Intelligent Automation Goes Mainstream

Is your organization ready to employ an intelligent automation (IA) strategy? If the answer isn’t a resounding “Yes,” it’s time to reconsider. Smart enterprises understand that IA can improve the whole organization—from boosting productivity to viewing real-time business insights on product performance.

Obviously, these capabilities provide a competitive advantage over businesses that fail to develop a strategy for enterprise-wide IA. In a newly released Harvard Business Review Analytic Services survey of 434 business and technology leaders, 80 percent said employing IA will be very important to ensuring the success of their business over the next five years. At the same time, 86 percent said that not investing in IA would negatively affect their organization’s ability to compete.

“Organizations are already reaping the benefits of intelligent automation, beginning but certainly not ending with enhanced productivity,” said Alex Clemente, managing director of Harvard Business Review Analytic Services. “By establishing these proof points, many are now engaged in how to scale their use of IA across and throughout the enterprise.”

So why do business leaders consider IA so crucial?

For starters, IA frees up personnel for more strategic work across the enterprise—whether it’s a database administrator who can work on a special project for business units or an accountant who can do more analysis instead of spreadsheet adjustments.

Respondents in the survey agree: 52 percent believe IA will have the greatest impact on productivity, while 36 percent see it improving the customer experience. Thirty-five percent expect improved innovation, 32 percent predict better profitability, and 31 percent think product/service quality will ameliorate.

A seamless start to adding intelligent automation

For many organizations, trying to determine where IA makes the most sense—along with where and how to start—can be overwhelming. For instance, IT staff may ask, “How do you integrate new IA functions with existing applications?” or, “How do you scale these automation initiatives across the enterprise?” Well, working IA into your organization is less daunting than it may seem if you choose the right platform.

With Oracle Cloud, you get a platform that delivers three essential drivers of a successful IA project—automation, cloud infrastructure, and advanced analytics—integrated into one offering, making it a seamless solution.

A great place to start in IA is with your database, a critical part of your organization. With Oracle Autonomous Database, machine learning is used to automate areas such as security, backups, updates, and other routine management tasks. But unlike a conventional database, it automates routine database tasks, allowing you to focus on getting the most out of your data.

The self-managing cloud infrastructure also enables you to run traditional enterprise apps as well as modern cloud-native apps such as chatbots and AI-powered assistants that can help reduce operational overhead.

Advanced analytics infrastructure is lagging

Still, you’re going to want to optimally mine that data using advanced analytics for crucial insights into your business. Those insights are why more organizations are recognizing the importance of advanced analytics even though many have not yet fully committed to it. In the same Harvard Business Review Analytic Services survey, 71 percent of respondents said advanced analytics will be critical to their business over the next five years, while only 31 percent said the technology is in wide-scale production at their organization.

This signals that enterprises are looking for the right cloud infrastructure, the right database, and the right analytics system to enable them to jump fully on board.

Another key service available with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is Oracle Analytics, which works together with Oracle Autonomous Database. It allows you to pull data directly from your database and into an advanced analytics dashboard for a seamless transition with no data fragmentation. Instead of data being moved onto spreadsheets from applications—where it almost immediately becomes outdated—the data moves right into the dashboard for real-time analytics.

In addition, Oracle’s integrated solution makes governance more streamlined.

No more unapproved and disparate software tools being imported from suspect and unsecured websites.

These benefits couldn’t be timelier.

Forty-seven percent of the survey respondents said that their company has set up a governance model for the appropriate use of IA, up from 17 percent in a year-earlier poll. That demonstrates that company leaders understand that IA is key to driving smarter governance policies.

The overarching theme of the survey is clear: IA is critical in today’s digital world and the leaders agree. The question is how to get to that optimal state of automation and what the best practices are once you’re there. To learn more about intelligent automation and how technology leaders are applying these new innovations, download this report.