Workload automation (WLA) has emerged as a critical capability for enterprises undergoing digital transformation. As per Gartner, 75% of organizations implementing digital transformation view IT process automation, like workload automation, as vital for meeting their business goals. This blog provides a comprehensive guide on workload automation – what it is, why it matters, top use cases, evaluation criteria, and recommendations on how organizations across industries can leverage these tools to drive transformation.
What is Workload Automation and How Does it Work?
Workload automation refers to specialized tools that help enterprises schedule, orchestrate and monitor business process workflows spanning multiple platforms, applications and environments. They enable managing unattended, backend execution of high volume, repetitive tasks through a centralized interface.
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As opposed to traditional job schedulers focused just on batch processing, workload automation steps it up across five aspects:
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Holistic workflow automation: Workload automation tools don’t just schedule jobs. They can model end-to-end business processes spanning discrete jobs, handle event triggers, dependencies, provide auditing and orchestrate workflows across platforms.
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Heterogenous platform support: Workload automation allows coordinating workflows involving multiple platforms like on-premise systems, cloud environments, containers, data warehouses, ETL services in a unified manner.
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Integration capabilities: Workload automation leverages connectors, APIs and integration capabilities to interoperate with other core enterprise platforms used for application releases, data warehousing, IT service management.
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Advanced operational features: Workload automation enhances reliability of business workflows through balancing workloads on resources, enabling high availability, dynamically allocating more resources to critical jobs.
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Unified administration and monitoring: Companies can define, schedule, monitor workflow KPIs and gain centralized visibility into automation health from a single pane of glass.
Now that we know what workload automation does, let‘s examine why enterprises care about it.
Why Should Businesses Invest in Workload Automation Capabilities?
The business drivers motivating enterprises to pursue workload automation range from cost management to improving reliability of business services. Let‘s explore the major factors:
Accelerating Digital Transformation Success
As per a survey by EMA research, 47% of organizations viewed adopting workload automation as the number one way to enable their digital transformation mandate. Automating IT and business operations is pivotal to transforming enterprises to be digitally dexterous. Workload automation solutions make it faster and easier to onboard new cloud platforms, data sources and automate processes – thus accelerating transformations.
85% of organizations expected to adopt workload automation by 2020 (EMA survey)
Driving Greater IT Effectiveness
Forbes research reveals that enterprises using workload automation realized a 42% improvement in IT staff productivity as they needed to spend less time on manual tasks. 52% saved costs by decommissioning legacy job schedulers and consolidating process automation on robust workload automation platforms.
By centrally coordinating workflows spanning legacy systems, cloud environments and orchestrating interdependent jobs, workload automation gives IT better outcomes including:
- Improved SLA compliance: Orchestrate and monitor busines critical jobs and SLAs from a unified platform
- Quicker platform migration: Onboard new cloud platforms, manage provisioning and automate data movement faster
- Enhanced observability: Single lens into automation health across infrastructure and consumption insights
Boosting Business Productivity via Automation
The economic potential of automating knowledge work is estimated to be over $9 trillion just in the US, as per McKinsey. Workload automation allows enterprises across industries to automate business functions through low-code platforms, pre-built integrations and RPA bots.
Key business benefits workload automation drives are:
- ~20-30% reduction in manual efforts for departments like finance, accounting, HR
- 50% quicker period close cycles via finance automation
- 80% faster new hire on-boarding through automated IT system provisioning and access
Top 12 Use Cases of Workload Automation
Workload automation platforms offer rich capabilities that can be leveraged by enterprises across functions. Let‘s discuss the top business use cases:
IT Use Cases
1. Data warehouse and ETL automation
Workload automation tools help manage and orchestrate ETL pipelines that transform data across sources and load it into data warehouses. This helps improve reliability of DW jobs from 80% to 99% and accelerate new pipeline deployment by 65%.
2. Application release automation
Workload automation augments existing release automation platforms with capabilities like workload modeling, dynamic forecasting and simulation to optimize deployment workflows.
3. Multi-cloud orchestration
As organizations operate multi-cloud environments, workload automation helps them seamlessly provision resources across public clouds, monitor costs and utilization in a unified manner.
4. IT process automation
IT teams use workload automation to standardize and automate processes like server provisioning, software license management, access deprovisioning saving thousands of admin hours.
HR Use Cases
5. Onboarding and offboarding
HR can define and automate workflows for employee offboarding spanning functions like access management, asset return, finance system update saving massive manual effort.
6. Automated payroll
By modelling payroll runs as workflows in workload automation platforms, HR can schedule periodic runs, orchestrate downstream processes like bank transfers and get audit trails to simplify compliance.
Finance Use Cases
7. Automated reconciliations
Finance teams can leverage workload automation to develop standardized reconciliations processes spanning bank statements, sub-ledgers etc. and automate their execution.
8. Faster period close
Workload automation allows modeling period close dependencies as workflows with SLAs. This provides finance teams superior visibility and control over tasks reducing period close from 10 days to just 2 days.
The use cases highlight the pervasive role workload automation can play in driving digital transformation across functions. But making the right workload automation choice can be confusing given the breadth of vendors.
So how should you go about evaluating options? Let‘s explore that next.
Choosing a Workload Automation Platform: Key Selection Criteria
While core workflow automation capabilities might seem similar across offerings, they differ significantly when it comes to aspects like:
Here are eight key parameters organizations should evaluate:
1. Time to realize value
The workload automation platforms organizations should prioritize are ones that provide easy low-code or no-code interfaces, templatized workflows andprebuilt integrations that speed up onboarding and time to automate.
2. Scalability
Since workload automation underpins mission critical workflows, theability to support high job loads, scale seamlessly and provide high availability is vital. Tracking record on large deployments is crucial.
3. Heterogenous platform support
Given hybrid technology environments, robust connector support for platforms like ServiceNow, Snowflake, Databricks, Kubernetes and lift and shift integration capabilities are important.
4. Security
Evaluate SCM integration for change tracking, access controls and masking capabilities to protect sensitive workflows and data. Auditing with role based access views provides compliance transparency.
5. Universal automation
Prioritize vendors that can automate IT as well as business operations using workload modelling, forms based workflows and RPA bots to drive enterprise scale impact.
6. Operational maturity
Proven operational practices like workload forecasting, what-if analysis, SLA tracking and simulation reduce risk. Dominant players have honed these over years of mission critical deployments.
7. Right deployment model
Assess if you need on-premise, pure SaaS or hybrid models considering appetite for control, change readiness and use case continuity.
8. In-house workload automation expertise
Given the learning curve, partner with vendors that can provide hands on coaching support during evaluation and deployment powered by internal workload automation CoEs.
Using parameters like these can help organizations find the right long term enterprise automation partner vs a point solution.
Additionally, engaging workload automation specialists early on via proof of value projects focused on top pain points is recommended. This allows you to experience capabilities first hand before broader commitments.
Realizing the Workload Automation Dividend
As increasing number of forward looking enterprises pursue large scale automation powered transformations, workload automation is coming into the spotlight as an enabling capability. Much like what ERPs did to unify processes, these tools hold the promise to integrate automation building blocks and help you ..
- Respond faster to changing market needs
- Scale innovation and efficiency aggressively
- Unlock trapped productivity in mission critical workflows
However, as highlighted before, organizations need to invest in evaluation and choose carefully. The right workload automation platform provides strategic advantage that accrues over time vs short term cost savings from blunt automation tools.
Hopefully, the detailed buyer‘s guide covered here will help you assess options aligned to your needs and priorities. Would love to hear your feedback or automation modernization challenges. Please feel free to submit a discussion topic below!
