The realities of workplace automation

[Amelie Winkler _Appfire_]

Hi, community!

Today, I’d love to share some insights from a recently published research report that Appfire ran in collaboration with Isos Technologies. The report looks into workplace automation, its impact on cross-functional teams, and its unrealized potential.

Here are a couple of takeaways:

Businesses expect greater productivity, accuracy, cost savings, and scalability through automation.

(Unsurprisingly) The vast majority of businesses see automating day-to-day processes as a strategic priority. Why? 92% believe automating day-to-day processes will enable them to scale their business more quickly and unlock benefits like increased productivity, accuracy, and cost savings.

Therefore, nearly half of organizations (46%) expect to increase the degree of automation in the next 6 months.

The extent to which automation is implemented varies across company sizes, industries, and business units.

84% of enterprise organizations have medium/high levels of automation, while medium and smaller organizations show lower levels of automation (76% and 53% respectively). While automation is highest in the IT (90%), software (85%), and finance (78%) teams, those are also the ones most eager to up their automation game.

Is this a pattern you’ve noticed across some of the organizations you worked at?

The actual benefits of automation may differ from the initial expectations.

Companies with mature automation processes are more likely to experience significant benefits like time freed up thanks to their automated processes.

Most of those who expected increased productivity have achieved it (78%). However, other anticipated benefits have been less frequently observed. Smaller businesses are less likely to experience some of the benefits. Why? Is it because those companies are expecting benefits or returns too quickly? Or is it that there’s a threshold that needs to be surpassed for automation to truly bring value? Or maybe they’re not tracking the results (yet)?

I’m curious to hear your thoughts. Does any of this ring true from your experience? Does anything stand out?

[Laurie Sciutti]

Great discussion topic, @Amelie Winkler _Appfire_ !  I'm always on the lookout for ways to automate processes (in both my professional AND my personal life) to afford me the time to learn new things, help others or simply to not be so stressed out from the workload.  I've found hurdles to this sometimes due to a lack of tools or my lack of knowledge about how to automate certain things but I'm usually able to figure it out.  That (lack of knowledge and even lack of access to automation tools) may be a factor for the unrealized benefits in smaller companies, too.

[Amelie Winkler _Appfire_]

Thank you for joining the discussion, @Laurie SciuttiYou're making a great point! Especially for smaller organizations that often operate with limited resources, setting up and adopting automation practices in the first place can be a bit more challenging.
I'm curious if you've come across any particular automation tools or resources that have been especially helpful in your efforts to automate processes?

[Laurie Sciutti]

Hi @Amelie Winkler _Appfire_ ~ the tools I use are typical for Jira administration (i.e. ScriptRunner, Jira Automation) but I have used PowerShell in the past as well as some internal AWS services.

[Benjamin Horst]

Most of those who expected increased productivity have achieved it (78%). However, other anticipated benefits have been less frequently observed. Smaller businesses are less likely to experience some of the benefits. Why? Is it because those companies are expecting benefits or returns too quickly? Or is it that there’s a threshold that needs to be surpassed for automation to truly bring value? Or maybe they’re not tracking the results (yet)?

I expect smaller businesses to have:

• more individual setups in their projects and spaces compared to bigger companies with a good amount of standards. In a bigger company processes are more defined and you have less individual solutions (in percentage :P ). So sometimes they might underestimate the effort of the automation. Often you don't just set this up and it works. E.g.: you want to create a Subtask based on an event. This might work for one project, but the next project doesn't work with that even or status. Or you create that Subtask and the template text you add is only to the point for 80% of the cases
• In smaller companies it is easier to rapidly start something and explore it and then dump it if it doesn't work. I found it to be more cumbersome to set up improvements in a bigger company. You have to coordinate with lots of people, integrations with other tools and such. So you have to think things through to not break your CI/CD chain. So when you automate, you are pretty sure on what to expect
• In bigger companies, there's bigger numbers. E.g.: I invest two days to automate something that gets done once a day by every developer and saves 2 Minutes. With eight hours of work the task has to be executed  480 times until it brings a benefit. With 5 developers this is 96 days. With 100 developers it starts saving time after a week
• tracking the savings is not a trivial task. And with sheer numbers you sometimes don't have to track it thoroughly because of the calculation in my last point. With smaller numbers you then tend to rely on the "feeling" of improvement. And unless it's a task everybody hates, the feeling when saving two minutes a day will not qualify to give that automation a 10/10,

[Amelie Winkler _Appfire_]

Great points, @Benjamin Horst ! I think you're spot on about "the lack of standardization" in smaller companies and how that complicates the setup of repeatable automations.

And YES on the tracking side, too. There's often no process for tracking automation results – and even less so in smaller organizations, where results will naturally be smaller numbers as you pointed out.