Driving automation, and enabling employees, enterprisewide

The wall separating IT and line-of-business units began to crumble decades ago, around the same time that the role of chief information officer (CIO) – an executive responsible for bridging the IT-business gap – first emerged.

Today, IT and business are inseparable, if not indistinguishable, and CIOs are seen as critical leaders in crafting business strategy as well as in driving business execution. Part of the CIO’s role remains making good and timely decisions about how to upgrade different elements of the IT infrastructure, from servers to storage to networking equipment. In today’s world, however, the most impactful initiative CIOs and IT departments can drive is the automation of the many manual processes that occur on top of, and across, the ubiquitous IT foundation.

Pervasive process automation can reshape and power the business environment in ways even more sweeping than earlier IT advances such as software-as-a-service and other cloud computing initiatives. That’s because automation can do more than just make employees and their organizations more efficient. Among its many additional benefits, automation can allow workers to engage in more meaningful and higher-value tasks, it can facilitate improved customer intimacy and loyalty, and it can drive increases in innovation enterprisewide.

“Enterprisewide” is arguably the most critical aspect of realizing automation’s promise. Every department—including finance, sales and marketing, procurement, manufacturing, HR, legal, IT, and even the C-suite—performs hundreds, if not thousands, of tasks that could benefit from partial or full automation. One of the biggest challenges organizations face, in fact, is identifying the most promising tasks to automate first, and then setting up an automation pipeline for continually expanding automation’s reach and benefits.

As noted in an earlier post, robotic process automation (RPA) has evolved and diversified significantly in recent years. RPA has now established itself it as the primary technology for eliminating much of the labor-intensive drudgery still occurring across organizations.

In addition to freeing employees’ time by eliminating many of their manual and repetitive tasks, RPA can also equip workers with digital assistants—personal software robots—to help them do everything from submitting expense reports to setting up out-of-office messages. But, again, the challenge for organizations isn’t so much the now-simple process of automating individual tasks, it’s in operationalizing and scaling automations across every department.

While an automation pipeline is an essential element for achieving this objective, it is just one of several disciplines and tactics required. Others include establishing automation centers of excellence; addressing governance, compliance, and security needs; and implementing an effective change-management program.

Ideally, a comprehensive RPA platform will facilitate all these requisite and complementary initiatives as well as the automations themselves.

UiPath offers a multifaceted RPA platform as well as the institutional expertise needed to help organizations realize the full potential of this pivotal technology. Among the most critical capabilities UiPath can deliver is the ability to operationalize automations at scale. For further information about how the company and its RPA platform can help you drive automation enterprisewide, go to https://www.uipath.com/rpa/scaling-automation-journey.