Scaling automation requires strong foundations: Workato CEO

Automation has transformed many aspects of business operations, however, scaling automation processes can often serve as a band-aid solution to deeper issues.

Vijay Tella, CEO of Workato, an intelligent automation platform, agreed with the proposition that many organisations invest too much into the short-term productivity gain of upgrading their automation process, rather than changing their current processes.

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“I think it's economically valuable short term, but it is not transformational, it's not really changing the game for your customers,” says Tella.

“How do you work inside your company to get the job done for your customer? How do you want to change that? How do you want to deliver the products and experiences All of this requires a more holistic system thinking versus just automating in place what you're already doing.”

And that holistic system requires a foundation of great connectivity and integration, he says.

Simplicity on the menu

As businesses incorporate countless tools into their processes, some businesses develop overcomplicated and separate business functions, leading to Workato’s concept of “recipe” to unify data and process.

“Every line of the recipe is about transforming data and moving data from one app to the other. And the set of recipes is a workflow,” Tella says.

Workatp's apprapch to combine two often discrete ideas into one by combining the  integration tool and the work automation tool."

It's one concept that does both, he says,  allowing builders and the business experts, and even [other] execs to "...be literally on the same page.”

Tella told Digital Nation, automation should be an aspect of a larger business transformation, with new workflows and constant improvement.

“In our view, automation is not just about efficiency, about doing what you're doing just more efficiently,” he says.

“That's almost like cementing what you were doing in the past in place by replacing what humans were doing with bots. For us, it is about orchestrating all of your applications and data people into these new workflows, [deciding] how you want to do and automate it.”