What is the main requirement for building a successful rapport with your team and getting your point across – communication, right? But with most teams locked within the boundaries of their own work departments, speaking different languages and leaning on isolated knowledge and understanding, it is no surprise that communication is often disjointed, making it harder to make well-informed decisions.
Responding to an often-faced dilemma of the barriers between the IT and the business side of organizations, process mining and intelligence firm Celonis and enterprise architecture company (EA) Ardoq recently launched a joint solution that closes that gap.
“There is an important mission that every CIO has to do today. Every day, they have to merge two forces – keeping the business running and also balancing how they can keep innovating on the edge,” Eugenio Cassiano, SVP of strategy and innovation at Celonis Lab, tells ERP Today.
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Leaning on Celonis’ Process Intelligence platform and Ardoq’s EA technology, the solution works by creating an enhanced digital twin of the organization to demonstrate the correlation between IT operations and business process performance – enabling CIOs to align technology investments with business priorities.
Practical applications of the digital twin
In the meantime, the popularity of digital twin technologies is on the rise. A recent McKinsey analysis projects the global market for digital twins will grow by approximately 60 percent annually over the next five years, reaching $73.5bn by 2027. This also reflects the increasing value organizations place on the comprehensive operational visibility and scenario planning delivered by digital twins.
By joining forces, Celonis and Ardoq are able to deliver significant benefits to their users through their combined expertise. Celonis has helped over 1,500 companies across the globe to build a living digital twin of their business operations through the Celonis Process Intelligence platform. Ardoq’s data-driven platform has been adopted by nearly 400 enterprises worldwide.
The new system-agnostic solution assists in building a single source of truth about how the business operates. It creates transparency and traceability of what the company is doing (process), how it’s doing it (architecture), and how well it’s doing it (KPIs and metrics).
Maintaining this single source of truth over time allows stakeholders to show how investments and improvements in IT and transformation lead to better business outcomes through improved metrics.
Not only transformation initiatives but also business operations will benefit greatly from this holistic understanding. For example, leveraging Celonis’ task mining capabilities allows for understanding and managing change adoption, including the dynamic detection of shadow IT.
Looking ahead we see this novel digital twin enabling advanced use cases for Process Orchestration and for supporting more AI Agents to automate work.
Shedding light on the insights the two companies found during the prototyping phases of the solution, Erik Bakstad, CEO and co-founder at Ardoq shared that “there’re a lot of different business initiatives that the business side isn’t prioritizing because of gaps on the IT side. But once you start the exploration from the IT side, you realize that the same gaps actually impact multiple processes and business initiatives. This insight can help you prioritize more impactful IT-changes.
As one of the organizations already tapping into the potential of the solution, DSM-Firmenich’s Jeroen Akkermans, head of digital innovation and enterprise architecture, explained that the integration of process intelligence and process modeling with enterprise architecture “will enable us to make data-driven decisions with greater accuracy and agility based on a more comprehensive data foundation.”
This latest innovation can put IT and business departments in the same room, helping organizations translate their IT needs and gains into meaningful language. When different departments have the same goals, that is a win-win for businesses.
