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Business Technology is Critical to Driving Business Transformation in Organizations

A new technology role is emerging within organizations, "Business Technology," also called Business Applications or Business Systems. This is the team charged with rolling out apps, integrations, and automations in their companies, according to State of Business Technology Report, prepared by Atomik Research for Workato.


The rapidly growing field resides within IT and works with business teams — from finance, human resources, operations, and sales — to help impact initiatives through buying and managing applications, and integrating and automating workflows throughout them.

The roles in a business technology team are expected to encompass more than 15 million jobs by 2022, supporting all business verticals. This job market growth is driven by the proliferation of SaaS applications and continual investment in Enterprise Software — the fastest growing spend in IT at a rate of 10.5 percent year over year. It is also driven by the need for organizations to drive transformation and innovation by aligning IT and business goals.

The report includes responses from two separate surveys; the first of more than 100 full-time Business Technology leaders and the second of more than 300 HR, marketing, sales, finance, and support professionals, manager level and above in the United States.

Key findings include:

Business Technology Leaders Drive Productivity and Innovation

With the continued rise of SaaS applications, Business Technology leaders bring a holistic view of the company across individual functional departments.

■ 94 percent of Business Technology respondents agree or strongly agree that Business Technology Teams are key changemakers and drivers of an organization's productivity and innovation.

Existing Tools Are Slowing Down Business Transformation

■ 82 percent of Business Technology Leaders report being backlogged with their projects with Finance being the biggest culprit at 71 percent, followed by Sales and HR.

■ 44 percent indicate that tools at their disposal are slowing them down followed by tactical, day-to-day firefighting at 42 percent.

Job Frustrations, Challenges Evolving with New Role

■ 91 percent of Business Technology respondents are frustrated with their role, citing the speed with which they are able to respond to Lines of Business demands as their number one frustration. 72 percent feel overworked.

■ Only 18 percent of Business Technology leaders feel "very appreciated" by their Lines Of Business colleagues.

■ 40 percent are frustrated with their current integration/automation tool.

Business Technology and Lines of Business Aren't Fully Aligned

■ Employee onboarding and offboarding is universally acknowledged as important.

■ Business Technology respondents cite "hire to retire" procedures for employee on-boarding and off-boarding as the most desired automations (37%).

■ Lines of Business respondents cite it as the second most desired (26%).

■ Lines of Business respondents identified "Approval Workflows" as their most desired automation, Business Technology rated it in the bottom three.

■ "Procure to Pay" is among the lowest desired automations for Lines Of Business but in the top 3 for Business Technology.

"There is a foundational shift happening in the role of IT, from providing infrastructure and provisioning hardware to working within business teams to optimize the systems and processes they rely on to help drive business impact," said Vijay Tella, Co-Founder and CEO of Workato.

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Business Technology is Critical to Driving Business Transformation in Organizations

A new technology role is emerging within organizations, "Business Technology," also called Business Applications or Business Systems. This is the team charged with rolling out apps, integrations, and automations in their companies, according to State of Business Technology Report, prepared by Atomik Research for Workato.


The rapidly growing field resides within IT and works with business teams — from finance, human resources, operations, and sales — to help impact initiatives through buying and managing applications, and integrating and automating workflows throughout them.

The roles in a business technology team are expected to encompass more than 15 million jobs by 2022, supporting all business verticals. This job market growth is driven by the proliferation of SaaS applications and continual investment in Enterprise Software — the fastest growing spend in IT at a rate of 10.5 percent year over year. It is also driven by the need for organizations to drive transformation and innovation by aligning IT and business goals.

The report includes responses from two separate surveys; the first of more than 100 full-time Business Technology leaders and the second of more than 300 HR, marketing, sales, finance, and support professionals, manager level and above in the United States.

Key findings include:

Business Technology Leaders Drive Productivity and Innovation

With the continued rise of SaaS applications, Business Technology leaders bring a holistic view of the company across individual functional departments.

■ 94 percent of Business Technology respondents agree or strongly agree that Business Technology Teams are key changemakers and drivers of an organization's productivity and innovation.

Existing Tools Are Slowing Down Business Transformation

■ 82 percent of Business Technology Leaders report being backlogged with their projects with Finance being the biggest culprit at 71 percent, followed by Sales and HR.

■ 44 percent indicate that tools at their disposal are slowing them down followed by tactical, day-to-day firefighting at 42 percent.

Job Frustrations, Challenges Evolving with New Role

■ 91 percent of Business Technology respondents are frustrated with their role, citing the speed with which they are able to respond to Lines of Business demands as their number one frustration. 72 percent feel overworked.

■ Only 18 percent of Business Technology leaders feel "very appreciated" by their Lines Of Business colleagues.

■ 40 percent are frustrated with their current integration/automation tool.

Business Technology and Lines of Business Aren't Fully Aligned

■ Employee onboarding and offboarding is universally acknowledged as important.

■ Business Technology respondents cite "hire to retire" procedures for employee on-boarding and off-boarding as the most desired automations (37%).

■ Lines of Business respondents cite it as the second most desired (26%).

■ Lines of Business respondents identified "Approval Workflows" as their most desired automation, Business Technology rated it in the bottom three.

■ "Procure to Pay" is among the lowest desired automations for Lines Of Business but in the top 3 for Business Technology.

"There is a foundational shift happening in the role of IT, from providing infrastructure and provisioning hardware to working within business teams to optimize the systems and processes they rely on to help drive business impact," said Vijay Tella, Co-Founder and CEO of Workato.

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As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...