While Business Technology leaders are increasingly being recognized as changemakers in an organization, 91% of them are frustrated with their jobs. This could be due to the fact that despite being hired to drive organizational efficiency, they are often hampered by:
- The speed at which they can deliver projects to lines of business (HR, IT, Sales, etc.) (62%)
- How much they have to say “no” to stakeholders (40%)
- Their current integration/automation tools (40%)
Given this changing landscape and the shifting needs of the lines of business they serve, Workato recently unveiled the first annual State of Business Technology Report. Conducted by independent firm Atomik Research, we surveyed 112 full-time BT leaders and 302 managers across lines of business – including in HR, Marketing, Sales, Finance, and Support – resulting in the first quantifiable insights into the performance, challenges, and impact of this new role.
Read the full State of Business Technology 2020 report.
To help BT teams continuously transform their organizations, we must better understand their most common tasks and strategies for implementation, the resources they need (including automation tools and alignment), any obstacles standing in their way, and what can be done to solve these issues so that they can continue to perform their jobs well.
BT teams manage everything from the company’s cloud app stack to the processes that happen in and between those apps and databases. Through the launch of apps, integrations and automations best suited for departments, BT therefore impacts operational efficiency and employee and customer experience. They can revolutionize (or consumerize) the way your employees or customers interact with your product, thereby improving customer loyalty and employee satisfaction with internal tools.
Trust and understanding between these two groups, therefore, is essential to drive innovation and company success – but with just 52% of LOBs strongly trusting people at their organizations to effectively manage automations, there’s clearly room for improvement in the area of alignment. If LOBs feel like BT teams aren’t moving fast enough or that BT teams don’t adequately support them, they can turn to shadow IT for implementation, which can have dire cybersecurity consequences without IT oversight.
By using a low-code automation tool that can be used by both smart business users and BT leaders alike, LOBs can get the fast implementations they need while BT can focus on the more complex, value-added tasks. With BT governance, tech teams can still oversee application work at their organizations without sacrificing employee and customer data or greater IT security in the process.
