Investment in intelligent automation (IA) technology has failed to deliver fast enough returns, with many projects still stuck in “pilot mode” according to a survey of over 600 large businesses. 59% of poorly performing companies still need another two to five years to achieve IA scale.

Just 17% of the companies surveyed had scaled up their technologies, despite 52% confirming they had invested more than $10m in projects.

KPMG, which carried out the research, said IA initiatives like advanced analytics and robot process automation are hindered by a lack of coordination, integration and prioritisation.

This resonates with our own research with Shared Services and GBS leaders, who tend to own many of the in-scope processes. A critical inhibitor to effective automation is a lack of executive alignment across the functions on the end-to-end processes and there is an identified need to improve engagement, understanding and collaboration in this area.

Along with scalability, other challenges mentioned by the respondents included lack of clarity on accountability, and concerns around governance and risk management.

You can read more of the survey results here

Our ‘Something To Consider’ snippets are framed as small, digestible, ‘dashes of insight’ around the pillars of what we define as “World Class Finance” – Process Optimization, Financial Control and Compliance, and Risk Assurance, all underpinned by technology enablement and integration.