The Challenges of Automation and the Changing Role of the CIO

Celigo is a Business Reporter client.

The world has changed dramatically in the past few years, with digital technology increasingly embraced at all levels of society. At the same time, there has been a massive acceleration of digital transformation programs in business, driven largely by the pandemic and the need for remote working. 

The increased use of digital technologies at work has been accompanied by a change in the way employees look at their IT equipment. As digital consumers with experience using powerful, easy-to-use software and technology, today’s workforces expect instant, always-on access to the tools and information they need to do their jobs. And they look for employers who give them autonomy to make decisions about the technology they choose to use. 

The post-digital age

Most organizations have begun their journey toward digital transformation, and the pandemic has increased their focus. They understand that digital technology is far more than just pipes for information, and is something that should be strategically leveraged to confer competitive advantage. 

Over the past two years, many companies have achieved a base level of digital maturity, developing new digital channels, increasing revenue streams and enabling remote working in a way never imagined before. This influx of digitally mature companies means that the markets they operate in have a whole new set of competitive challenges. 

For these organizations, a deep embrace of cloud technologies is no longer enough. They need to go further to stay competitive, and to look beyond digital transformation programs to further increase efficiency, facilitate agility and drive competitive differentiation. They are, in some ways, “post-digital.”

Because their main competitors are using technology in a similar way, the competitive requirements for these organizations in this post-digital phase are evolving. But certain emerging technologies, processes and mindsets offer a competitive route forward. One of the most critical technologies is automation. 

Importance of automation at scale

The key to thriving in this new post-digital world is automation wherever possible, as automation at every level of the organization is a fundamental enabler of business effectiveness. Automation brings faster processes, improved accuracy and cost savings. Perhaps more importantly, by freeing employees from routine tasks, it increases their motivation and liberates them to add greater value to the organization. 

Automation cannot be just a one-and-done project. Rather, companies need to develop an automation-first mindset, with a continuous process that identifies automation opportunities and scales solutions across the organization. This must be driven both by top-down decision-making by leadership and by the bottom-up choices of different business functions.

Leveraging the exponential growth of data in every organization, automation supported by machine learning facilitates better decision-making by uncovering hard-to-see trends. 

For example, within an e-commerce process, sales information must be shared with ERP software to confirm stages such as payment and shipping. These order-to-cash processes can be automated by integrating the ERP with the e-commerce storefront, providing significant efficiencies for the organization. 

However, if the ERP endpoint is not functioning properly, an error is generated. An organization that uses automation supported by AI can catalog these errors and automatically identify the best ways of handling them. This saves a lot of time in troubleshooting and maintaining the e-commerce process, and means that business processes are not just automated, but optimized. 

Integrating to automate

Large companies use dozens, if not hundreds, of cloud applications across hundreds of business processes. Each application generates data or needs data from other applications. Therefore, these applications need to be efficiently connected to support key business processes, and any robust automation strategy must include holistic, top-down application integration that prioritizes end-to-end business processes. 

There is no single way of integrating automation. Some organizations simply rely on native solutions that come with the software they’ve purchased. This is efficient for the most common use cases, but often can be inflexible as only apps and use cases selected by the software vendor can be connected. As your company grows in size and complexity, integrations and automations need to be customized in ways that out-of-the-box solutions can’t accommodate. 

Other organizations take a DIY approach, leveraging code and technical teams to connect and automate processes across applications. While this allows for highly customized solutions, it is time-consuming and resource-intensive, and hard for the organization to maintain pace. 

Today, the most flexible solution is to use an integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS), a key component of any successful integration strategy. iPaaS enables the integration of any combination of applications, processes and data. By providing an underlying architecture that allows any set of apps to be efficiently integrated, iPaaS allows individual employees to use their chosen software while enabling organizations to maintain security and operational efficiency. 

However, the majority of current iPaaS tools are primarily designed for IT professionals, and these traditional integration tools are no longer enough. In an age when employees are more empowered and business teams build, manage and monitor the business process they own, today’s integration platforms need to be accessible to all, powerful and yet easy to use, providing guidance whenever possible. 

At the same time, they must offer power, flexibility and control to IT professionals. This is necessary to maintain proper data governance and ensure that localized automations work within the context of the entire organization, so that organizational security, compliance and operational efficiencies can be preserved. 

CIOs in an age of change

The pace of technological change shows no sign of slowing and it is impossible to predict the future. But one thing is clear: These market changes are forcing an expanding role for the CIO. 

In the past, CIOs were responsible mainly for technical solutions throughout the organization. But now, CIOs have new competitive challenges that they need to address, which requires identifying the best ways to unleash the power of information within the organization to impact the bottom line. Automation at scale is an example of such a challenge. 

Implementing automation across the whole organization will free people from mundane tasks that can be better performed by machines, enabling businesses to reduce errors and improve decision-making. Ultimately, this will unleash greater innovation. But for that to happen, CIOs need to create a framework for an automation-first culture across the organization at scale. 

This is not simple to achieve. But by using the right integration technologies with a focus on business processes to support automation, CIOs can optimize the potential of every employee to deliver agility, resilience, creativity and value to the organization. 

Business process automation, properly integrated at every level, is central to remain competitive in this new, dynamic environment. And the CIO will be central to the successful delivery of this strategy.

For more information, please visit celigo.com.

Find out how transformational CIOs and business and IT leaders can ignite an automation-first culture across entire organizations. Watch our webinar here.

This article originally appeared in Business Reporter.

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