ITechnology Interview with Neal Gottsacker, Chief Product Officer at Nintex

“Automation helps and puts in place best practices to digitize, so that your business runs efficiently.”

Hi, Neal. Please tell us about your current role and how you arrived at Nintex.

It became clear to me during the hiring process that Nintex would be a good fit. I was drawn to the non-bureaucratic, let’s-get-it-done attitude, and was energized by the people and the conversations we shared, where the passion teams have for the business and their customers quickly became evident. In my role as Chief Product Officer, my remit is to lead the Nintex product team to continuously innovate and build reliable, enterprise grade products that people want to use. Throughout my career I have seen a pervasive interest by companies around the world to continuously improve employee and customer experiences.

Soon after I discovered Nintex, I realized this company was well positioned to accelerate market progress towards what is now considered digital transformation.

Tell us a little bit about your journey during the pandemic months and how your experience leading teams in the past helped you scale your opportunities?

Despite uncertainty due to the pandemic, one thing is clear: organizations are required to work faster and smarter with less.

The need for businesses to drive even further efficiencies across their operations has accelerated, which we view as an opportunity. Past experience has taught me the importance of determining true product fit for a market and the need to pivot, based on customer feedback. This knowledge is particularly relevant right now as Nintex continues to reimagine the way people work by providing our global community with enterprise software that empowers their teams to quickly and easily manage, automate and optimize business processes.

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Could you tell us more about Nintex, and the services you offer?

Founded in 2006, Nintex is a leading privately-held automation software company. The Nintex Process Platform is powerful, easy to use, and provides an end-to-end process management and automation solution for solving a comprehensive list of enterprise challenges and business pains, which has proven to be critical for companies in the world we live in today. As more companies have remote employees, they’ve realized it’s the best time to digitally transform, and that understanding their business is key to running it efficiently.

With tools like Nintex Promapp®, employees can collaborate to map out all the important processes that govern how the business runs. They can then automate parts of those processes – through the integration of people with systems across the enterprise – with Nintex Workflow Cloud or Nintex RPA. Mapping and automating their processes now allows employees to focus on more revenue-generating work that can’t be automated.

What is the most contemporary definition of Workflow Automation? Which group of users can benefit from using these platforms / tools?

Understand how a process is executed now, whether it’s fully manual or partially manual. This allows you to know which part needs to be manual and which can be automated with the right software. With tools like Nintex Workflow Cloud and Nintex RPA, you don’t need to be a developer to automate workflows. Of course, IT can automate processes, but if the processes are for a specific department, such as HR or finance, IT may not fully understand all the details related to those business processes.

The best people to build out workflows, are subject matter experts and operations professionals involved in those processes. They understand why a process runs the way it does, what steps are needed for it to complete, and what edge cases exist. Transferring that information to IT is not always successful, so empowering departmental SMEs to build workflows will drive a higher rate of success in automation.

According to you, how is the Process Management market-shaping around data privacy, AI Machine Learning and digital transformations trends? Where do you see workflow automation trends heading to in the new normal era of hybrid working culture? 

We are seeing great demand for process mapping and management. The current challenge for CIOs is that they are spending thousands or millions of dollars, performing tasks that add minimal value to the company, because they don’t understand how their business actually runs. With concerns around privacy and regulations such as GDPR, process management could expose related issues and allow companies to fix them faster and prevent these problems from occurring in the future. No doubt, AI and digital transformation will be drivers in automation evolution. Process definition and automation provides extensive operational data that serves as a rich bed for AI/ML to provide further insights for business improvements. Digitally transforming can be challenging. Automation helps and puts in place best practices to digitize, so that your business runs efficiently.

Whereas in the past companies filled in paper forms, put them on a desk for signature, transferred them to another desk for more signatures before strong them in a filing cabinet, with a hybrid working culture, this is not feasible. Transforming to an automated business is the only way for companies to successfully move to hybrid and remote work.

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At Nintex, how do you secure your data infrastructure in the current hyper-threat challenges?

The security of our data infrastructure is of critical importance at Nintex and the current hyper-threat challenges demand we continue to raise our level of focus and commitment to meet an ever-expanding set of new challenges. We remain committed to ongoing investment in people, processes, product architecture and tools to ensure we provide a platform our customers can rely on in our ever-changing online world.

Hear it from the pro: How is the hiring industry shaping up in the modern Cloud technology industry? What kind of skills and expertise are you hiring for in the current year?

We live in a very technological world. More and more companies are either cloud-first or they provide cloud technologies. In order to successfully traverse the hiring process with companies that take this approach, it is important to understand what cloud technologies involve. If you are looking to hire engineers in Cloud-focused companies, for example, it makes more sense that the successful candidates will be those that either have experience in cloud tech or have made the effort to understand what it is, and the challenges that cloud can bring.

At the moment, Nintex is hiring product, engineering and sales talent to support the demand for automation in the market. We’re looking for talented professionals to join our team to ensure organizations are equipped to digitally transform their business processes.

What’s your contingency plan for 2022: How are you preparing for the end-to-end RPA economy? Any simulation technique you use? 

RPA has proven that it is a critical component of any automation plans a company is considering. We are investing today and will continue to invest in 2022 in RPA features, governance and integration with cloud workflows in order to enable our customers to truly digitally transform how work gets done. Data generated from such automations will be leveraged to provide insights for continuous improvement.

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Thank you, Neal ! That was fun and we hope to see you back on itechnologyseries.com soon.