Establish an operating model that provides the right balance between governance and delivery agility.
Overview
Automation HQ brings together a group of people with specific skills within the organization to provide best practices, standards, training, and other shared services to enable a new operating model based on an “automation-first” culture.
While it shares similarities with the Center of Excellence (CoE) approach to solving the age-old enterprise integration problem, traditionally, organizations approached the CoE model focusing on governance without much consideration on enablement and execution. Moreover, CoE teams historically have become an organizational bottleneck creating an ever increasing backlog of missed opportunities.
Workato's Automation HQ operating model shifts the paradigm on enabling cross-functional “Automation Factories” across the enterprise to build automations. At the same time, the HQ team offers a standardized governance and execution model that does not hinder the delivery speed.
Automation Factory
The realization of business value from automation opportunities happens through federated delivery teams which we call Automation Factories. Each factory is aligned with a business function or automation capability. Automation Factories combines business subject matter experts, business analysts, IT operations, application admins, and a product or a project manager. Industry analysts have often termed these "fusion teams," which align well with the agile operating model that draws team lines across formerly rigid department lines.
Combined with guidance from the HQ team, Automation Factories provides the self-sufficiency and right combination of skills to rapidly implement automations, eliminating the execution bottleneck challenges.
Here are some of the many ways organizations can benefit by establishing an Automation HQ model.
Improve business agility
The Automation HQ team acts as the automation enablement team for the organization. By moving beyond a single team, business analysts and other team members can now start building automations while still receiving appropriate training and guidance from the HQ team. This allows your organization to maximize the value of your existing staff by empowering citizen developers to apply their domain expertise in automating business processes they are most familiar with. This unlocked delivery capacity helps your business respond quickly and provides the ability to accelerate your business transformation initiatives.
Drive consistency
Enterprise automation requires processes that promote efficiency while ensuring that projects adhere to best practices and standards. The Automation HQ team establishes procedures to provide a consistent approach to automation across a diverse set of teams and applications. The HQ team also governs this process to let teams build, test, and operate automations collaboratively and help improve the quality of deployed solutions.
Manage business risks
Realizing a new organizational model in an enterprise requires well-defined controls.
These controls extend the freedom to build automations without opening the organization to unmanaged risks in critical business applications or data. The Automation HQ team helps maintain the guardrails to protect systems by leveraging a strong security model, limiting the available services, and in some cases simplifying the data model. By creating a simplified and controlled environment for building automations, it lowers the learning curve for automation builders and increases their ability to deliver solutions rapidly.
Learn more about building an Automation HQ operating model in the Automation Institute course.
Resources
GEARS Assets