Think your organization is ready for automation? Read this quick guide first.

Understand why the demand for automation is on the rise.

Automate! Automate! Automate! The demand for automation is growing across every industry and business leaders are being pressured to act fast to accelerate digital transformation.

What's the hype about? Let's take a look at why organizations are pushing for automation.

"Gartner expects that by 2024, organizations will lower operational costs by 30% by combining hyperautomation technologies with redesigned operational processes."

Source - Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Hyperautomation-Enabling Software Market to Reach Nearly $600 Billion by 2022

"Increased employee productivity and satisfaction as automation speeds many laborious and time-consuming processes"

"Lower error rates, improved security, and stricter compliance thanks to the standardization and auditing improvements that RPA can deliver"

"Lower operating costs and increased revenue driven by productivity gains, operational speed, and faster time to market"

"Greater innovation and competitiveness as employees, freed from many burdensome rote tasks, are able to focus on more valuable and strategic activities"

Source - Facilitating executive sponsorship for automation | CIO

Define a strategy before diving into developing solutions.

Having seen and led a variety of automation initiatives over the past 4 years, here is why automation is not always the best solution along with key factors to consider when getting started. Defining a proper structure for your team is essential to navigating requirements and blockers.

1. Does your executive leadership understand the business value and high-level parameters of automation?
2. Can the business process be redesigned to streamline efficiency to eliminate the need for automation or simplify the process before automation is applied?
3. Is automation essential or is it being treated as a "band-aid" as a quick project in an attempt to fix a larger problem?
4. Will applying automation be a permanent or temporary solution? If temporary, what is the ROI of implementing the solution?
5. Do you have an operations team staffed with the right skills to identify opportunities, perform a cost-benefit analysis to calculate projected ROI of opportunities, perform data governance reviews, perform security reviews, and define access management prior to development?
6. Do you have a technical team staffed with the right skills to develop, troubleshoot, and maintain production automation solutions?
7. Is the business process thoroughly documented before it becomes automated to ensure legacy process knowledge is not lost and where is this information stored?
8. Where will you host the solution (for example Virtual Machines) and what is the SLA associated with the VMs to guarantee solution uptime for business-critical solutions?

Embrace ambiguity.

Automation is an emerging area and with that comes a great volume of ambiguity. Embrace the ambiguity through challenges, never stop learning, and keep moving into the future!