The autonomous enterprise is much more than technology—it’s about operationalizing business agility

The triggers leading to the autonomous enterprise

The advent of the internet at the turn of the millennium drove the first significant wave of globalization of business and operations, but the first massive wave of IT offshore outsourcing wasn’t sparked until 2008’s Great Recession. Accenture, Cognizant, Infosys, TCS, and Wipro rode the wave and enjoyed colossal growth to become the multi-billion-dollar firms they are today, helping enterprises develop the building blocks of their digital foundations.

During the last decade, we have flirted with the advent of automation, where the rudimentary screen scraping, process, and system patches of robotic process automation (RPA) sparked the dreams of many CFOs and investors to automate the enterprise. The reality was that significant progress with automation would never happen as long as business unit leaders refused to make fundamental changes to their underlying processes and data. Plus, the global economy has been on a constant upward growth curve in recent years, and most firms avoid painful, transformative change until economics forces the issue.

The pandemic shifted the automation focus from creating efficiencies in the back office to delivering immediatebusiness impact, where talent shortages can be overcome, digital workflows can operate despite broken supply chains, and businesses can find new opportunities in their virtual and increasingly connected ecosystems.

In 2023, major rethinking is taking place. Many firms simply struggle to navigate this complex and costly maze. The autonomous enterprise vision is where the survivors are going, but getting there requires fewer people and politics, less resistance to change, and great partnerships.

Autonomous businesses can respond faster and more effectively to changes and make better—and less risky—business decisions. But becoming an autonomous enterprise is not an easy and quick destination. It is a journey an enterprise cannot travel alone, and enterprises need more support than ever from trusted partners.

The autonomous enterprise must be a purpose-led strategy and not a tech-only puzzle

A successful autonomous enterprise requires a combination of changes across culture, people, data, process, operating models, and governance, all working together to achieve a common goal. Moving from one maturity level to the next generally requires evolving many core components simultaneously. The time for building the case for the autonomous enterprise is now.

HFS, in collaboration with Pega, interviewed transformation-focused executives across a wide range of industries to understand what it takes to become an autonomous enterprise. This research study identifies what enterprises need to achieve this goal and what changes they must implement to stay there. It also lays the conceptual groundwork for the autonomous enterprise and aims at defining a matrix of autonomous enterprise maturity levels. In addition to the information captured during our interviews, we have also leveraged data from our latest quantitative surveys to enrich and, in many cases, validate the findings of this study.

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