Enterprise automation leaders must maintain reliable services supporting business and operational processes while also driving change in their organizations. In this episode, Dan Twing and Tom O'Rourke discuss the challenges and opportunities of becoming a change agent, and why it is important to step forward rather than waiting for direction from above. They advocate behaving like an entrepreneur in identifying problems to be solved, building business cases, and actively selling their proposals to leadership.Key Points

• Many automation groups only get attention when something is broken, functioning as a service rather than being recognized as a strategic asset
• Senior managers often do not understand how automation enables the business
• Automation leaders often wait for someone above them to provide direction on when to act
• No matter where you are in the organization, you have a role to play in moving change forward
• Automation leaders need to behave like entrepreneurs, driving change to improve their business impact
• Marketing and selling are not dirty words; automation leaders must frame proposals in business terms, understand executive and stakeholder priorities, and actively communicate the value automation delivers.

Takeaways for Automation Leaders

1. Create a "State of Automation" briefing that your management and non-technical stakeholders can read to understand why automation matters to the business
2. Meet with your management to understand: - their expectations of what the automation team needs to work on, - what business initiatives automation should be performing, and - whether the leadership team feels the automation team is moving quickly enough
3. Design and propose a small pilot where automation can deliver a measurable business improvement

References

1. Intrapreneurship (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrapreneurship
2. Intrapreneuring: Why You Don't Have to Leave the Corporation to Become an Entrepreneur, Gifford Pinchot III, (Harper & Row, 1985) - out-of-print

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