Scale Business Process Automation

Business process automation (BPA) adoption gained significant momentum as your business leaders saw the positive outcomes in your pilots, such as improvements in customer experience, operational efficiencies, and cost optimizations.
Your stakeholders are ready to increase their investments in more process automation solutions. They want to scale initial successes to other business and IT functions.
However, it is unclear how BPA can be successfully scaled and what benefits can be achieved from it.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

The shift from isolated, task-based automations in your pilot to value-oriented, scaled automations brings new challenges and barriers to your organization such as:

Little motivation or tolerance to change existing business operations to see the full value of BPA.
Overinvesting in current BPA technologies to maximize the return despite available alternatives that can do the same tasks better.
BPA teams are ill-equipped to meet the demands and complexities of scaled BPA implementations.

Impact and Result

Ground your scaling expectations. Set realistic and achievable goals centered on driving business value to the entire organization by optimizing and automating end-to-end business processes.
Define your scaling journey. Tailor your scaling approach according to your ability to ease BPA implementation, to broaden BPA adoption, and to loosen BPA constraints.
Prepare to scale BPA. Cement your BPA management and governance foundations to support BPA scaling using the lessons learned from your pilot implementation.

Scale Business Process Automation Research & Tools

1. Scale Business Process Automation Deck – A guide to learn the opportunities and values of scaling business process automation.

This research walks you through the level setting of your scaled business process automation (BPA) expectations, factors to consider in defining your scaled BPA journey, and assessing your readiness to scale BPA.

2. Scale Business Process Automation Readiness Assessment – A tool to help you evaluate your readiness to scale business process automation.

Use this tool to identify key gaps in the people, processes, and technologies you need to support the scaling of business process automation (BPA). It also contains a canvas to facilitate your discussions around business process automation with your stakeholders and BPA teams.

Scale Business Process Automation

Take a value-first approach to automate the processes that matter

Analyst Perspective

Scaling business process automation (BPA) is an organization-wide commitment

Business and IT must work together to ensure the right automations are implemented and BPA is grown and matured in a sustainable way. However, many organizations are not ready to make this commitment. Managing the automation demand backlog, coordinating cross-functional effort and organizational change, and measuring BPA value are some of the leading factors challenging scaling BPA.

Pilot BPA with the intent to scale it. Pilots are safe starting points to establish your foundational governance and management practices and build the necessary relationships and collaborations for you to be successful. These factors will then allow you to explore more sophisticated, complicated, and innovative opportunities to drive new value to your team, department, and organization.

A picture of Andrew Kum-Seun

Andrew Kum-Seun
Research Director,
Application Delivery and Management
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

Business process automation (BPA) adoption gained significant momentum as your business leaders see the positive outcomes in your pilots, such as improvements in customer experience, operational efficiencies, and cost optimizations.
Your stakeholders are ready to increase their investments in more process automation solutions. They want to scale initial successes to other business and IT functions.
However, it is unclear how BPA can be successfully scaled and what benefits can be achieved from it.

Common Obstacles

The shift from isolated, task-based automations in your pilot to value-oriented and scaled automations brings new challenges and barriers to your organization:

Little motivation or tolerance to change existing business operations to see the full value of BPA.
Overinvesting in current BPA technologies to maximize return despite available alternatives that can do the same tasks better.
BPA teams are ill-equipped to meet the demands and complexities of scaled BPA implementations.

Info-Tech's Approach

Ground your scaling expectations. Set realistic and achievable goals centered on driving business value to the entire organization by optimizing and automating end-to-end business processes.
Define your scaling journey. Tailor your scaling approach according to your ability to ease BPA implementation, to broaden BPA adoption, and to loosen BPA constraints.
Prepare to scale BPA. Cement your BPA management and governance foundations to support BPA scaling using the lessons learned from your pilot implementation.

Info-Tech Insight

Take a value-first approach in your scaling business process automation (BPA) journey. Low-risk, task-oriented automations are good starting points to introduce BPA but constrain the broader returns your organization wants. Business value can only scale when everything and everyone in your processes are working together to streamline the entire value stream rather than the small gains from optimizing small, isolated automations.

Scale Business Process Automation

Take a value-first approach to automate the processes that matter

Pilot Your BPA Capabilities

Learn the foundation practices to design, deliver, and support BPA.
Understand the fit and value of BPA.
Gauge the tolerance for business operational change and system risk.

See Info-Tech's Build a Winning Business Process Automation Playbook blueprint for more information.

Build Your Scaling BPA Vision

Apply Lessons Learned to Scale

Ground Your Scaling Expectations
Set realistic and achievable goals centered on driving business value to the entire organization by optimizing and automating end-to-end business processes.
Define Your Scaling Journey
Tailor your scaling approach according to your ability to ease BPA implementation, to broaden BPA adoption, and to loosen BPA constraints.
Prepare to Scale BPA
Cement your BPA management and governance foundations to support BPA scaling using the lessons learned from your pilot implementation.

Research deliverable

Design and communicate your approach to scale business process automation with Info-Tech's Scale Business Process Automation Readiness Assessment:

Level set your scaled BPA goals and objectives.
Discuss and design your scaled BPA journey.
Identify the gaps and improvements needed to scale your BPA practices and implementation.

A screenshot from Info-Tech's Scale Business Process Automation Readiness Assessment

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

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