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.

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

When Automating Forever Becomes Faster Than Doing It Once

People want to be doing more engaging work, yet their day often gets overrun by addressing urgent IT tickets. But thanks to advances in AI "vibe coding," where a user describes what they want in plain English and the AI turns it into working code, IT teams can automate ticketing workflows and offload much of that work. Password resets that used to take 5 minutes per request now get resolved automatically ...

Smarter Systems for Disinformation: How Data-Centric Design Could Transform Online Trust

Governments and social platforms face an escalating challenge: hyperrealistic synthetic media now spreads faster than legacy moderation systems can react. From pandemic-related conspiracies to manipulated election content, disinformation has moved beyond "false text" into the realm of convincing audiovisual deception ...

The 5 Pillars of Cross-Platform Observability

Traditional monitoring often stops at uptime and server health without any integrated insights. Cross-platform observability covers not just infrastructure telemetry but also client-side behavior, distributed service interactions, and the contextual data that connects them. Emerging technologies like OpenTelemetry, eBPF, and AI-driven anomaly detection have made this vision more achievable, but only if organizations ground their observability strategy in well-defined pillars. Here are the five foundational pillars of cross-platform observability that modern engineering teams should focus on for seamless platform performance ...

What's Blocking Scalable AI?

For all the attention AI receives in corporate slide decks and strategic roadmaps, many businesses are struggling to translate that ambition into something that holds up at scale. At least, that's the picture that emerged from a recent Forrester study commissioned by Tines ...

Not All Networks Are Built for the Edge

From smart factories and autonomous vehicles to real-time analytics and intelligent building systems, the demand for instant, local data processing is exploding. To meet these needs, organizations are leaning into edge computing. The promise? Faster performance, reduced latency and less strain on centralized infrastructure. But there's a catch: Not every network is ready to support edge deployments ...

Why Observability Is the Missing Piece in Your Business Growth

Every digital customer interaction, every cloud deployment, and every AI model depends on the same foundation: the ability to see, understand, and act on data in real time ... Recent data from Splunk confirms that 74% of the business leaders believe observability is essential to monitoring critical business processes, and 66% feel it's key to understanding user journeys. Because while the unknown is inevitable, observability makes it manageable. Let's explore why ...

Gartner: Regular AI System Assessments Triple the Likelihood of High GenAI Value

Organizations that perform regular audits and assessments of AI system performance and compliance are over three times more likely to achieve high GenAI value than organizations that do not, according to a survey by Gartner ...

Beyond Autoscaling: What True Kubernetes Optimization Actually Requires

Kubernetes has become the backbone of cloud infrastructure, but it's also one of its biggest cost drivers. Recent research shows that 98% of senior IT leaders say Kubernetes now drives cloud spend, yet 91% still can't optimize it effectively. After years of adoption, most organizations have moved past discovery. They know container sprawl, idle resources and reactive scaling inflate costs. What they don't know is how to fix it ...

Is Your Network Ready for the AI Boom? 5 Overlooked Stress Points

Artificial intelligence is no longer a future investment. It's already embedded in how we work — whether through copilots in productivity apps, real-time transcription tools in meetings, or machine learning models fueling analytics and personalization. But while enterprise adoption accelerates, there's one critical area many leaders have yet to examine: Can your network actually support AI at the speed your users expect? ...

Keeping Your Business Stable When Going Through an IT Disaster

The more technology businesses invest in, the more potential attack surfaces they have that can be exploited. Without the right continuity plans in place, the disruptions caused by these attacks can bring operations to a standstill and cause irreparable damage to an organization. It's essential to take the time now to ensure your business has the right tools, processes, and recovery initiatives in place to weather any type of IT disaster that comes up. Here are some effective strategies you can follow to achieve this ...

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.

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

When Automating Forever Becomes Faster Than Doing It Once

People want to be doing more engaging work, yet their day often gets overrun by addressing urgent IT tickets. But thanks to advances in AI "vibe coding," where a user describes what they want in plain English and the AI turns it into working code, IT teams can automate ticketing workflows and offload much of that work. Password resets that used to take 5 minutes per request now get resolved automatically ...

Smarter Systems for Disinformation: How Data-Centric Design Could Transform Online Trust

Governments and social platforms face an escalating challenge: hyperrealistic synthetic media now spreads faster than legacy moderation systems can react. From pandemic-related conspiracies to manipulated election content, disinformation has moved beyond "false text" into the realm of convincing audiovisual deception ...

The 5 Pillars of Cross-Platform Observability

Traditional monitoring often stops at uptime and server health without any integrated insights. Cross-platform observability covers not just infrastructure telemetry but also client-side behavior, distributed service interactions, and the contextual data that connects them. Emerging technologies like OpenTelemetry, eBPF, and AI-driven anomaly detection have made this vision more achievable, but only if organizations ground their observability strategy in well-defined pillars. Here are the five foundational pillars of cross-platform observability that modern engineering teams should focus on for seamless platform performance ...

What's Blocking Scalable AI?

For all the attention AI receives in corporate slide decks and strategic roadmaps, many businesses are struggling to translate that ambition into something that holds up at scale. At least, that's the picture that emerged from a recent Forrester study commissioned by Tines ...

Not All Networks Are Built for the Edge

From smart factories and autonomous vehicles to real-time analytics and intelligent building systems, the demand for instant, local data processing is exploding. To meet these needs, organizations are leaning into edge computing. The promise? Faster performance, reduced latency and less strain on centralized infrastructure. But there's a catch: Not every network is ready to support edge deployments ...

Why Observability Is the Missing Piece in Your Business Growth

Every digital customer interaction, every cloud deployment, and every AI model depends on the same foundation: the ability to see, understand, and act on data in real time ... Recent data from Splunk confirms that 74% of the business leaders believe observability is essential to monitoring critical business processes, and 66% feel it's key to understanding user journeys. Because while the unknown is inevitable, observability makes it manageable. Let's explore why ...

Gartner: Regular AI System Assessments Triple the Likelihood of High GenAI Value

Organizations that perform regular audits and assessments of AI system performance and compliance are over three times more likely to achieve high GenAI value than organizations that do not, according to a survey by Gartner ...

Beyond Autoscaling: What True Kubernetes Optimization Actually Requires

Kubernetes has become the backbone of cloud infrastructure, but it's also one of its biggest cost drivers. Recent research shows that 98% of senior IT leaders say Kubernetes now drives cloud spend, yet 91% still can't optimize it effectively. After years of adoption, most organizations have moved past discovery. They know container sprawl, idle resources and reactive scaling inflate costs. What they don't know is how to fix it ...

Is Your Network Ready for the AI Boom? 5 Overlooked Stress Points

Artificial intelligence is no longer a future investment. It's already embedded in how we work — whether through copilots in productivity apps, real-time transcription tools in meetings, or machine learning models fueling analytics and personalization. But while enterprise adoption accelerates, there's one critical area many leaders have yet to examine: Can your network actually support AI at the speed your users expect? ...

Keeping Your Business Stable When Going Through an IT Disaster

The more technology businesses invest in, the more potential attack surfaces they have that can be exploited. Without the right continuity plans in place, the disruptions caused by these attacks can bring operations to a standstill and cause irreparable damage to an organization. It's essential to take the time now to ensure your business has the right tools, processes, and recovery initiatives in place to weather any type of IT disaster that comes up. Here are some effective strategies you can follow to achieve this ...