Let’s face it, more than likely your company needs to adopt more automation to stay ahead of the competition and respond to your customers’ rising expectations for instant gratification.

But the automation landscape is far more than the set of applications and platforms that comprise intelligent automation. It includes the physical aspects of running and maintaining these automations too.

That’s the people involved as well as infrastructure; specifically, the servers, computers, storage, network resources and integrations into the applications, and interfaces that employees and customers use to interact with these systems of automation.

While applications have long served as the backbone of enterprise technology, change has quietly crept up on us. It’s becoming increasingly common for diverse yet co-evolving automation technologies – robotic process automation (RPA), low-code tools, native integration platforms (iPaaS), process intelligence, chatbots and machine learning – to be woven together atop the application layers. Using automation, they abstract features and functionality from the underlying apps to make them more accessible to a wide range of users.

The integrated automation toolkit

In today's post-pandemic, tech-driven economy, a vast majority of savvy executives appreciate that automation can help to improve their firms' processes. In many organizations, however, the use of RPA, business process management (BPM), intelligent document processing (IDP) and related AI technologies remains siloed, leading to missed opportunities to resolve inefficiencies and reimagine work in radically new and more efficient ways.

A holistic approach to managing the automation landscape will help you achieve long-lasting transformations in your organization. What’s needed is a comprehensive, integrated automation toolkit that incorporates both physical automation and integrated solutions for organizational processes.

How is the automation landscape changing?

To achieve true transformation, automation goals must be aligned with the broader strategic company goals, including competitiveness, revenue growth, risk reduction and enhancing business agility by transforming customers’ and employees’ experiences and outcomes.

Whereas organizations once were focused on individual task automations, today, your automation landscape can include a far broader range of end-to-end processes. Whether rule- or knowledge-based, of any transaction volume, frequent or infrequent and with a larger variety of exceptions, you can implement long-running and complex workflows that incorporate both human and digital workers operating together, and leverage any type of data source, no matter where the data is from or what format it’s in.

We’re already seeing that approaching automation in isolation does not yield great results, with short-term fixes leading to inefficiencies and even more technical debt. Existing ways of doing things block real progress. Processes need to be reimagined.

A company that has achieved full automation maturity, or understands the entire automation landscape, can coordinate work and standards so the entire organisation can benefit from integrated automation.

A holistic approach to the automation landscape is needed

Businesses that get automation right will outperform those that don't.

What does ‘getting it right’ look like? Simply put, it should be technology-driven with integrated, scalable, and adaptable processes. Rather than purely focusing on multiple large enterprise applications, true automation leaders combine RPA, BPM, low-code, integration platforms as a service (iPaaS), process intelligence, chatbots, and machine learning in an integrated and flexible architecture.

It's crucial for technology executives to understand that outcomes for both customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) should be front and center in the path to long-term success. In the increasingly competitive and fast-moving digital world, we are under constant pressure to produce more with less, which can result in inferior user and employee experiences.

Leveraging technologies that empower employees and customers to build and interact with automations not only encourages innovation but ensures that everyone takes part in the journey, resulting in sustainable outcomes for all.

How should you handle the major issues that lie ahead?

An organization's top- or bottom-line effectiveness, efficiency, and business risk are all impacted by its approach toward adopting an integrated intelligent automation toolkit.

At SS&C Blue Prism we are here to help your company build an intelligent automation program that works for your business, your employees and, most importantly, your customers.

We provide the largest set of technologies and methodologies across the intelligent automation landscape woven together to help you realize the full potential of intelligent automation. Enabling you to develop the strategy and governance framework to realize your organization’s strategic goals, transition towards a unified workforce and to align your delivery to create value at speed.