The imperative to sharply improve business processes, and even reinvent the business, using automation technologies is gaining steam. One way to automate is through teams: Set up a project team, or an automation center of excellence (CoE), identify the right activities or tasks, reimagine a business process, and then automate the activities. Another way is to get automation technologies into the hands of a broad swath of employees who can, in turn, automate work on their own.

While involving a wide range of employees in automation isn’t new, increasingly powerful types of automation are rapidly emerging. These include robotic process automation (RPA) and cognitive automation tools deploying machine learning, natural language processing, and other forms of artificial intelligence. Unlike earlier tools, these new technologies hold tremendous promise for automating an even greater amount of manual work and simultaneously giving organizations resources to support effective collaboration and governance.

To harness the potential of these new technologies, companies need to grow automation in both ways—through project teams and CoEs and through employees interacting with the tools and automating their own work. Until now, the former approach has been more prevalent.

This presents a challenge: How can companies empower employees to more enthusiastically embrace automation, with flexible and easy-to-use tools that have strong governance, without creating more complexity for IT teams to manage?

Read more on Channel Post MEA