Dive Brief:

• Automating part of IT teams' workflow will help leaders sustain the effectiveness of their work even as tech spend budgets dwindle, said 72% of decision makers in a report from software company LogicMonitor. The report surveyed 500 global IT executives.
• Among leaders who say there is a "great deal" of automation within the IT team, half are very confident in the organization's ability to overcome an unanticipated crisis.
• In the aftermath of a global shift to remote work, 80% of IT leaders say the infrastructure they manage is getting "more complex by the day," and 94% of IT leaders expect IT automation to become a focus over the next three years.

Dive Insight:

Responding to the pandemic heightened interest in automation adoption, a strategy that allowed companies to sustain operations in times of disruption. 

Strained IT teams leveraged automation to uphold the massive shift to remote work, pushing previously in-person processes to the digital realm and letting bots handle routine tasks such as onboarding and IT support.

Customer support outfits turned to chatbots to manage repetitive claims. RPA company Automation Anywhere cites the technology helped one airline customer deal with a surge in cancellations that went from 500 requests daily to 4,000. 

IT teams are concerned with the complexities of remotely handling outages among their workforce, according to 49% of respondents in the LogicMonitor study. More than half of IT leaders said teams experienced "initial disruptions or outages with their normal software, productivity or collaboration tools," as operations moved to a distributed model.

Almost half of business leaders say their companies are gearing up to introduce automation to the traditional IT helpdesk, according to a study by Inference Solutions. Despite uncertain economic forecasts and pressures on leaders to cut costs, two-thirds of IT decision makers say automation budgets are set to grow. 

Challenges in onboarding staff remain as companies continue operating remotely, but automating access to knowledge for incoming employees can smooth out the challenges of remote onboarding. The value automation can deliver is allowing teams to focus on higher-value tasks while routine operations are automated.