need more data points to confirm this hypothesis, but it still is an interesting anecdote and something worthy of discussion. Are you automating and making your processes efficient or just automating?
As a practitioner of Six Sigma myself, it's great to see the comparison. Some of the most efficient IA programs I have seen utilize RPA as an extension of the methodology.
That’s an interesting correlation between Six Sigma and RPA.