Enhancing experiences: How hyper automation gives businesses a head start

CIOs have guided their organisations through massive waves of disruption with digital transformation in the past two years. Yet, as the business landscape shifts, so does the role of the CIO.

Evolving customer and employee expectations, along with the rise of the hybrid workforce, are creating a new imperative for CIOs to ensure digital investments made during the pandemic are delivering revenue for the business.

With automation largely being seen as the new fabric for digital business, what is the role of hyper automation in helping CIOs achieve their objectives, and how will the role of the CIO change in 2022 and beyond?

These are just some of the areas addressed in Enhancing experiences: How hyper automation gives businesses a head start, a recent webinar hosted by Adobe and Forrester.

Here are some of the key insights from the session.

CIOs as change makers

IT continues to play a big part in driving organisational change, with 86 percent of CIOs surveyed describing their role as digital- and innovation-focused, and the majority noting they spend much of their time effecting transformation across the enterprise.

CIOs are also significantly more likely than leaders in any other function to expect increases in their IT budgets this year, demonstrating the board’s trust in their capabilities to drive change.

In addition to increasing operational efficiency, transforming existing business processes and improving employee productivity, automation that leads to increased business performance is rapidly becoming a top priority on their agenda. More CIOs are expected to automate efforts across business and IT processes to streamline operations while taking on new revenue responsibilities.

Avoiding transformation and automation siloes

Automation is a no-brainer when it comes to cost and productivity. However, while many organisations automate across all levels, most have yet to achieve a “peak of innovation and business transformation” that optimises their investments, according to Sam Higgins, Principal Analyst at Forrester.

Often, businesses that employ a high level of automation still suffer from what Higgins terms “automation myopia”. This can manifest in enterprises taking siloed approaches to automation or having the misconception that a single type of automation technology can address all types of business problems. These piecemeal approaches to automation inevitably hinder transformation and create technical debt, eventually compromising future transformational investments.

Today, business moves faster than ever before, demanding organisations to become more agile and efficient to keep pace. To do so, they must reframe how they think about automation and look to adopt a set of diverse but complementary technologies that can efficiently and effectively support the ecosystem of teams, partners and consumers they serve.

A good place to start is digitising document workflows with tools such as Adobe Acrobat Sign to help improve customer experience, acquisition and onboarding while reducing risk with enterprise-level security features.

Digital transformation in the post-COVID world

As we look to accelerate out of the pandemic, the hybrid workforce has created differing needs for digital transformation. Work arrangements that involve varying locations and devices can create friction points that can be addressed through hyper automation.

To keep teams engaged and productive, organisations must deliver seamless, personalised experiences for employees, just as they aim to do for customers.

For this to be successful, businesses must double down on their investments in hyper automation and examine every touchpoint and process to determine where efficiency and speed can be improved through automation.

Hyper automation is proving to be one of the most important facets of digital transformation that CIOs must master to accomplish their objectives. By elevating their transformation approach from tactical to strategic, CIOs can enable their organisations to keep pace with the changing needs of the business, their employees and its customers.

Watch the webinar on demand.