The enterprises’ adoption of automation technologies has been accelerating over the last few years. The COVID-19 pandemic has stress-tested organizations’ business continuity plans and forced enterprises to rethink their strategic priorities. The crisis brought home the importance of digital transformation, with automation emerging as a vital lever to accelerate the shift to become a digital-first business. While the opportunity to adopt Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has captured the attention of many organizations, there is a distinct shift among forward-looking enterprises toward Intelligent Automation (IA) to expand the scope and scale of their automation initiatives.

While successful adoption of IA technologies has the potential to help enterprises achieve superior business outcomes, the road to scaling up automation programs is not without challenges. Some forward-looking enterprises, however, have successfully overcome these barriers and have employed organization-wide strategy to drive IA at scale, resulting in significantly greater business impact and enhanced experiences for their employees and customers.

To capture the most recent dynamics in enterprise automation and identify key success factors for scaling up automation initiatives, Everest Group surveyed 50 executives from enterprises ranging across different organizational sizes, all of which embarked on their IA journeys more than two years ago.

This paper combines the findings from the survey and select in-depth interviews, as well as Everest Group’s ongoing research and IP on IA, to provide insights across the following:

• The evolution of the enterprise automation journey
• Benefits achieved through successfully-scaled automation initiatives
• Key barriers to scaling up automation programs
• Best practices and key success factors for those ahead of the pack in successfully driving and managing enterprise-wide automation initiatives

The research maps the IA journey from an enterprise practitioners’ perspective and identifies mature enterprises that have been able to successfully scale up their IA initiatives. It contrasts them with typical enterprises to provide insights into the key enablers needed to successfully scale up automation initiatives within the enterprise.

Scope:

All industries and geographies

Contents:

This report looks at:

• The evolution of enterprise automation journey
• Benefits achieved through successfully-scaled automation initiatives
• Barriers to scaling up automation programs
• Key success factors for scaling up automation initiatives
• Leveraging third-party service providers for successful adoption and scaling up
• Future outlook and conclusion

Membership(s)

Service Optimization Technologies (SOT)

Sourcing and Vendor Management