“Unstoppable companies” need to adopt a new automation mindset

The Situation: Market shocks, driven by the pandemic and war in Europe, have highlighted the value of designing organizations to be “anti-fragile” —built to not shatter from shocks but to benefit from them. Workato CEO Vijay Tella believes his company’s low-code automation and integration platform provides the kind of reconfigurable flexibility that can make the antifragility concept real (as featured in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book The Black Swan).

At Workato’s Automate 2022 event, Tella described those taking the antifragile approach as “unstoppable companies.” They—like the technology they use and the processes they deliver—rapidly reconfigure to meet the market’s needs. Workato’s low-code integration and workflow automation enables exactly this responsive reconfiguring. Read the HFS take on antifragility in our POV OneOffice Tech is the nervous system that makes transformation real.

Achieving ‘unstoppability’ requires more than technology, as Tella admits, leaders also need “the new automation mindset.” This mindset combines a process mindset’s systems thinking, a growth mindset’s desire and ability to leverage change, and a scale mindset’s focus on getting everyone in the organization involved.

Fragmented views lead to fragile businesses

Tella argues many leaders focus too much on the detail, only ever achieving a fragmented view of the end-to-end processes that make up their business. And, just as described by HFS OneOffice, if you don’t zoom out, you can’t see how you can make improvements across the front, middle, and back offices. A fragmented view leads to a fragile company.

Speaking at Automate 2022, Helen of Troy CIO Harish Ramani explained how taking the process mindset’s big-picture view of end-to-end processes had helped his team speed through a digital transformation involving digital commerce, a new team and infrastructure, and moving to the cloud. The team was two years ahead of growth targets, and he credited this partly to using Workato as the glue connecting best-of-breed solutions. Helen of Troy is the consumer products business that owns such brands as Oxo, Braun, Vicks, and Hot Tools.

Process, growth, and scale = the new automation mindset

The Automate 2022 audience also heard how Vituity, the physician staffing network, had cut time to placement from 90 days to 60 days by applying the process mindset, improving its processes end to end, using Workato as its “central nervous system,” and connecting people, data, and applications.

TripActions CIO Kim Huffman illustrated the application of the growth mindset. The corporate travel startup she worked for had to relish change, embrace failure, and work hard to reconfigure itself when business travel ground to a pandemic-led halt. The company had to enable rapid adaptation. When she started at TripActions, Kim found a wide range of point-to-point integrations across the business, but she wanted an architecture to integrate core data. She said that moving to an API-based, event-driven architecture, enabled by Workato, resulted in scalable, stable architecture.

When the business decided to target the small and medium enterprise market for growth, self-serve and self-onboarding were ready in a month, thanks to that new architecture. The business grew customer numbers by 50%, adding 1,000 new customers.

Engage the whole business to drive scale at speed

Autodesk, a software company with $5 billion in revenue now employing 15,000 people, provided an example of the scale mindset. CIO Prakash Kota explained how Workato’s low-code capabilities had empowered wider engagement of business employees, increasing the pace of delivery beyond that which would have been possible with technical-only teams.

He said it was important to mix teams, with technical people providing expertise and guide rails for security, scalability, and simplification, working alongside business teams’ business know-how.

Biggest-ever platform expansion doubles down on new automation mindset

Tella says Workato intends to double down on its support of the “new automation mindset”’ with the largest expansion of its platform since launch in 2013. It is launching two new products by the end of the year.

Workato Insight will offer enterprises an understanding of their operational processes end-to-end, through to delivering for customers. Workato is also extending its Workbot-based apps, pioneered for Microsoft Teams and Slack users who have created 12,000 applications with it to date. It will extend the product so all elements can be customized in standalone applications. A new WYSIWYG interface is due to make builds easier, too. Expect to see these new products in Q3 and Q4 2022.

The Bottom Line: Be ready to think beyond technology on your journey to OneOffice

Workato’s bold attempt to associate itself with unstoppable companies is not without merit. Its low-code integration and workflow automation can support the rapid breakdown and reconfiguration of your processes in discrete APIs, micro-services, and best-of-breed solutions. That is an important part of building a responsive HFS OneOffice or OneEcoSystem business. However, enterprises must also keep the role of data front and center in their strategy and move forward, too, with a clear understanding of the role of people and change in delivering success.