Process to measure, report, and track the performance of automations to ensure that they are consistently delivering business value and relevant to the current enterprise strategy.

Overview

Organizations implement automations to achieve specific strategic objectives and deliver business outcomes. Most teams use the intake and prioritization process during project initiation to assess the business impact of automation and determine the implementation approach. However, upon completion, the success of these projects are often measured based on their defined scope and ability to address the requirements rather than the business value they deliver.

The business value of automation and integration becomes important criteria for approving investments needed for scaling adoption beyond the initially identified scope. Such metrics also help justify the support and maintenance budgets of deployed projects.

The business value can be measured in quantifiable economic terms and/or strategic importance. Following are the four main classifications you can use when measuring and reporting the business value of automation.

Business Cost Savings: Automations create value for the company by improving staff productivity and reducing costs. For example, automation can save hours the HR team spends manually onboarding a new employee. Similarly, you can optimize the business application license cost by using automation to extract application data and make it accessible.
Revenue Generation: Automation can have a direct impact on the organization's revenue streams. For example, automation can enrich sales leads, which allows sales teams to identify higher-quality leads in a shorter amount of time, thus increasing sales conversion.

User Experience: Automation and integration reduce the time to complete tasks, improving the ability to respond to support requests quickly, which leads to higher customer satisfaction. It also enhances employee experience as they don't have to perform repetitive tasks. Employees can focus on more value-added work instead of jobs that can be automated.

Risk Reduction: Automation reduces human error that may occur when performing tasks manually. Automations help organizations standardize their processes, ensuring compliance across their enterprise to manage and mitigate business risks.

Automations often generate business value on an ongoing basis for as long as they are running. Hence, identifying, measuring, and reporting the business value should be a continuous process followed by every project.

Continuous value reporting of various initiatives helps improve the visibility of enterprise automation’s impact on the organization for all stakeholders and supports the decision-making process of business leaders.

You can learn more about how to measure and report the business value of automation in the Automation Institute course.

Resources

GEARS Assets