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The Critical Role of Workload Automation in Achieving Successful Digital Transformation

Dan Twing
EMA

Digital transformation has become a ubiquitous term in today's business landscape, describing the integration of digital technologies and cultural change to achieve organizational objectives. While discussions surrounding digital transformation have been ongoing for over a decade, the progress made across industries and organizations varies. In this blog, we will explore the state of digital transformation and examine the critical role that Workload Automation (WLA) plays in supporting its development and ongoing operations. We will also delve into how organizations are leveraging WLA to drive their digital transformation initiatives.

EMA WEBINAR ON-DEMAND: The Critical Role of Workload Automation in Achieving Successful Digital Transformation

The State of Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is a journey that organizations undertake to embrace the potential of digital technologies. However, the pace of this journey varies across industries and organizations, influenced by factors such as organization size, priorities, technology infrastructure, and talent readiness. Some industries, including e-commerce, digital media, and financial technology, have made significant strides in digital transformation. However, sectors like healthcare and government are still in the early stages of digital adoption.

EMA conducted a global survey of 406 IT and business leaders to understand how workload automation software is changing to adapt to modern IT needs and to support digital transformation. The first chart shows where global enterprise IT and business leaders self-assess the state of digital transformation in their organizations.


The second chart summarizes these results into 5 categories. Most of the enterprise market, 97% of organizations, have initiated digital transformation activities. However, only 21% are considered mature or looking towards the next generation, while the majority (77%) are still in the early stages or just beginning their transformation journey. These findings highlight the wide range of progress and the ongoing nature of digital transformation.


The Role of Workload Automation in Digital Transformation

Workload Automation (WLA) tools play a critical role in supporting the development and ongoing operations of digitally transformed processes. During the development phase, WLA tools streamline and automate various tasks in the software development life cycle, such as code builds, testing, and deployment. By automating these tasks, WLA accelerates development cycles, reduces errors, and enhances code quality.

The survey conducted by EMA sheds light on how organizations are leveraging WLA to support their digital transformation initiatives. The most mentioned use case, as highlighted by 51% of respondents, is the support of DevOps processes. DevOps emphasizes collaboration and integration between development and operations teams, and WLA tools facilitate the automation and orchestration of tasks involved in this process.


Another significant application of WLA in digital transformation is the configuration of cloud and on-premises infrastructure, mentioned by a considerable percentage of respondents. By automating infrastructure provisioning and management, organizations can scale their digital capabilities effectively.

Additionally, WLA plays a crucial role in automating release management, ensuring efficient and error-free deployment of digital solutions. This aspect was highlighted by 28% of respondents in the survey.

Furthermore, organizations are leveraging WLA to orchestrate automation in support of digital transformation. This includes connecting and orchestrating disparate digital transformation capabilities, as mentioned by 33% of respondents. Another 27% use WLA for end-to-end orchestration of digital transformation processes. EMA believes that if developers have a better understanding of WLA orchestration, new applications and digital processes could be completed with reduced developer time.

WLA is a critical component of digital transformation. It not only plays a vital role during the development phase, streamlining and automating various tasks, but also continues to support ongoing operations by automating IT operations tasks, ensuring operational efficiency and reliability. WLA enables scalability and flexibility, allowing digital processes to handle varying workload demands without compromising performance. By leveraging WLA, organizations can accelerate development cycles, improve operational efficiency, and deliver innovative digital processes to customers.

Where to Learn More

If you would like to learn more about the role of WLA, watch this on-demand webinar, The Critical Role of Workload Automation in Achieving Successful Digital Transformation. You can see how those further along the digital transformation journey recognize the need to centrally manage automation, and how organizations with developers who understand and value the role of WLA tend to be farther down the digital transformation path.

Use the player or download the MP3 below to listen to EMA-APMdigest Podcast Episode 1 — Dan Twing, President and COO of EMA, discusses Observability and Automation.

