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Expert Guidance on Workflow Automation

Expert Guidance on Workflow Automation

Automation has become one of the more popular investments within a range of industries over the past few years, as companies have worked to establish more efficient and accurate operational management frameworks for stronger profit margins. This trend has been fueled by the increased utilization of cloud computing services, which have a fundamental connection to the automation of business processes. 

Software-as-a-Service has remained as the most popular form of cloud computing and is expected to sit at the top of the market for years to come. Rather than having to develop or maintain software in-house, companies can leverage hosted tools to reduce the amount of strain placed on IT departments from the outset of new technological deployments, thus driving efficiency in the right direction and on a large scale. 

SaaS-based automation is stepping into the driver's seat for a variety of common corporate needs and requirements, such as invoice processing, content management and data and document capture. Considering the fact that these procedures are among the most monotonous and leave the most amount of room for error, more ubiquitous use of automation tools that are based in the cloud makes simple business sense. 

However, optimal outcomes from these investments do require a bit of planning, knowledge and oversight to achieve.

Simple steps toward automation success
Distinguished Forrester principal analyst Jean-Pierre Garbani, writing for Computer Weekly, recently broke down some of the core requirements and frameworks that need to be in place to ensure the most streamlined workload automation procedures. Before diving into these recommendations, though, the author noted that several trends in corporate and consumer demand are shaping the automation landscape, such as higher data quantities and self-service preferences. 

Diversity and velocity appear to be at the center of the automation trend, and will likely continue to be in that spot for the foreseeable future. 

"For the variety of custom and packaged applications in the enterprise, this means that different batch schedules have to be integrated and consolidated to avoid resource conflicts," he explained. "Forecasting when jobs will be complete and using automated provisioning to respond to incidents and resource shortages ensures that jobs will conclude on time. All of these constraints are now critical components that define today's workload automation solution."

Garbani then went on to list the three core requirements that businesses will have to cover in the policy and planning stages of automation strategy creation, which are centralization of control and oversight, speed to market and delivery and enhanced self-service capabilities fueled by automatic tools. 

The analyst noted that the most successful firms pursuing these programs will often be the ones that maintain tight channels of communication between the IT department and business management leaders. This type of collaboration, along with more strategic and targeted thinking, will help push the initiative in the right direction.

"The tools you use to automate your IT processes today will extend to automating your business processes tomorrow," Garbani affirmed. "To shift your tool decision-making from tactical to strategic, you need to select vendors that address today's needs while satisfying an architectural vision for the future."

Why not now?
Many companies have remained relatively stubborn or lackadaisical in their pursuit of automation, which might be putting them at a significant competitive disadvantage, considering how many firms have proactively deployed these solutions. 

From boosting employee engagement through the reduction of monotonous work to the increased accuracy that comes from software-driven processing and data entry, automation can quickly modernize and optimize the average organization's operational processes. 

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