Organizations, including those in financial services, are struggling to realize the full value of automation, in part because they’re tentative about fully rolling it out.

That’s left nearly half of process automation deployments at the proof-of-concept stage or team scale, although process automation received a high satisfaction rating in a recent survey by Emergence Partners, a U.K.-based IT research firm.

The survey queried 177 large enterprises, or companies of over $1 billion and 1,000 employees, in the U.S., U.K., and several major European countries about their top technology priorities for the past 12 months. Eleven percent of those interviewed were in banking, financial services or the insurance industries.

Process automation was among the top priority investments in 2020. Specific automations that were prioritized were IT process automation using robotic process automation (RPA), business process automation using intelligent solutions, and business process automation using RPA. The survey found only 12% of the process automations were companywide in their scale.

Two factors are driving the hesitation to move to large-scale deployment: a skill and staff shortage, and a lack of understanding about how to leverage automation, Emergence founding partner and RPA expert Sarah Burnett told Bank Automation News.

“I have no doubt that the lack of skills and shortage of staff are hampering developments. These were the biggest challenges as reported by the survey participants, and in particular in the field of RPA,” Burnett said.

But it’s more than the technical skills of robot coding that’s missing; it’s the knowledge of a bigger automation picture. “Enterprises don’t know how to make the most of it,” Burnett said.

Another factor is how willing organizations are to try new technologies, Burnett said. Some are so afraid of IT failure that they restrict technology implementations, which can then hamper innovation and modernization, she said. That’s linked to a general risk aversion and fear of disappointment in the space.

“These show in attitudes. For example, when a pilot project goes wrong, work stops completely with no lessons learned, captured, and no further attempts made to get it right,” Burnett told BAN. “The technology is blamed and no analysis of the approach toward its adoption is done.”

It might be expected that 2020’s highly rated technology investments would become 2021’s high priorities, but that wasn’t the case, according to the survey. In fact, only cloud ranked as a distinctly higher priority than other technology projects Otherwise, technology projects ranked about equal across a wide range that included process mining, RPA automation in IT and business, intelligent process automation in IT and business, and cybersecurity, among others.

One reason for “a lack of a clear direction in technology investment could be the general uncertainty about the future and organizations wanting to hedge their bets,” the report noted.

Other key findings from the report:

• Low-code automation wasn’t a priority for large enterprises, “but those who deployed it gave it the highest satisfaction rating in terms of achieving investment outcomes,” the report stated.
• Satisfaction with the outcome of investment in cloud was rated at 3.98 out of 5, but it was even better with regard to return on investment, which was 4.21 out of 5.
• The combination of both RPA and smart AI-based technologies “leads to larger scale automation in the enterprise,” the study noted.
• The demand for services in financial services, among other sectors, “rocketed” in 2020. That, combined with pandemic-related staff absences, boosted investment in RPA.

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