Automation's relevance lies in its application. Integrating with advancing technologies and supported by the creation and proliferation of specialized roles to manage its deployment, automation is expanding to encompassing an ever-widening range of utilization. Noteworthy trends in automation include: 

• Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) 
  At the forefront of automation, AI and ML revolutionize enable systems to learn from data and improve over time. This capability allows for the automation of ever-more complex tasks.

• Hyperautomation 
  Hyperautomation involves the convergence of multiple technologies, including AI, ML, and robotic process automation (RPA) to automate as many business and IT processes as possible.

• Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) 
  AIOps platforms consolidate disparate IT tools into a single unified, automated system, enabling more proactive and rapid responses to potential IT issues. 

• Chief automation officers (CAOs) 
  CAOs oversee the deployment of automation technologies across the enterprise, ensuring they align with business goals. 

• Digital workers 
  Digital workers, powered by AI capabilities like ML and natural language processing (NLP), work independently or alongside humans to perform complex actions. This innovation extends automation’s benefits from repetitive tasks to more complex processes, improving efficiency and productivity. 

• Financial Operations (FinOps) 
  FinOps merges financial discipline with DevOps to optimize cloud investments. Automation plays a key role in implementing FinOps practices, enabling organizations to efficiently manage costs and maximize returns on their technology investments. 

• Green IT 
  Automation contributes significantly to sustainability goals by optimizing resource use and reducing waste. Automated systems can ensure efficient operation of computing systems and devices, directly impacting an organization's environmental footprint and operational costs.

• Low-code, No-code 
  Low-code and no-code platforms democratize automation, empowering users without technical expertise to design and implement automated processes. This trend accelerates the adoption of automation technologies, enabling rapid development and deployment of solutions.

If you decide to invest in an automation platform, be aware that you have a wide range of choices, and not all provide the same level of service. As such, reading reviews, researching case studies, and—when possible—trying out demos and free-trial options can help you get a feel for what each is capable of.

With that in mind, here are the four main factors to consider when choosing an automation platform: 

• Scalability

As your business grows, you do not want to have to find a new automation platform to support increased demand. A scalable automation platform will be able to grow with your business. 

• Flexibility

Your chosen automation platform should be able to fit the unique needs of your business. Finding a platform that is flexible enough to do exactly what you need it to do is absolutely essential. 

• Reliability

You have a lot riding on your automation solution, so your platform should be dependable. Frequent outages, unreliable support options, bugs, and other issues will tell you that you need to keep looking. 

• Usability

Not everyone in your business who uses the automation platform is, or should be, a developer. The platform you choose needs to be intuitive and user-friendly enough that everyone can build effective automations. Find a platform tailored towards citizen developers and well as professional developers. 

Businesses may incorporate automation to control nearly any kind of task. Basic automation usually involves assigning simple tasks to automated systems, and relies heavily on automation tools, while more complex automation may demand dedicated software or even artificial learning programs. The following are examples of automation in business:

• Business process management 

Automation plays a key factor in business process management (BMP). BMP describes the methods a company can use to measure, analyze, and improve business processes for increased efficiency and reduced costs.

• DevOps automation 

Development and operations teams may implement automation for improved code development and testing, security testing, workflows, infrastructure implementations and changes, and validation of configuration management changes.

• Workflow automation 

Workflows gain increased efficiency and visibility when supported by automation. Workflow automation solves problematic issues that are common in manual workflows, including employee dependency, lack of transparency, and unnecessary bottlenecks and slowdowns.

• Orchestration 

Automation in orchestration helps improve workflow efficiency by automating computer systems, applications, and services. Orchestration is particularly effective in automating IT-related tasks, decreasing IT team workloads.

• Automation vs. Orchestration 

Most organizations have a clear idea of what automation is, but might not be as clear on orchestration. Orchestration incorporates automation but takes it further. Orchestration automates many tasks together, allowing for entire automated processes that operate seamlessly, and effectively on their own.

Retail businesses need to be able to effectively address customer concerns and improve visibility into their own operations. Automation is helping retail businesses achieve this goal.

To provide patients with the care they require, providers need to be able to coordinate effectively, respond to service tickets quickly, and focus their energies on improving patient circumstances. Automation helps make it possible.

