CA Southern Africa has revealed the results of a CA Technologies landmark research conducted by analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA): The State of Automation. CA Technologies is a leader in business automation software.
The study reveals the global state of automation maturity across organisations, highlights the increasing adoption of automation to drive business success, and demonstrates that automation is becoming the backbone for modern business. Organisations that do not embrace modern business automation will flounder and struggle to survive.
Automation drives agility, speed, revenue
The report illustrates automation's impact on businesses' strategies. These results provide business decision-makers with a real-world understanding of the rate at which their industries are becoming automated, and its overall effect on productivity and revenue growth.
According to the report
* Fifty-one percent of organisations see automation as key to delivering rapid rate of change.
* Forty-nine percent of organisations state that automation drives new revenue opportunities.
* Automation is now a strategic discipline within all enterprises; an incredible 98% of organisations are driving automation plans across their businesses.
However, 59% of organisations state they have not achieved a very mature level of automation, and only 18% of organisations currently have an Automation COE; this is expected to grow to 70% within 24 months.
The successful implementation of automation also varies widely across industries, with retail showing the highest level of maturity (70%) and manufacturing the least mature (35%).
Anticipating automation's future with artificial intelligence, machine learning
Businesses believe that artificial intelligence (AI) will only further increase automation's value to their processes:
* Ninety-eight percent of respondents believe AI and machine learning will improve automation.
* Sixty-five percent of respondents believe AI and machine learning will leverage data for better decision-making and increase overall knowledge through better usage of historical data.
* Almost one-third of organisations are changing processes to empower machine learning.
"As companies continue to embrace AI and automation, it's imperative that different industries and departments understand their respective priorities and bottlenecks in adopting and implementing these technologies," says Dan Twing, president and COO at EMA.
Additional key findings from the report include:
* CIOs and business executives are the driving force behind automation projects.
* Automation allows organisations to focus workers on more strategic tasks.
* Europe rates "freeing up strategic resources" and "reducing errors" higher than the US.
* Business leaders rate finance and accounting as having the most benefit from increased automation, while they see software development as the lowest.
* Looking at the types of IT automation in use, WLA tops the list at 82%, followed closely by IT process automation (Runbook) at 81% and ERP workload management at 76%. Surprisingly, big data automation (33%) and data warehousing, BI analytics, and reporting (36%) are the least automated.
The research also indicates many organisations have struggled with a large number of task-specific tools, and many others have the benefit of the experience of those who have gone before them as they start down the path to automation. Participants stated they are looking to broader, multipurpose automation tools, such as workload automation (WLA) on the IT side of the house, or robotic process automation (RPA) for business processes. Both approaches are broad, and while WLA is generally thought of as an IT operations tool, the research demonstrates it is now increasingly being applied to business processes.
RPA conundrum
According to the research, many participants are using RPA on a limited basis for some IT process automation. While 88% of respondents have deployed RPAs, or plan to deploy, RPA usage is very low, with most organisations having less than 100 bots. Thirty-five percent of respondents believe RPA will become more important as it becomes AI-enabled.
Responding to this, CA Technologies is the only vendor that supports clients as they work to get their bots smarter, supporting their need to keep up with the speed of the business, which requires continuous updates. With new integrations with leading RPA vendors, CA Continuous Delivery gives customers the business agility to deploy bots faster into production.
"This research shows that business automation is clearly recognised as a key enabler for business success. Organisations that fail to embrace modern automation solutions risk becoming industry laggards. Never has the phrase 'automate or die' been more relevant," says Kurt Sand, general manager, CA Technologies. "CA offers enterprises the reliable, secure solutions needed to enable a business to become efficiently automated."
Survey methodology
CA Technologies sponsored the global survey of 1 007 IT and business executives, and Enterprise Management Associates conducted it online across the United States, United Kingdom, France and Germany in June and July 2018. The survey respondents consisted of top technical and management personnel familiar with their organisations' applications, from a wide range of mid-sized to large enterprises across the commercial, government, education, and non-profit industries.
Download the full report:
* White paper: The State of Automation
Tweet this: CA Automation (@CAinc / @CAAutomation) launches ground-breaking new research: "The State of Automation" in partnership @ema_research. Automate or die is the mantra of modern business. #digitaltransformation #automation #IT #DevOps https://cainc.to/qi2WHv
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