September 30, 2024 | Blog

Through automation, many businesses start to grow. Eliminating mundane and repetitive tasks and automating them creates efficiency and productivity for a company. Automation in different sectors and departments of your businesses helps you lessen people’s work hours and focus on more critical tasks like strategic and business planning. 

As automation grows through the years, integration becomes a part of it. But how exactly do automation and integration work? Does one exist without the other? Or does one exist because of the other? The answer is either. Automation is like a first-generation business process, while integration was born out of the necessity to integrate one automation into another. Automation is more of one specific task to be automated. Meanwhile, the integration connects all parts of automation per department to smooth the automation process.

Also read: Automation and Integration, The Best Combo for Supreme Efficiency

Workato, IT Group, Inc. ‘s (ITG) tech partner, has capitalized on this process and philosophy. “Our founding team helped build some of the earliest integration platforms. Now they have reimagined Integration and Automation to enable companies to tap into the growth mindset and transform their organization with Workato,” they said.

Maximize and Utilize the Power of Automation and Integration

1. Automate to Integrate?  

2. The Power Automation and Integration with AI  

3. Recipe of Success with ITG and Workato

Automate to Integrate?

With the competitive market that we all currently live in, automation of your processes is the way to the future. But for Workato, automation is the foundation of a better and more efficient future, especially combined with an integration platform, bridging the gap between one app and another with less code to no code anticipation. “Business apps had become simpler, mobile, inexpensive, fast and beautiful, while the integration products to connect these apps remained technical, complex, expensive and forbidding,” said Vijay Tella, the CEO & Co-Founder of Workato.

Also read: Automate Your Business to the Next Level

Meanwhile, Massimo Pezzini, Head of Research, Future of the Enterprise, explained further the retrospective how integration and automation are two distinct processes, saying that to appreciate the power of automation of workflow in your business operations, integration is the key and automation will be the end goal. “Integration technology, according to its widely-adopted definition, is used to ”make independently designed systems work together.” In other words, it acts as a bridge between different communication protocols, and validates, maps, and transforms data in transit from one system to another, “ he said. “The modern, end-to-end model of automation described above requires independently-designed systems (including software applications and machines) to work together in order to automate (that is, “remove manual activity from”) a process. The bottom line is that the modern, end-to-end model of automation requires integration. Automation is the goal, integration is the means.”

The Power Automation and Integration with AI

Moreover, the power of automation and integration is about the unison and synchronization of both, aligning with your business strategy and goal. This means that automation might be visible in some areas of your department but not integrated into other departments, losing its full potential and maximizing automated processes. For example, your business issues e-recipients, business partners, and suppliers; however, the payment approval processes depend solely on manual processes. This is where the bottleneck happens and where the power of automation and integration with Workato and ITG can work for you, connecting the gap between automation by integrating it with the actual processes needed. 

Also read: The Advantages of AI for Your Business

“It doesn’t make a lot of sense to have an automation strategy without a closely aligned and coherent integration strategy. Vice versa, an integration strategy that’s not designed to support automation needs is poor and incomplete—as every organization in the world wants, and needs, to automate at least some of its processes,” Pezzini said. “Consequently, your automation and integration strategies should be designed together as two sides of the same coin. I refer to this coin as “enterprise automation,” that is, a unified strategy that puts integration technologies and methods at the foundation, and automation as one of the enabled use cases (along with the other key use cases: ensuring data synchronization and supporting API-based composition).”

Also read: Here are the Innovative Solutions for Your Businesses

Now, the game has changed from automation to integration to AI. Workato, at the forefront of automation and integration, used the power of AI to maximize both. Alex Lamascus, Director of Marketing of Workato, cited in his report the importance of AI in the market. “In 2023, we experienced economic headwinds and the excitement of Artificial Intelligence. As businesses find themselves caught in the middle of this transformative era, it is an exciting time to release our third Work Automation Index,” he said. “The Index is our yearly report detailing real data across sectors to see how businesses at the forefront are utilizing automation and AI. This year’s data is based on real automation use cases anonymized from over 1,000 organizations.”

Recipe of Success with ITG and Workato

Lamascus also shared insights that many businesses are now eyeing to include in their processes. “The report showcases a year marked by unprecedented change as companies rapidly embraced AI, with their investments yielding remarkable results. We saw a staggering 500% increase in the adoption of automated processes with generative AI over the last year alone,” he said. 

Some key takeaways from the Work Automation Index 2024 showed that  44% of all automated processes are built outside of IT,  multi-department automation is at an all-time high, and customer retention is the #1 growing strategic priority for automation. Revenue and IT Ops also lead to generative AI adoption, and Generative AI is used in 400% more business processes than just a year ago.

With ITG and Workato, you can utilize automation and integration with AI.  IT Group, Inc. (ITG) has been the leading IT Solution Partner in the Philippines and the ASEAN region. We’re an ISO 9001:2015 Certified company with four regional offices in the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia. We help 200+ clients across the ASEAN region promote innovation through a digital transformation journey, and we have a solid portfolio of 250+ successful projects. We offer Business Consulting, Support and managed Services, Subscription and licenses, Service Delivery, and Certification and training. 

Also read: ITG Story: Meet Our Unsung Heroes and Know Their Inspiring Stories

For over 21 years of expertise, ITG has been your leading technology partner for system-wide innovative solutions to accelerate your business plans and goals, delivering seamless integrations and processes, from Business Management Solutions, IT Management, Integration & Automation, and Enterprise Data Management to IT Infrastructure. We help clients across the region experience digital transformation in their business, co-creating and co-owning solutions tailored to their business needs.

With the power of Workato and ITG, your business is ready to get the recipe for success from automation of your processes to integration of your apps to including AI for your business.    

Learn more about how we can help you today.