Lessons from automation leaders: Automation-cloud-data nexus is vital for success

In our report ‘Seven Lessons shaping today’s automation leaders’ we evaluated the differences between automation heroes and stragglers. The heroes had scaled their RPA deployments across enterprise functions and processes at scale. This approach to automation is the enabler for overcoming operational silos and ultimately, of achieving the unified workforce ideal – the seamless integration of people, systems, and the digital workforce. Our seven lessons – detailed in full in the report – reveal what the heroes do differently.

• The lesson that the automation-cloud-data nexus is vital for success emphasises the intent to transform, found in heroes. Even post-COVID-19, the stragglers revealed they were still simply trying to get better value from their previous transformation investments, such as a legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite or outdated CRM implementation.
• Heroes are aligning automation to their data and cloud strategies. We found 83% of the automation heroes have aligned their plans for automation with their data strategies, compared to 50% of stragglers.
• 46% of the heroes have organized data, automation, and cloud together in a holistic and integrated way with one overall coordinating lead, compared to 18% of stragglers. This points to the evolution of automation in which processes are designed in the cloud, and in which a range of emerging technologies are leveraged to create intelligent and automated workflows.

The Bottom Line: The nexus of automation, data and cloud delivers flexible response for the enterprise

The nexus of automation, data and cloud enables consistent cross-functional enterprise operations. Our automation heroes focus on value through the lens of the strategic value of data, driving them to design processes – in the cloud – that help them get the data they need to respond at pace to the needs of their market and customers.