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IT Leaders Embracing Automation to Stay Competitive, Reduce Costs and Scale

IT leaders are driving an increasing number of automation initiatives as a way to stay competitive, reduce costs and scale as they navigate an unpredictable social and economic environment, according to the 2023 State of Automation in IT survey conducted by Jitterbit.

In particular, businesses are turning to integration technology as a way to connect systems and automate workflows to boost productivity and efficiency.

Organizations are also discovering that to truly move the needle on their digital transformation journey, strategic collaboration and alignment between IT and business technologists is a must.

Business Process Automation is Top Priority for IT Teams

A significant 89% of companies state that business process automation is part of their technology strategy this year, with the IT department taking precedence over other departments.

Concerns around competitors accelerating automation efforts are a key driver for this prioritization. However, only one-third of respondents feel they are currently ahead of the competition when it comes to automation — a perception that is motivating IT leaders to take action.

Operational Optimization Fuels Demand for Automation

According to respondents, the top two forces driving the need for automation are operational optimization and rising economic pressures.


However, there are still lingering concerns when it comes to implementing automation tools. Among the top automation challenges reported by IT leaders, security and data privacy took the lead, followed closely by cost and complexity.

LOB User Participation Rising with Explosion of SaaS Apps

While IT leaders remain at the forefront of organizational automation initiatives, the survey reveals that business leaders in HR and Marketing departments are increasingly responsible for executing automation and integration projects. In terms of integration requirements, hybrid integrations are in high demand as companies continue to incorporate SaaS apps into their existing ecosystem, often consisting of legacy, on-premises systems.

"The data shows a clear commitment from today’s IT leaders to leverage automation as a way to drive real change and accelerate digital transformation," said Manoj Chaudhary, CTO at Jitterbit. "With mounting pressures for efficiency and productivity gains with reduced budgets, embracing integration and automation technology helps unburden IT teams and lay the groundwork for a truly optimized and futureproofed enterprise."

Methodology: Within the context of a larger study into the current state of business automation, Jitterbit collected survey data from IT, marketing, and human resources executives at organizations spanning B2B, B2C, and B2G sectors. There were 167 respondents to the survey, all in firms with 100+ employees.

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IT Leaders Embracing Automation to Stay Competitive, Reduce Costs and Scale

IT leaders are driving an increasing number of automation initiatives as a way to stay competitive, reduce costs and scale as they navigate an unpredictable social and economic environment, according to the 2023 State of Automation in IT survey conducted by Jitterbit.

In particular, businesses are turning to integration technology as a way to connect systems and automate workflows to boost productivity and efficiency.

Organizations are also discovering that to truly move the needle on their digital transformation journey, strategic collaboration and alignment between IT and business technologists is a must.

Business Process Automation is Top Priority for IT Teams

A significant 89% of companies state that business process automation is part of their technology strategy this year, with the IT department taking precedence over other departments.

Concerns around competitors accelerating automation efforts are a key driver for this prioritization. However, only one-third of respondents feel they are currently ahead of the competition when it comes to automation — a perception that is motivating IT leaders to take action.

Operational Optimization Fuels Demand for Automation

According to respondents, the top two forces driving the need for automation are operational optimization and rising economic pressures.


However, there are still lingering concerns when it comes to implementing automation tools. Among the top automation challenges reported by IT leaders, security and data privacy took the lead, followed closely by cost and complexity.

LOB User Participation Rising with Explosion of SaaS Apps

While IT leaders remain at the forefront of organizational automation initiatives, the survey reveals that business leaders in HR and Marketing departments are increasingly responsible for executing automation and integration projects. In terms of integration requirements, hybrid integrations are in high demand as companies continue to incorporate SaaS apps into their existing ecosystem, often consisting of legacy, on-premises systems.

"The data shows a clear commitment from today’s IT leaders to leverage automation as a way to drive real change and accelerate digital transformation," said Manoj Chaudhary, CTO at Jitterbit. "With mounting pressures for efficiency and productivity gains with reduced budgets, embracing integration and automation technology helps unburden IT teams and lay the groundwork for a truly optimized and futureproofed enterprise."

Methodology: Within the context of a larger study into the current state of business automation, Jitterbit collected survey data from IT, marketing, and human resources executives at organizations spanning B2B, B2C, and B2G sectors. There were 167 respondents to the survey, all in firms with 100+ employees.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...