We're most of the way through 2024 and it's time to start thinking about plans for next year. In many cases, the budget has already been set, but it's still important to think through what your priorities will be and how to allocate time for yourself and your team.
Important Trends:
* Digital Transformation – 70% of organizations are in the midst of transformation efforts, relying heavily on automation services to achieve their digitization goals
* Cloud Migration – Increasing push toward multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, strategic focus on SaaS applications
* Expanding Automation User Base – Growing emphasis on citizen developers, business teams taking on more automation responsibilities
* AI Integration – new integrations, increased need for data management

* Data Analytics – more production applications, growing importance in business decision making

* Cybersecurity – continued focus on keeping automation software updated, access management controls
* Legacy systems – slow retirement of legacy hardware and software, requiring maintenance of specialized knowledge of automation integrations
While many automation leaders feel that their teams have no time to take on additional work, the payback on service and skill enhancements can be high.  We advocate being proactive in selecting areas where they can make improvements.
- Organization Alignment – understand your organization's business goals and make sure that your team's efforts are supporting the business plans
- Service Improvement – find an area where you can improve the way you serve a user group, such as reducing the time to fulfill a user request.
- Team Development – determine what skills you and your automation team need to support the business goals and evolving technology portfolio of your organization 
- Communication Plans – develop communication strategies to keep you team, management, stakeholders and users aware of what you're doing to deliver automation services to the organization
To get started, allocate a couple of hours a week of your time to an improvement initiative. Identify a project that will address immediate operational needs or a strategic effort that will help you get to where you need to be in the long term. Share your improvement plan with your team and manager so that they can support you in the project.
Good luck, and let us know if you have any questions.