As your organization grows and accelerates initiatives for digital transformation, your finance leadership must keep pace and provide increased collaboration with IT and business so all goals are aligned. In today’s rapidly changing business and accelerated business demands, a process automation strategy seems to be the answer on everyone’s mind. But, how do you achieve successful automation if there’s a misalignment between your business and IT? It’s simply not ideal.
Having a process automation strategy is a fantastic way to create the much needed bandwidth that organizations crave nowadays. Not only are repetitive tasks automated, but you also provide your organization with a holistic overview of how much time and resources can be saved as a result of process automation strategy, thus leading to a transformative chain of events as you develop a new strategy and roadmap that achieves your process automation strategy goals.
How do you reap the benefits of business and IT alignment on the road to your business process automation strategy journey?
Best Practices for Business Process Automation Strategy
1. Align Your Business and IT, Top to Bottom
It can be hard to get business and IT to work together, and it can be even harder to keep them working together. One tried-and-true way to align your business with IT is to invite both leadership teams early on so everyone is on the same page about business goals, strategic needs, IT budgets and tech stacks, and more. Bring in decision influencers as well as they will also be heavily involved in the alignment process.
Identify which gaps can be filled as a result of automating processes; whether it’s regarding IT infrastructure, security, or any other process in your organization, it’s a good exercise to outline how process automation strategy can yield benefits as well as identify what the risk areas are.
Internally, remember to start off with a solid foundation between IT and finance so the process automation strategy technology implementation flows smoothly. By engaging in these activities, you will achieve a business-IT alignment that will trickle down to your entire organization including your infrastructure teams, applications teams, information security teams, legal teams, and more.
2. Stay Nimble, Quick, and Sustainable
For many organizations, sustainability is imperative when planning for an important implementation project such as automation technologies. It’s highly recommended that you employ a big-picture perspective to planning that can help you grow as much as you need to and as quickly as your business demands.
By having a clear understanding of your process automation strategy needs, you will be able to allocate resources intelligently, always considering infrastructure, development, and support processes, as well as controls, performance, and scalability.
Remember to keep an eye out for foundational aspects of process automation strategy, especially infrastructure and process changes so you carefully lay out your tactical and strategic goals.
3. Keep Speed and Standardization Front and Center
When talking about business process automation strategy, most companies take the route of business process standardization prior to choosing which modules can be automated. While this is a tried-and-true approach, you can also explore a more high-reward option thanks to business-IT alignment.
When an organization is truly aligned in terms of business and IT, you can propose to standardize using business process automation strategy. Why? Well, standardization itself can be time-consuming and complex, so using a process automation strategy to achieve standardization can help motivate automation to move faster, instead of treating it as a prerequisite. In this approach, it’s the reward.
4. Focus on the Benefits of Business-IT Alignment
When people start experiencing the benefits of genuine business-IT alignment, it’ll be hard for them to not want to join in and participate. Place special emphasis on the cultural changes involved in business-IT alignment as a means to accelerate your technology implementation.
Focus on high-value use cases that will make an immediate impact and provide significant value to help set the one for the rest of your automation endeavors as you executive under the business-IT alignment umbrella.