• Omnicare 
  Omnicare is an industry leading, long-term care pharmacy services provider. As Omnicare made the switch to outsourcing the day-to-day management of IT services, freeing up in-house IT professionals to focus high-value strategic initiatives, it encountered a problem: Omnicare would need to maintain its highly rated customer-service levels, despite outsourcing to other service providers. By integrating ServiceNow solutions, Omnicare was able to achieve full visibility into service-provider environments. This led to a 90% first-contact resolution rate, and used custom applications to help ensure optimal internal operations and customer satisfaction. 
  See how Omnicare and ServiceNow are applying automation to facilitate top-quality customer service at scale

• Novant Health 
  Novant Health is an integrated network of physicians, hospitals, and outpatient centers. This not-for-profit healthcare system is dedicated to improving and simplifying the healthcare experience of their patients, delivering world-class care, clinicians, and technologies. However, their existing processes were taking clinicians’ valuable time, and negatively affecting the patient experience. ServiceNow solutions made possible improved transparency, more-effective collaboration, and better service, resulting in 62,000 more clinician hours for patient care per year. 
  Read about how Novant Health implemented ServiceNow technologies to streamline IT workflows and better address patient needs.

Financial institutions are making the switch to full automation, freeing up their human employees to better engage with customers and clients. Automation is eliminating the repetitive, mundane tasks that stand in the way of providing exceptional customer experiences.

• Experian 
  Operating across 37 countries, Experian is a multinational consumer credit reporting company. But while this extended reach was allowing Experian to serve more than 100,000 clients and maintain demographic data for millions of consumers, it also meant incompatible processes, disconnected systems, and high operational costs. Working with ServiceNow, Experian was able to transform how it delivers IT services, adopting a single, unified platform throughout its entire business infrastructure. The end result was faster request approvals, seamless service delivery, and a 50% reduction in time spent resolving incidents. 
  See how ServiceNow helped Experian modernize and streamline their employee experience.

• Discover Financial Services 
  As one of the world’s first all-virtual financial institutions, Discover Financial Services is dedicated to providing efficient, effective service delivery. Tom Eavenson, Vice President of Infrastructure Structure Services, has pledged that Discover Financial Services will be working exclusively with the ServiceNow platform to fully implement automated workflows as a replacement for written standard operating procedures within the next five years. 
  Watch the Discover Financial Services Keynote Interview.

HR departments are experiencing unprecedented digital transformation. Legacy HR systems demand custom programming, and are simply not capable of keeping up with modern demands. HR automation is stepping up to replace aging systems, automating essential processes and handling crucial administrative tasks.

• General Mills 
  General Mills was already a well-established entity within the branded consumer-foods industry when it undertook a company-wide global transformation towards increased visibility into employee HR inquiries. General Mills chose to work with ServiceNow, gaining a holistic approach, and creating an effective solution to the employee-service experience.

• American Express Global Business Travel 
  American Express Global Business Travel (AMEX GBT) relies on expert staff to provide high-quality service to travelers in need. To do that, AMEX GBT counselors need easy access to relevant, reliable information at the click of a button. AMEX GBT and ServiceNow built upon their existing collaborations for onboarding and IT-service management, and created a unified HR portal. By bringing multiple functions and resources together on a single platform, AMEX GBT saw approximately 18,000 hours saved in productivity gains. 
  Read more about how AMEX GBT and ServiceNow are making essential resources more accessible than ever, with a powerful, unified employee portal.

We are in an exciting new era where IT is leading the charge to create innovations that will radically transform how companies are selling products and reaching customers. However, many IT organizations are still stuck in the old way of doing things. IT automation helps remove unstructured processes, fragmented data, and manual reporting in IT operations. Start with end-to-end processes with a lot of structured tasks and where automation will alleviate the most workload for the IT team. Provisioning VMs, patching machines, and installing may be the best options.

At its core, automation involves identifying repetitive, rule-based tasks and implementing technological solutions to execute these tasks efficiently and accurately. 

This process begins with the input of data or a triggering event, followed by the technology following a predefined set of instructions (or algorithms) to achieve a specific outcome. In more advanced forms, such as intelligent automation, systems can employ ML to learn from data patterns and outcomes, adjusting their operations to optimize performance over time. And, as supporting technologies continue to improve, the capabilities of automation likewise expand. 

Business automation is becoming essential for all industries. As such, it is likewise important to identify who in an organization should be involved in the automation process.

• Professional Developers 
  In most organizations, developers will bear the greatest responsibility for creating and implementing automations. Developers will likely have the requisite experience and technical know-how, as well as in-depth understanding of the company and customers to create automatic, data-driven processes that effectively address those areas where automation is needed most. That said, developers should be expected to work closely with other departments to ensure that the benefits of automation can be enjoyed company wide.

• Citizen Developers 
  Developers may be the most obvious architects of business automation, but they are not the only ones capable of creating effective applications. In fact, any interested individual can become a citizen developer, with help from the ServiceNow Developer Program. 
  Providing citizen developers with automated tutorials, libraries, and the opportunity to connect with fellow citizen developers, the Developer Program offers a clear path to building automated apps to solve a range of problems.

