For the automation-minded CIO, integration and digital transformation aren’t just technological challenges. It can be even more daunting to shift the mindset and responsibilities of your workforce. To truly make the most of automation and transform your business, you first need to establish an automation-first company culture, from top to bottom.

Automation has the power to improve your operations, save money, free up your employee’s time to focus on higher-impact work, and deliver top-tier service to your customers. Automation is the future, and companies that avoid it are already lagging behind.

Integrating your tech stack goes further than just connecting applications. You can automate entire business processes. What was once intensive, tedious, and error-prone has become simple, fast, and mistake-free.

In today’s digital landscape, adopting automation is an easy choice. But changing the way that your company works, and changing the way your people think? That’s a real challenge — a challenge that even the savviest CIO might not overcome.

How do you get your employees to buy in while you reinvent your processes without missing a beat? Consider these four strategies:

1. Engage senior leadership

No matter the size of your organization, the scope of an automation-first shift requires the support of company leaders. Whether you simply mention it in an open forum or prepare a thorough presentation, your first step is to convince your fellow leaders that automation is the best option for your business.

Try to address the concerns of senior leadership before they ask about them. These are just a few questions you should consider as you prepare to make your case for automation:

• How will costs and profits be affected?
• How long will it take to implement?
• How will day-to-day work be affected during the transition?
• What’s the process for shopping for an integration platform?
• Which people in the company will need to be involved?

2. Break down the benefits

The benefits of automation are aplenty, including saved time, higher profit margins, reduced errors, better customer experience, improved company reputation, and full customer visibility.

There are countless examples in the real world of automation changing the way business is done, to the point that it’s what customers have come to expect. Share these use cases with stakeholders to support your proposal.

Make sure to communicate these benefits to your teams, relating them directly to problems your organization faces. Be understanding if some people are intimidated by the concept, and be ready to explain why automation doesn’t threaten anyone’s job — instead, it allows employees to spend more energy toward making a positive, higher-value impact.

3. Have a solution-focused mindset

Don’t just automate to automate. Instead, look into what your company will accomplish by shifting to automated processes. In our webinar, Best Practices for Automating Back Office Accounting Operations, we asked one of our partners to explain his approach for automation.

“What you don’t want to do is just take the old processes, the old offline processes, and force them into a tool,” said Carlos Vega, CEO and co-founder of Tesorio. “Don’t just automate my workflow. What were the goals of that process you were running? What were the outcomes?”

Automation may seem easier to your employees if you go one step at a time, solution by solution, starting with a problem that’s clearly solved by automation.

Ask yourself these questions and consider where you want your company to start:

• What is most important to your company?
• What processes are bogged down the most?
• Which teams are the most willing to change how they work?

Choose a few initial goals that are “quick wins” and implement automation to achieve them. When you can show the benefits that materialized in one department, it will become easier to shift the mindset across the organization.

4. Enable non-technical users with low-code integration

Integration and automation are no longer limited to the technical wizards in your IT department. Automating simple or complex business processes has become an increasingly approachable task for a wide range of professionals.

Celigo’s integration platform is built around this concept, with a low-code developer workspace and tools that non-technical users can easily understand. For complex integrations requiring custom coding, the platform also features powerful, robust development tools.

When your organization is beginning to implement integration, be sure to educate all the line-of-business users. Automation will seem more appealing when your employees can see how they will benefit from it, from both an efficiency and business standpoint, and they’ll feel more empowered to identify automation opportunities and build their own integrations.

How Celigo can help

In addition to providing the most scalable, most intelligent, and most user-friendly integration platform (iPaaS) on the market, Celigo works closely with its customers to understand how and why to automate processes using integration.

“Celigo helped us determine not only what to connect, how to connect, and when to connect it, but also what our business required,” said Malcolm James, senior technology and business solutions manager for the CDC Foundation, in this customer story.

Celigo’s team of integration experts can help company leaders like you assess, automate, and optimize business processes within the organization.

Contact Us for more information on getting your operations ready for establishing automation with Celigo for your Business.