DEVOPSdigest

For IT executives, the year 2022 brought with it a new set of challenges that are impacting how they prioritize investments. Pandemic-induced slowdowns, supply chain reliability, the Great Resignation and budget cuts are forcing CIOs to re-evaluate their priorities and adjust investments to achieve their strategic goals.

SAPinsider surveyed nearly 200 CIOs to get first-hand insight into their key focus areas for 2022.

Increasing process efficiency and visibility

In response to the survey, 67% of respondents said increasing efficiency and visibility of processes is their top priority this year.

Within SAP environments, one of the largest opportunities for improving process efficiency and visibility is in change management. Many SAP teams rely on traditional, manually driven "waterfall" development to build and deliver change which severely limits the ability of these critical systems to adapt at the speed the business requires. These error-prone manual methods also significantly increase the risk of costly unexpected downtime. The key to eliminating these risky, stifling inefficiencies is with automation.

SAP automation tools reduce errors and cut down the time it takes to make changes to critical SAP systems. With the ability to automate the entire change management workflow, and integrate SAP with non-SAP DevOps tools, companies can break down silos across the IT organization and gain visibility into the enterprise development lifecycle.

Supporting new business models and products

The second highest priority for CIOs this year is supporting new business models and products. To deliver on this priority and to keep up with the demands of the business, IT executives need the ability to change critical systems like SAP frequently and reliably. The traditionally slow, opaque, manual ways of managing and adapting SAP simply can't keep up with the pace that companies need to stay competitive.

SAP automation can support this priority in three key ways:

1. Improving the speed and quality of change management to eliminate effort, errors and delays across the SAP release cycle.

2. Enabling SAP teams to adopt agile and DevOps methodologies to achieve fast, frequent, high-quality change delivery.

3. Integrating SAP with other best-in-breed tools to enable greater transparency, collaboration and efficiency across the IT landscape.

With the right SAP automation in place, executives can quickly and efficiently support new business models and products.

Lowering cost of IT operations

Half of the decision-makers surveyed ranked lowering the cost of IT operations as their top priority. As companies recover from the operational dynamics of the past couple years, they're looking to trim back costs and keep budgets under control.

Finding a faster, more efficient approach to deliver change to the business is one way to save meaningful costs in both the short and long term. With automation, the amount of manual effort required to build, test and deploy software is significantly reduced.

A recent Forrester Total Economic Impact™ report showed that firms who adopt Basis Technologies' SAP automation solution, ActiveControl, eliminate 90% of deployment errors and 98.5% of remediation effort. That means less time spent finding and fixing errors, and increased focus on strategic projects that bring more value to the business. And the higher quality software being deployed virtually eliminates costly unexpected downtime.

Simply put, automation means that tasks can be carried out more quickly, in greater volume, at higher quality, with lower cost.

Go to: SAPinsider Report: CIO's 2022 SAP Agenda - Part 2