Automation is at the core of business innovation today. Large enterprises, mid-sized companies, and fast growing startups are automating business processes across all business functions. Be it marketing, sales, support, IT, product, engineering, and finance. We are also observing a rapid increase in the diversity of usage and users creating these automations.
See automation HQ in action:
The rise of automation at the edges
We strongly believe that innovation happens at the edges. “Edges” in organizations are areas of the business with untapped high growth potential. Areas that can make the most impact but traditionally don’t have access to skills and technologies for creating these automations themselves. By empowering people who are closest to the process and the problem, Workato radically increases the capacity to deliver automations. And more importantly unlock the creativity at the edges.
Unsurprisingly more and more customers are automating end-to-end business operations. From improving interactions with customers and employees during onboarding to optimizing their marketing and sales funnel for revenue operations. From actively orchestrating actions to security incidents to gaining actionable insights for better and faster decision making.
It is encouraging to see builders with varying technical skills thriving with our low-code/no-code approach for agility and speed. On one end of the skills spectrum we have more technically savvy IT and business systems teams. And on the other end we see business savvy application admins, business and data analysts and project managers. As well as teams supporting sales, marketing, HR, people and revenue operations.
Why Automation HQ — Rapid growth in workspaces and team sizes
This rise in automation of business processes at the edges has also led to a significant increase in the average number of workspaces used in a company.
By creating multiple workspaces large and complex organizations (with tens or hundreds of thousands of employees) are able to divide the organization into manageable Workato Workspaces. By doing so organizations can create dedicated working space for business functions e.g. marketing, human resources, sales, support, product/engineering, IT etc.
For example, the marketing team can use the marketing workspace to create all the necessary recipes for lead management, campaign operations, campaign attribution and other processes. Within this workspace, a marketing administrator can add collaborators to build automations. And grant each individual the right roles and permissions for them to get their work done.
The administrator for the workspace can audit the activity of each user and changes made to each asset like changes made to recipes, connections, user permissions, lookup tables and more. They can also securely manage connections to the business apps they work with, operationalize the lifecycle of recipes as it goes from concept to production, and use the automation dashboard to monitor the health of these automations.
However, this growth in scale and diversity is driving a need for more advanced management of workspaces, users, data, connections and recipes across the enterprise.
Automation HQ – An essential foundation for organizations to drive automation at scale
Automation HQ is a set of advanced capabilities of the Workato platform. You can use Automation HQ to accelerate scaling of automations across the enterprise with speed and efficiency. All from a single platform that provides a single experience for designing, and operating automations.
It empowers teams across your company to work with the agility of a startup while tapping into the resources and shared knowledge of your enterprise. It also provides IT teams with the essential centralized tools to manage security and maintain compliance across the entire organization.
Automation HQ up-levels our rich capabilities around workspace federation, lifecycle management, business operations console, and our communities for enterprises.
Automation HQ is designed to adapt to the ways your company is structured. It supports unlimited workspaces. All workspaces roll up to a central organization. Workspaces are flexible enough to support your organization’s unique needs. You can provision workspaces for business units, departments or teams.
Workspace Management: Empowering all teams
Workspace federation provides IT admins with tools to manage access, compliance, security, applications, connections and more across your entire company. No matter how many workspaces exist in your organization. Workspace management gives you tools to:
- Provision workspaces: Provision dedicated workspaces for business units such as marketing, sales, finance, HR teams, and more.
- Govern access: Configure and manage apps, connections, roles, and other resources centrally, and control access to those across different workspaces. For example, for the marketing workspace you can provision access to the business systems apps relevant for marketing automations like Marketo, Salesforce, Hubspot etc.
- Manage usage policies: Define custom policies and allocation for resource utilization. Like the recipes or tasks they can consume. Set usage policies for each workspace by granting them a quota of recipes, tasks etc. This makes it easier for administrators to empower the teams at the edges to have adequate resources. As well as prevent under utilization or wasteful usage.
- Delegate administration: You can also create administrator roles and delegate workspace administration tasks across one or more workspaces—such as setting up projects, access management, operations, and notifications. This enables the teams at the edges to be independent, but also have access to expert supervision and guidance when needed.
Operations Console: Driving adoption with usage intelligence
The Operations Console provides a bird’s eye view of users, data, automations, and connections across your organization. Organization administrators can use this view to analyze usage trends for connections, automations, and users across workspaces. With this level of usage intelligence, the central team can assess the growth in usage, identify anomalies, and discover opportunities for improvement to drive adoption.
Custom communities: Build together, faster
We have seen tremendous success with our public community library where members have shared over 500,000+ ready-to-use recipes. The custom community capability gives you the power to create your own internal communities. Teams , within your organization, come together to to share, learn and reuse standardized assets in this community setting.
Each business or project team creating automation can make sure they’re following best practices including recipe design, error & exception handling and operations automation, test and production environments, release management, and more.
To drive automation at scale, reuse of assets is key.Reusability also reduces maintenance overhead. It drives faster time-to-value across the organization and empowers your team to cultivate best practices to drive automation at scale.
Empowerment with governance is key to success
Building a low-code/no-code product that is accessible by non-developers or more commonly referred to as “Citizen Integrators” or “Citizen Automators” is a step in the right direction. But empowerment without governance is like handing out driving licenses to everyone without traffic laws and infrastructure.
The path to automation at scale requires creating a layer of accessibility for an automation infrastructure that can be used across the enterprise with the right governance and guardrails in place – by both business and IT teams.
Automation HQ is a capability many organizations are already using to scale their automation projects and more importantly create an “automation first” culture by empowering the edges.It provides the foundation for empowerment with governance to drive automation at scale across your organization.
Send your questions and feedback to product@workato.com.