Automation has transformed the way companies operate these days. With so many complexities in each domain, automation came as a necessary solution to mitigate risks prone to human error. It allowed companies to work with precision and save time and effort. With automation, employees have been elevated to a new level where they can bring innovative strategies and creativity to work. The overall efficiency of each department has improved with automation, and companies are currently relying almost completely on it.
But automation is not complete until it becomes cross-domain. Most of the companies today use automation in silos – for each department. HR automates the recruitment process, Finance automates billing and payment cycles, Dev automates building and testing pipelines, and Ops automates deployments. While they help in streamlining each domain, their maximum potential cannot be realized until they work in complete integration with each other. This is where cross-domain automation comes into the picture. It ensures automation of all the departments under one automation layer. This article is specifically aimed at understanding this approach, its benefits, and strategies for its implementation.
Understanding Cross-domain Automation
For any company to work at its highest potential, seamless communication is the key. Now, communication can happen at different levels. Information exchange is the most common form of communication where companies use software like Microsoft Teams or Slack to communicate within the organization.
Another form of communication happens between systems. These are mostly actions that must be triggered at the right stage and time. When done manually, it is dependent on an individual’s decisions, availability, and bandwidth to conduct all the required operations. When done automatically, it streamlines the overall process with the highest efficiency.
But automation is also of two types – domain-specific and cross-domain automation. Companies these days often work in silos. One department’s process is integrated with another’s. A step completed in one department requires another department to follow other processes. Without cross-domain automation, this communication between different departments becomes slow, less efficient, and tedious.
The real potential of a company can be realized when automation is implemented at a collective level. When departments work automatically, within and without, the whole company becomes a self-regulated autonomous system. This has immense benefits, which we will cover in the next section.
Benefits of Cross-domain Automation
A unified automation layer brings a transformation at the organizational level. Its benefits can be realized through the following points:
- Breaking Silos: Departments no longer need to work in isolation and wait for their dependencies to be fulfilled by other departments. All functions can trigger and execute the required steps automatically at the right stages and developments of the processes.
- Enhancing Agility: Organizations with cross-functional automation work much smoothly, faster, and adapt quickly to the changes. Automation workflows adjust themselves to the new changes introduced in one area.
- Improving Precision: For a tech-based organization, precision cannot be compromised. Automation between domains leaves no gap for human error as all the required logic is pre-defined in the automation workflows, which run them flawlessly.
- Increasing Visibility: When automation is implemented at an organizational level, the higher authorities get full visibility of all the functions in a single dashboard.
- Optimizing processes and costs: With such a holistic visibility, companies can easily optimize their workflows by eliminating unnecessary complexities and loopholes, thereby saving costs and enhancing efficiency of the overall organization.
With so many obvious benefits, automation at a company level is the most effective way to elevate your business from all sides.
Unifying all Domains through Automation
To illustrate cross-domain automation in this article, we will specifically discuss the most important functions in any organization, which are Finance, HR, Dev, and Ops.
HR and Finance
There are many operations in a company that require a fusion between HR and Finance. These are payroll process, reimbursement, and compliance. For finance to release payroll payments, they must get the data from HR software about the employee or contractor’s attendance for a month, along with other records.
Another case includes a new hire in a company. Once they are hired, the HR system must send their bank details, tax information, and benefits enrollment to the finance department for them to calculate their finance. All these data exchanges and communication, when streamlined through pre-defined automation rules, become a self-driven process with high precision and no dependency.
HR and Dev
When a new developer joins a company, provisioning them with the required tools comes under HR’s responsibility. They might need approval for development and testing tools from HR. While the dev team has its own automation tools for internal requirements, e.g., code building automation tools or codeless automation testing tools, installing them needs approval from HR. An integrated automation with HR allows the workflow to grant access to all these tools once the onboarding is approved.
Finance and Ops
The operation team has a lot of expenses that need to be covered by the organization. These may include cloud expenses, software licenses, and infrastructure scaling. Without the integration of Ops with Finance, these expenses become hard to measure at a holistic level. When Finance and Ops are unified automatically, all the expenses become visible in the finance dashboard, which can produce useful insights for senior leadership. Any Ops-related cost exceeding budgets can trigger automated approvals from senior authorities.
DevOps with Finance and HR
Integrating software development and operations is the fastest way to release products, and most companies have already done that under their DevOps teams. But when this is extended to the level of automated integration with HR and Finance, it unlocks a whole new level in the process optimization. Resource allocation can be scheduled according to availability, project planning can be done taking recruits into account, project budgets can be estimated at an organizational level, and many more. The result of such unified automation is an autonomous orchestration between all the departments to crystallize their highest possible benefits.
Closing Reflection
While cross-domain automation can be done through technical experts at the internal level, who are well-versed with all the processes, there are several tools, like MuleSoft, Zapier, or Boomi, that are specifically designed for such cases. To further optimize the automation, AI systems can be integrated that detect redundancies in the workflows and simplify them. The initial stages may be difficult to implement and test but once you are through that stage, you cannot live without it. Once the employees are freed from monotonous and repetitive tasks, they get the bandwidth to work on innovative and creative ideas. The future of automation holds many opportunities for companies to reap, especially through AI, where they can set themselves on a continuous trajectory of evolution.