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Maximizing Your Automation Investments: 3 Steps IT Leaders Should Take

Daniel Meyer
Camunda

With an accelerated push toward digital transformation, organizations everywhere are trying to find ways to work smarter, not harder. A key component of this new model is finding ways to automate business processes — freeing up employees to focus on more strategic, valuable work and improving customers' experiences. Today's enterprise IT leaders have many options to help drive automation initiatives — from digital process automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to enterprise content management and robotic process automation (RPA).

Armed with these tools, organizations can simply replace the hand weavers with automated looms … right? Not so fast; automation done well requires a strategic vision and holistic approach.

After all, modernizing your technology is not the same thing as modernizing your organization. The variety of automation technologies available today have served to obscure this basic principle, and often, IT leaders rush to implement technology without fully understanding the impact it will have on their organization. Despite good intent, automating business processes quickly and without a strategic vision will not yield the desired long-term success or transformation.

This is why it's important to focus on the difficult work of organizational transformation. However, this can be particularly challenging, simply because people are both risk averse and resistant to change. The way things have "always been done" becomes the default position, and no one wants to take the risk of doing things differently. Only by breaking this down into incremental steps can organizations hope to succeed with their business transformations. And while technology isn't a substitute for organizational change, automation can help drive such change — as long as it is implemented properly.

As IT leaders navigate their digital transformation journey, they should focus on maximizing their investments by resisting the urge to immediately deploy automation across their entire organizations' architecture. Instead, start small.

1. Generate a bigger impact long term with software development

The worldwide market for technology that enables hyper automation will reach $596.6 billion in 2022, according to the latest forecast from Gartner. This is up from $481.6 billion in 2020 and a projected $532.4 billion this year. This is largely due to business and IT leaders looking to further build their digital footprints as competition drives all to increase efficiency, efficacy and business agility.

The biggest mistake companies can make when they move to more automation is not investing in software development, and especially in failing to bring development skills in-house. To successfully implement automation, they must establish technology layers that can orchestrate all the different elements of a business process — be it humans, RPA bots, API endpoints, AI-powered decision making and more. Orchestration across multiple endpoints is imperative for successful hyper automation.

2. Prioritize hands-on experience with a single project first

While most IT leaders will look to define the "picture perfect" architecture right from the start, the truth is, the most effective approach when integrating process automation is to focus on smaller projects first. Gaining hands-on experience with a single project offers a buffer for IT teams to learn the ins and outs of a new system. In a more digestible setting, you can identify the return on investment from leveraging automation before you roll this project out across your entire organization.

What may seem like a tedious step at first will ultimately lead to significant time and cost savings. By giving your developer team this grace period to immerse themselves in the software, you've set them up for success. As a result, they now have the opportunity to harness the skills required to implement, monitor and fix tasks across the entire organization.

3. Don't try to future-proof your entire architecture right out of the gate

Processes are the algorithms that define the inner workings of any organization, and successful businesses are masters in optimizing these algorithms. They achieve this by automating business processes that are designed precisely to their needs, by improving continuously as they gain more insights over time and by relentlessly leaving no part of a process across people, systems, or devices behind. By starting small, you provide a confined space where developers can make errors and adapt so that when it's time for broader implementation, these errors aren't repeated.

With this approach, organizations can focus on mastering their new system, and avoid complications they otherwise would have missed had they rushed to deploy automation too quickly and scaled it too widely. For process automation to truly transform a business, IT leaders will need to reinvent their process automation initiatives with more open, agile and scalable approaches — with the potential to automate any process, anywhere.

Daniel Meyer is CTO of Camunda

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Maximizing Your Automation Investments: 3 Steps IT Leaders Should Take

Daniel Meyer
Camunda

With an accelerated push toward digital transformation, organizations everywhere are trying to find ways to work smarter, not harder. A key component of this new model is finding ways to automate business processes — freeing up employees to focus on more strategic, valuable work and improving customers' experiences. Today's enterprise IT leaders have many options to help drive automation initiatives — from digital process automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to enterprise content management and robotic process automation (RPA).

Armed with these tools, organizations can simply replace the hand weavers with automated looms … right? Not so fast; automation done well requires a strategic vision and holistic approach.

After all, modernizing your technology is not the same thing as modernizing your organization. The variety of automation technologies available today have served to obscure this basic principle, and often, IT leaders rush to implement technology without fully understanding the impact it will have on their organization. Despite good intent, automating business processes quickly and without a strategic vision will not yield the desired long-term success or transformation.

This is why it's important to focus on the difficult work of organizational transformation. However, this can be particularly challenging, simply because people are both risk averse and resistant to change. The way things have "always been done" becomes the default position, and no one wants to take the risk of doing things differently. Only by breaking this down into incremental steps can organizations hope to succeed with their business transformations. And while technology isn't a substitute for organizational change, automation can help drive such change — as long as it is implemented properly.

As IT leaders navigate their digital transformation journey, they should focus on maximizing their investments by resisting the urge to immediately deploy automation across their entire organizations' architecture. Instead, start small.

1. Generate a bigger impact long term with software development

The worldwide market for technology that enables hyper automation will reach $596.6 billion in 2022, according to the latest forecast from Gartner. This is up from $481.6 billion in 2020 and a projected $532.4 billion this year. This is largely due to business and IT leaders looking to further build their digital footprints as competition drives all to increase efficiency, efficacy and business agility.

The biggest mistake companies can make when they move to more automation is not investing in software development, and especially in failing to bring development skills in-house. To successfully implement automation, they must establish technology layers that can orchestrate all the different elements of a business process — be it humans, RPA bots, API endpoints, AI-powered decision making and more. Orchestration across multiple endpoints is imperative for successful hyper automation.

2. Prioritize hands-on experience with a single project first

While most IT leaders will look to define the "picture perfect" architecture right from the start, the truth is, the most effective approach when integrating process automation is to focus on smaller projects first. Gaining hands-on experience with a single project offers a buffer for IT teams to learn the ins and outs of a new system. In a more digestible setting, you can identify the return on investment from leveraging automation before you roll this project out across your entire organization.

What may seem like a tedious step at first will ultimately lead to significant time and cost savings. By giving your developer team this grace period to immerse themselves in the software, you've set them up for success. As a result, they now have the opportunity to harness the skills required to implement, monitor and fix tasks across the entire organization.

3. Don't try to future-proof your entire architecture right out of the gate

Processes are the algorithms that define the inner workings of any organization, and successful businesses are masters in optimizing these algorithms. They achieve this by automating business processes that are designed precisely to their needs, by improving continuously as they gain more insights over time and by relentlessly leaving no part of a process across people, systems, or devices behind. By starting small, you provide a confined space where developers can make errors and adapt so that when it's time for broader implementation, these errors aren't repeated.

With this approach, organizations can focus on mastering their new system, and avoid complications they otherwise would have missed had they rushed to deploy automation too quickly and scaled it too widely. For process automation to truly transform a business, IT leaders will need to reinvent their process automation initiatives with more open, agile and scalable approaches — with the potential to automate any process, anywhere.

Daniel Meyer is CTO of Camunda

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The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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