Click here for a direct MP3 download of EMA-APMdigest Podcast Episode 1

Dan Twing is President and COO of Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)

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The Critical Role of Workload Automation in Achieving Successful Digital Transformation

Dan Twing
EMA

Digital transformation has become a ubiquitous term in today's business landscape, describing the integration of digital technologies and cultural change to achieve organizational objectives. While discussions surrounding digital transformation have been ongoing for over a decade, the progress made across industries and organizations varies. In this blog, we will explore the state of digital transformation and examine the critical role that Workload Automation (WLA) plays in supporting its development and ongoing operations. We will also delve into how organizations are leveraging WLA to drive their digital transformation initiatives.

EMA WEBINAR ON-DEMAND: The Critical Role of Workload Automation in Achieving Successful Digital Transformation

The State of Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is a journey that organizations undertake to embrace the potential of digital technologies. However, the pace of this journey varies across industries and organizations, influenced by factors such as organization size, priorities, technology infrastructure, and talent readiness. Some industries, including e-commerce, digital media, and financial technology, have made significant strides in digital transformation. However, sectors like healthcare and government are still in the early stages of digital adoption.

EMA conducted a global survey of 406 IT and business leaders to understand how workload automation software is changing to adapt to modern IT needs and to support digital transformation. The first chart shows where global enterprise IT and business leaders self-assess the state of digital transformation in their organizations.


The second chart summarizes these results into 5 categories. Most of the enterprise market, 97% of organizations, have initiated digital transformation activities. However, only 21% are considered mature or looking towards the next generation, while the majority (77%) are still in the early stages or just beginning their transformation journey. These findings highlight the wide range of progress and the ongoing nature of digital transformation.


The Role of Workload Automation in Digital Transformation

Workload Automation (WLA) tools play a critical role in supporting the development and ongoing operations of digitally transformed processes. During the development phase, WLA tools streamline and automate various tasks in the software development life cycle, such as code builds, testing, and deployment. By automating these tasks, WLA accelerates development cycles, reduces errors, and enhances code quality.

The survey conducted by EMA sheds light on how organizations are leveraging WLA to support their digital transformation initiatives. The most mentioned use case, as highlighted by 51% of respondents, is the support of DevOps processes. DevOps emphasizes collaboration and integration between development and operations teams, and WLA tools facilitate the automation and orchestration of tasks involved in this process.


Another significant application of WLA in digital transformation is the configuration of cloud and on-premises infrastructure, mentioned by a considerable percentage of respondents. By automating infrastructure provisioning and management, organizations can scale their digital capabilities effectively.

Additionally, WLA plays a crucial role in automating release management, ensuring efficient and error-free deployment of digital solutions. This aspect was highlighted by 28% of respondents in the survey.

Furthermore, organizations are leveraging WLA to orchestrate automation in support of digital transformation. This includes connecting and orchestrating disparate digital transformation capabilities, as mentioned by 33% of respondents. Another 27% use WLA for end-to-end orchestration of digital transformation processes. EMA believes that if developers have a better understanding of WLA orchestration, new applications and digital processes could be completed with reduced developer time.

WLA is a critical component of digital transformation. It not only plays a vital role during the development phase, streamlining and automating various tasks, but also continues to support ongoing operations by automating IT operations tasks, ensuring operational efficiency and reliability. WLA enables scalability and flexibility, allowing digital processes to handle varying workload demands without compromising performance. By leveraging WLA, organizations can accelerate development cycles, improve operational efficiency, and deliver innovative digital processes to customers.

Where to Learn More

If you would like to learn more about the role of WLA, watch this on-demand webinar, The Critical Role of Workload Automation in Achieving Successful Digital Transformation. You can see how those further along the digital transformation journey recognize the need to centrally manage automation, and how organizations with developers who understand and value the role of WLA tend to be farther down the digital transformation path.

Use the player or download the MP3 below to listen to EMA-APMdigest Podcast Episode 1 — Dan Twing, President and COO of EMA, discusses Observability and Automation.

Click here for a direct MP3 download of EMA-APMdigest Podcast Episode 1

Dan Twing is President and COO of Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)

The Latest

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 ...