CIOs continue to prioritize digital transformation projects – the latest research from the State of the CIO 2022 survey suggests that leading digital business and transformation initiatives are among the top three priorities for CIOs. At the same time, the use of external capabilities has become increasingly important. These operations and transformation projects place more work in the hands of the IT department, which continues to face labor shortages in the post-pandemic “Great Resignation” era, along with the need to continuously monitor data security infrastructure. and upgrade.
CIOs can ease this burden by democratizing the automation process of less complex business needs beyond the core IT team, so IT can focus on more complex transformation projects.
“IT workloads have grown significantly and put a burden on IT teams to not only keep up with demand, but also keep pace with evolving technology,” said Jagjit Dhaliwal, Vice President and Global CIO Industry Leader at UiPath. “Digital transformation efforts can’t all be on IT teams, so CIOs need to democratize automation across their organization to accelerate that transformation.”
However, opening up automation processes to non-IT workers isn’t like handing the keys to the Corvette to your teen and saying, “Just do it.” Dhaliwal says the key to transformative change for an enterprise lies in employee-driven automation, but with a careful, proven approach that aligns business and IT strategies.
Before the gates open, Dhaliwal suggests CIOs create an Automation Center of Excellence (CoE), a team of employees that centrally manages self-service automations and rolls out other automations to users. The CoE can focus on planning and retraining robotic process automation (RPA), delivering projects, creating development standards and practices, and following all audit compliance standards.
Dhaliwal recommends a five-step approach that CIOs can take to democratize automation and run it as a program aligned with the organization’s business and IT strategies. He notes that it is in the best interest of CIOs to lead the way here and promote a citizen development program to avoid the risk of ‘shadow IT’. It provides standardization and guardrails in all automation for successful large-scale program execution. Dhaliwal elaborates on the five steps here.
UiPath
Watch a webcast featuring UiPath’s Dhaliwal here to learn more about how companies can implement business automation.