Charles Crouchman is the Chief Product Officer of Redwood Software, a leader in automation fabric solutions.
Tell me if this scenario sounds familiar: You’ve joined a new company, excited to bring your expertise in overseeing critical IT functions and help the organization level up. However, as you settle in, you quickly realize the magnitude of the task ahead.
The company has not consolidated its many process schedulers into a single platform, causing it to run nearly two million job executions a month across myriad on-premises and web-based systems. The team has also resorted to ad hoc solutions over the years, with no single source providing end-to-end visibility into IT and business processes. As a result, you lack insight into process statuses and failures, and worse, you’re still in need of more people to keep your department and the business going.
A Trillion-Dollar Global Tech Problem
A study examining the increase in tech debt from 2012 to 2023 across industries and regions reveals global tech debt has nearly doubled over this timeframe, increasing by around $6 trillion. In the United States, three sectors are responsible for 64% of the estimated $2.2 trillion rise in tech debt: banking and investment services; communications, media and services; and government.
This heavy accumulation of tech debt ultimately leads to decreased organizational agility and control. As more human intervention is required to monitor and manage processes, more mistakes are made and contributions to missed SLAs and strategic business projects falter. Due to this, only 16.2% of projects are completed on time and within budget. These incomplete projects may include untested modules, postponed integrations or delayed system upgrades, ultimately resulting in hidden costs and operational inefficiencies within your organization.
You’re now limited in your ability to scale, forcing your organization into a reactive position, halting business operations to handle overdue infrastructure or software improvements.
Disconnected Tools Leading To Disconnected Processes
Tech debt often arises when companies layer multiple platforms and automation solutions onto an already complex tech stack, failing to connect critical processes end-to-end or integrate seamlessly with their enterprise resource planning tools.
Due to limited integrations with applications at the time of deployment, departments often select different tools to address specific processes and function needs, whether it be scheduling, inventory management, order processing or delivery fulfillment systems.
For example, your product team may use one platform to automate project tracking, while your data team is still manually pulling analytics and reports. The entire process was never fully migrated to a newer solution, causing frequent delays. At this stage, many organizations frequently adopt additional infrastructure management and new automation solutions to optimize and monitor their processes.
However, these tools can sometimes struggle to integrate seamlessly with existing systems or monitor specific platforms, process frequency and dependencies effectively. When automated processes operate in silos or are only partially integrated, the processes and oversight can become more complex, have a higher likelihood of failing and be more expensive overall.
As the lack of visibility continues to grow, many companies become vulnerable to errors and noncompliance and lack the scalability to remain competitive.
Steps To Success
To maximize the benefits of automation and streamline operations, organizations must first focus on building a clean, consolidated tech stack.
Start with a thorough audit of existing tools to identify redundancies and critical systems. Develop a phased roadmap that allows gradual consolidation while minimizing disruption. With fewer vendors to manage, the IT department can devote more time and resources to building stronger relationships with key vendors. This can lead to better communication, faster issue resolution and more effective collaboration.
Your employees must also see that the benefits of moving toward a unified system outweigh the short-term discomfort of change. Share with them how they’ll be able to focus on more strategic initiatives, such as investing in new technology solutions or enhancing IT and business process consistency to drive revenue growth.
Once processes are consolidated, automation fabrics can then unify disparate systems by connecting tools that once were automated in silos, allowing for smoother data flow, integrated end-to-end processes and real-time monitoring capabilities.
Tool consolidation should be seen not as a one-time fix, but as an ongoing process integral to maintaining your operational efficiency and competitive advantage. Regularly assess the connection of all SaaS and legacy automation applications with your ERP system.
Ask yourself and your team questions such as, “Am I able to create new automation quickly and at scale without extensive programming resources? Can I monitor and control the myriad processes in real time and have confidence that the processes will run to completion? Can I predict, manage and take action on performance?”
By reducing tech debt and streamlining your tools and automated processes, you can achieve significant financial savings, enhance productivity and improve your ability to respond quickly to market demands. IT teams will stay informed about mission-critical processes and receive early alerts if deadlines or performance thresholds are falling behind, allowing the team to address potential issues before they impact the business.
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