The Business Technology market, a paradigm shift in traditional IT, is expected to reach 15 million jobs by 2022, supporting all verticals. However, despite driving innovation and efficiency across business, only 18% of BT professionals feel valued by stakeholders. This may be due to the fact that both BT professionals and the lines of business they serve largely disagree on which projects to automate first, causing tension between the groups and most BT leaders to feel like they can’t deliver to LOBs fast enough.
Given this changing landscape and the shifting needs of lines of business, Workato recently unveiled the first annual State of Business Technology Report. Conducted by independent firm Atomik Research, we surveyed 112 full-time BT leaders and 302 managers across lines of business – including in HR, Marketing, Sales, Finance, and Support – resulting in the first quantifiable insights into the performance, challenges, and impact of this new role.
Read the full State of Business Technology 2020 report.
With 94% of BT professionals recognizing BT teams as changemakers in an organization, it’s important to clarify their most in-demand projects and from which departments, the correct automation tools they need to perform their jobs well, the speed at which they can complete these projects (based on resources and alignment), and what can be done to solve these issues so that they can continue to transform their organizations.
BT professionals are in charge of launching apps, integrations, and automations in their workplaces, which have the ability to not only impact operational efficiency, but also the employee and customer experience. This differs from IT as their goals are directly tied to the goals of business teams. Therefore, trust is essential between these groups to not only continuously drive innovation, but also come to an understanding as to what should be optimized so that the whole of business benefits and not just its parts.
While 52% of LOBs surveyed strongly trust the people in their organization to effectively manage automations, that trust begins to vary once broken down by department – which can hinder any initiatives to make processes more efficient, adding to the BT workload and slowing functional workflows. This often causes teams like Finance, Sales and HR who often request the most automations to turn to shadow IT for implementation, which can be a huge cybersecurity risk without IT oversight.
By introducing a low-code automation tool that allows smart business users to create integrations and automations for their team with governance from BT, LOBs can get the quick implementations they need while allowing BT leaders to focus on more complex, value-added tasks. This way, everyone can move the needle toward transformation while allowing BT teams to still oversee application work in an organization for security and data purposes – curbing chaotic shadow IT in the process.
To learn more about the top automation goals for BT professionals, what contributes to their backlogs, and how BT engages with lines of business, read our first annual State of Business Technology Report >
