Why 2023 will be the year of Tactical Automation in business

Automation tools have seen a great deal of investment in the past few years with the bigger vendors leading the charge with large-scale deployments of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tools. Their challenge to their customer base is to treat automation strategically and create an automation-first mindset in the enterprise. If automation is right for your situation, then this makes sense most of the time. However, I’m going to take a different view for this year, because I think 2023 will be all about Tactical Automation, and here are three reasons why.

• The world economy will slow and many regions will be in recession. Businesses will be careful with cash and projects will need to show faster ROI. Many high-level transformation programmes will be slowed or re-scoped.
• Companies that have consolidated onto Microsoft 365, which has seen tremendous growth in the past 12 months, will be asking their CIOs to squeeze every last penny out of that investment before taking on more software tools.
• The increasing maturity of low- and no-code automation tools such as the Microsoft Power Platform will generate demand as people learn how to create their own improvements. CIOs will need to support with governance and established technology practices such as version control and testing processes.

Tactical automation is business and user-led, and it is about solving point problems around data input, analysis or transfer that currently has a significant manual element. The bigger profile RPA tools can solve these problems, but their technical footprint is big, and the licence costs can be prohibitive unless they are applied to large-scale processes. Microsoft Power Automate is the most likely tool to be used for tactical automation if only because of the existing investment that many organisations have made in Microsoft 365.  

Using these tools, a proof-of-concept can be deployed in a matter of hours, an operating automation workflow in a matter of days. Where these automations become business-critical, more governance and structure can be built to improve the maturity and ensure that the process can handle exceptions and alert when errors are encountered, for example.

For a business that knows its processes well; where processes are largely static and repeatable, and data is stable and usable, tactical automation can be the solution to empower the users to increase productivity and enhance performance and accuracy. As a business, if this is something you would like to learn more about but possibly need help defining or even perhaps, really understanding your processes or your opportunities for automation, please get in touch. Jumar has both the experience and expertise in supporting you to solve your own problems, increase productivity and maximise your tactical automation potential.

Chris Weston
CDIO, Jumar