A new report finds that process automation is a high priority for business executives, but initiatives are siloed and poorly integrated within companies. Conducted by Forrester Consulting for RPA and intelligent automation technology provider Kofax, the 2020 Intelligent Automation Benchmark Report found the percentage of IT budgets devoted to automation is growing significantly. Two years ago, automation decision makers said they spent less than seven percent of their IT budgets on automation. Today, that number is 11.2 percent and in two years, tech leaders expect that to rise to nearly 16 percent.
While the rush to take advantage of automation solutions is fully underway, the report said little thought is being given to integrated solutions. Nearly half of the 450 decision-makers polled by Forrester said they’ve taken ad hoc approaches to implementing automation technology, often using multiple vendors. Ninety-eight percent of those companies said that approach has resulted in unanticipated challenges.
“A lack of guidance for assembling the right set of automation technologies exacerbates this cycle,” the report’s authors wrote. “The deeper organizations get into their transformation initiatives, the more challenging it is to readjust their strategies. As a result, in hindsight, firms realize that they invested in a set of technologies that are challenging to maintain — leading to high technical debt.”