Work automation is the game-changing tech you can use right now

Martin Stewart - Jan 30, 2023

According to the 2022 State of the CIO survey, 46% of CIOs are pushing to increase operational efficiency (up from 34% in 2021). The pressure is on for IT leaders to do more with what they’ve got. 41% of CIOs said they aim to transform existing business processes through automation and integration—indicating that automation is a key strategy for achieving higher efficiency. A report from KRC Research found 78% of business leaders and 53% of employees believe they could save 2 to 3 hours of mundane work every day with work automation.

Process-driven workflow automation is easy

With simple, process-driven work automation what you’re doing is automating the work people are already doing. They know what needs to be done—and how it should be done. They know it works. With workflow automation, there’s no training or upskilling required. No technical training or expensive consultants. Workflow automation is within reach of the people who do the work.

Routine work is repetitive and can be easily modeled as workflows

Business leaders and employees want to automate mundane work for two reasons:

High volume repetitive tasks are typically low-value to the organization, yet take up significant blocks of employee time (and energy)—with little variation. Simple logic is sufficient to handle the variables in the process.
Repetitive tasks are boring. Employees would rather be working on engaging, high-value work that makes a difference.

By nature, routine work is repetitive. Repetitive work is bad for people, but great for machines. By nature, most routine work is also relatively simple. That means it’s easy for a person to model work as a process for a workflow engine to execute.

Defined workflows drive predictable outcomes

Work automation is predictable and trackable because people create the workflows and then the tech follows the logic to execute actions. Work automations happen in the same way every time. Visual workflows make them easy to create and easy to understand. Workflows created by people are deterministic. That means there’s no risk of unintended variation when the whole process is guided from start to finish.

Takeaways

Workflow-driven automations are easy and fast to implement because the people who do the work can automate the work—whichever team they’re in. That means it's easily scalable. And there's no need for management to continually push for automation; the people who do the work are empowered to orchestrate and automate wherever they see an opportunity to save time.