Automation can have a significant positive impact for businesses across essentially every industry. However, before investing in automation, decision makers need to be able to accurately gauge not only the need for automation, but also the anticipated ROI.

In creating a business case for automation, consider the following steps:

1. Determine which business processes you should automate

Not all processes are likely to benefit from automation. Review the areas where your business is experiencing bottlenecks, reduced productivity, and above-average numbers of human errors. These processes are more likely to benefit from automation.

2. Calculate time costs

Automation is designed to replace or assist human involvement when it comes to task completion. In some cases, employee involvement may be entirely eliminated from certain processes. In other cases, the work of the employee is reduced to only the key essentials. This means that employees should be able to focus on tasks, projects and ideation that machines or automated processes can’t handle. The idea is that with automation, employees spend their time more effectively, which saves on labor costs. In addition, costs from time wasted from human errors, miscommunications, or non-human events—such as paper jams from printers—may also be considered for the total cost.

3. Calculate automation value

The value from automation may be attributed to time or money saved by automating a manual task, and including any benefit you can attribute to the automation is appropriate. The basic formula to assign a monetary value to the freed-up time of a knowledge worker looks like this:

Time spent on single manual task x Frequency of performing task per month x Cost per hour x 12 months = Yearly savings.

An example of indirect value from automation is savings from downtime reduction. To quantify the value, you calculate the yearly costs of a service or system outage – before any automaton. You then apply the reduced rate of outage after automation to arrive at the savings.

4. Determine ROI

Finally, to determine whether automating a specific process or processes will result in a positive gain for your business, you will need to calculate the expected return on investment. Use the ServiceNow Value Calculator, and see for yourself how lucrative business automation can be.

Just as automation can be applied to a wide range of processes, how you approach your automation solutions can be equally varied. Here, we address your options in implementing business automation.

Build

If you prefer to have complete control over the code and behavior of your automation solution, you may choose to build it from scratch. Building apps takes a great deal of time, resources, planning, expertise, and effort, and that’s with an established development team. Beyond development, you are also responsible for maintaining the code and supporting users year after year.

Automation platforms

Beyond building your own automation solutions, there are a number of third-party automation platforms you might want to consider. The right automation platform will provide your business with all of the necessary tools and resources to automate vital processes at scale, and can offer additional support when needed.

The future of automation—benefits

Automation is revolutionizing how businesses handle tasks across all departments. As the technology continues to develop, we can expect further advances leading to even greater gains. Consider the following advantages that organizations can expect from the future of automation:

• Enhanced productivity 
  By automating mundane and repetitive tasks, organizations will be able to achieve a higher volume of work in less time and with reduced oversight. This efficiency allows IT staff and other employees to dedicate more of their day to value-adding projects and innovative initiatives, thereby enhancing overall productivity. 

• Machine-level accuracy 
  Automation minimizes human intervention, which significantly reduces the risk of errors and increases the consistency of outcomes. With automation, tasks are performed uniformly every time, providing teams with predictable schedules, durations, and accuracy for processes, tests, updates, or workflows. 

• Greater control 
  Manual processes involving large teams often lead to knowledge gaps and miscommunication. By codifying processes and knowledge into automated systems, businesses can ensure more controlled and consistent governance, reducing the risk of errors and inconsistencies across teams and tasks.  

• Around-the-clock service  
  Automation enables businesses to perform tasks and remediations at all times, even outside of regular working hours. This capability reduces the mean time to resolve (MTTR) and minimizes downtime, allowing operations to continue smoothly and without interruption. 

• Better security 
  Automated systems can implement standardized, swift responses across IT environments, improving the speed and consistency of security measures and mitigating risks more effectively.

Automation is an emerging technology that is poised to change the way you approach business tasks. And while it consists of a range of solutions providing a number of valuable services, at its heart, automation exists to give you more time and freedom to focus on strategy, innovation, and the customer experience. ServiceNow provides the tools, solutions, and platform you need, to help make the dream of powerful automation a reality.

ServiceNow Hyperautomation extends beyond basic automation, combining advanced technologies like AI, ML, and RPA to automate complex, end-to-end business processes. This approach increases the speed and efficiency of operations while also improving reliability and governance across every relevant function. Key features of Hyperautomation include the integration of modern and legacy systems, allowing for a cohesive workflow across all enterprise applications, automating a wide range of tasks— up to and including complex, cross-enterprise workflows. Additionally, the platform's low-code automation capabilities make it accessible to users at all levels of IT expertise. 

Explore how ServiceNow can transform your organization's approach to automation; demo ServiceNow today, and unlock the potential of hyperautomation for your business.