CIO guide to enabling business automation

Just as modern-day insights and observability rely on integration, so does automation. By building a composable enterprise, you are positioned to take a platform approach to business automation, where APIs and reusable packaged business capabilities (PBCs) help unlock data from back-end systems to provide teams with governed access to automate processes.

Check out this whitepaper to:

• Review our checklist for building a successful business strategy.
• Discover why integration is central to executing business automation.
• Learn how leading organizations are leveraging APIs and PBCs to drive results.

The following is an excerpt from our whitepaper. Fill in the form to download the full version.

Whether it’s building connected customer experiences or the ability to scale with changing market demands, the benefits of business automation are unmistakable. Yet many IT leaders struggle to enable automation across the enterprise — and do it in the right way.

As Central IT encounters repetitive or robotic tasks, they may recognize an opportunity for automation. However, they often sacrifice strategic thinking for shortcuts and point solutions that address only a few immediate priorities but are often unusable in other projects. These seemingly small, inconsequential decisions can eventually become a mountain of technical debt and a decentralized patchwork of automation solutions. Additionally, most organizations haven’t created a process by which business users can execute on automation opportunities. Not enabling these teams ultimately undermines the company’s ability to quickly respond to shifting automation business conditions and changing customer expectations.

It is incumbent, therefore, on CIOs and other IT leaders to centrally enable their organizations so that the downstream outputs, like automation, inherit the important benefits of that central enablement: central management, central governance, and central security. All of this is dependent on building a composable enterprise.

A composable enterprise is an organization built to adapt quickly. This is made possible by packaging data or business capabilities into reusable building blocks with APIs and creating a culture where adaptability and agility are emphasized. As a result, the business will be able to seamlessly react to changing market demands.

In a composable enterprise, automations of any kind — ranging in complexity from robotic tasks to customer-facing applications — can be assembled from centrally governed digital building blocks. Gartner calls these building blocks packaged business capabilities (PBCs), which include your APIs, connectors, and other integration assets.

PBCs are essential to business automation. They enable the composable enterprise by allowing teams — from Central IT to business users — to leverage existing digital capabilities along with discoverable and reusable PBCs. Rather than relying on custom integrations and code, a composable enterprise embraces the API economy by using PBCs to extend its core capabilities to partners, customers, and developers.

However, just as modern-day insights and observability rely on integration to bring applications and data together, automation relies on integration to connect various business capabilities. A holistic integration strategy — where all connections to both internal and external applications can be centrally managed, governed, secured, and promoted — is foundational to building a great automation strategy.

IT leaders must deploy a business automation strategy that encourages innovation throughout the enterprise and democratizes the responsibility of both identifying and finding solutions for everyday challenges — all while Central IT retains the ability to manage overall security and governance. Moving to a composable state positions your organization to take a platform approach to business automation, where APIs and other reusable PBCs help unlock data from back-end systems and provide stakeholders with governed access to automate processes.

Learn much more from our ebook: “The CIO Guide to Business Automation”

• Composability democratizes automation and drives innovation
• CIO checklist for a successful business automation strategy
• Key business areas transformed through automation
• Operational excellence
• Connected customer experience
• Employee experience

Fill in the form to download the full version of our business automation whitepaper.