More applications, more complexity: what is driving automation adoption?

Almost 60 per cent of UK firms identified the need to modernise as a reason to automate business processes

Nine in 10 UK businesses are using some form of automation, and almost a quarter describe their use as ‘High' or ‘Very high'. But what is driving the quickly-climbing adoption of this technology?

According to Computing research, presented in a new whitepaper written with Liaison Technologies, a need to modernise topped the reasons for automating business processes, with nearly 60 per cent of our respondents relating to the statement, ‘A need for modernising applications to gain new capabilities required by the business'.

A variety of factors are likely to be affecting companies as they seek these new capabilities. Customers and potential customers are demanding ever greater levels of sophistication, personalisation and speed in the way that they interact with those providing them with goods and services via digital channels. These digital expectations are only going to increase - particularly with technical developments such as 5G poised to begin rolling out in the next year or so.

In such a market, new applications and upgrades, new features and so on must be delivered quickly. This is where business process automation comes into play. BPA can enable businesses to develop, deploy and scale applications at speed, and without such a technology companies would struggle to meet the demands of the market.

Other elements affecting automation adoption included the move to the cloud, an increasing number of applications being involved in business processes, and the rising volumes and variety of data involved in these processes.

Social media, the IoT and the variety of tracking and analytics tools that modern businesses use generate massive amounts of data, and they run the very real risk of being overwhelmed. Manual processes are likely to break down under the data flood.

There is a trend towards the consumerisation of business applications. The need to increase mobility, enhance collaboration, boost productivity, reduce costs and keep employees on side has transformed the nature of these apps, but has placed increased demands on the business - which automation is becoming critical to deal with.