Today, automation is fundamental to various aspects of a company’s operations, including marketing outreach, customer onboarding, and sales processes.
Furthermore, marketing automation is essential for scaling communication and streamlining processes across departments. It also plays a key role in generating precise internal operational reports for both stakeholders and team members.
In essence, companies are employing various forms of automation to enhance overall productivity.
Despite these efforts, the rapid proliferation of automation across departments means that many companies struggle to fully achieve their automation goals.
In fact, almost all digital and/or automation projects completed by businesses only 30% achieve their expected results, and most of these failures occur due to insufficient strategy and governance, inability to execute as instructed, or the inability to control and manage the successful implementation of their automation initiatives.
By establishing a Fractional Chief Automation Officer (CAO) to help develop a company-wide approach to automation initiatives that have resulted in poor execution or management, an organization will receive the guidance and leadership necessary to enhance its production capabilities.
In this blog post, we will highlight five key signs that signal your business urgently needs a fractional CAO, and we will clearly outline the essential roles and responsibilities that come with this position.
What Are the Responsibilities of a Fractional Chief Automation Officer?
Within an organization, the CAO is responsible for all aspects of the organization’s automation strategy. The CAO establishes policies regarding how automation will enable the organization to achieve its goals.
They create a ranking system for automating existing processes, establish standards, and define processes that ensure all systems work reliably together.
Also, they provide oversight over the technologies used in the organization’s automation processes. The chief automation officer’s focus will be on designing processes and making decisions, and creating systems of accountability.
Many companies have different groups within their organizations that have these types of responsibilities, such as their IT departments, sales operations teams, marketing operations teams, or their finance departments. The result is a fragmented execution of automation.
The fractional chief automation officer is a senior member of the executive team who provides part-time leadership of the chief automation officer’s responsibilities.
The fractional CAO will be most effective in organizations that do not require a full-time chief automation officer but would still like to have strategic leadership to assist with their automation efforts.
Read More: Chief Automation Officer (CAO) vs. Fractional Automation Officer (FAO)
When Should You Hire a Fractional CAO
Here are five signs you need to look for:
Sign 1. Your Teams Create Isolated or Disconnected Workflows And Automations
The most common signal of impending trouble is automation that is being done in isolation.
For example, the marketing team creates workflows to manage potential new clients. Sales creates automations to assist them in progressing newly created deals. Operations creates automations to facilitate onboarding and other internal processes.
But while each department creates a specific type of automation to achieve its own objectives, there is no visibility into how that automation impacts any other department.
Additionally, research conducted by Forrester shows that when multiple departments create siloed automations, their rework and redundancy diminish the total return on investment.
It is also noted in Gartner research that the reason for companies’ failure to automate successfully is due to the lack of cross-functional ownership of the automations being created.
Without an organization responsible for establishing standards for all automations and aligning them to the company’s overall goals, implementations become inconsistent and fragile.
One of the major roles of a CAO is to establish common standards for automation at the company level and create alignment between automation and company-wide objectives.
Therefore, creating the ability for different automation systems to work together, rather than creating automation systems that work independently from one another.
Sign 2: Despite the Existence of Automation, the ROI is Difficult to Quantify
The second indication that automation is present (in other words, many organizations utilize hundreds or thousands of automated processes) yet measure the effectiveness of these processes very poorly.
Business leaders can see that an organization has implemented automated processes; however, they cannot determine the benefits that the business has achieved.
According to a study conducted by PwC, only 23% of companies were able to confidently quantify their ROI (Return on Investment) from automation initiatives, indicating a significant gap between the projected benefits of automation and actual outcomes.
This gap results in most companies viewing automation as a pilot or “experiment”, rather than a strategy.
The same study illustrates that the failure to realize value from automation efforts is primarily due to companies placing the value created from automation on the process of implementation rather than the actual implementation of the automation processes.
While marketing automation teams within companies continue to create new automation processes, company leadership generally has less insight into the overall outcome of automation initiatives.
The introduction of a fractional CAO enables the establishment of a measurement framework for automated processes through defining expected success metrics, aligning automated initiative goals with business performance measures (KPIs), and regularly reviewing performance data.
Therefore, through appropriate management and oversight of automation, it becomes a capitalised investment versus an uncontrolled experiment.
Sign 3: Your CRM and Systems Are Becoming Hard to Manage
Your CRM becomes increasingly unmanageable as automation has introduced a degree of brittleness to these systems. The outdated assumptions used to develop workflows now impede their effectiveness.
The lack of integration documentation makes it difficult to know how automated functions interact with one another, and teams are reluctant to modify automated components due to concerns about negatively impacting downstream systems.
As the number of data inconsistencies increases, the accuracy of reporting on that data decreases.
Gartner has repeatedly warned that ineffective governance surrounding systems raises operational risk, decreases trust in reporting, and impedes timely decision-making, which also correlates with an increase in the number of manual tasks required.
Experian’s research on data quality shows that poor data quality has a direct impact on revenue forecasting, customer experience, and operational efficiency. Automation that introduces or amplifies bad data compounds the problem.
With the addition of a fractional Chief Administrative Officer (CAO), an organization’s ability to govern its business processes will be restored by providing a structure within the system that will provide an audit of the currently created automated processes, simplify the logic of the automated workflow, provide documentation for each integrated automated process, and establish rules that will govern the future spread of automation throughout the organization.
Sign 4: Strategic, Not Reactive, Automation Decisions
Automation Initiatives Are Created with Good Intentions, but Ultimately Develop into a Series of “Quick Fixes.”
When organizations face a new workflow process issue, they will add workflow processes as needed to support their current way of delivering work.
The additional workflow will be created to fill a gap in a specific tool or process. For example, if a new application is being used for product shipping, a workflow should be created for shipment tracking.
McKinsey has identified that, in cases where automation programs are created without a strategic plan, the result often does not perform as well as automation programs created with a clearly defined operational model. Often, the success of short-term fixes leads to future complexities.
IDC research has indicated that organizations seeking to achieve the highest level of automation maturity will benefit from a more proactive approach, whereby they establish an architectural discipline to streamline their automation workflow processes, thereby achieving greater scalability and elastic resilience.
The appointment of a fractional Chief Administrative Officer (CAO), by means of their being appointed to lead the organization in establishing a longer-term automation future, would enable an organization to align its automation initiatives to business objectives, define sequencing, and eliminate duplication, thus allowing organizations to create automation decision-making that was intentional rather than reactive.
Sign 5: Lack of Clarity in Ownership of Automation Strategy
An absence of clear ownership is probably the most significant sign that the company does not have a successful automation strategy.
When there’s a question regarding an automation investment, data flowing through systems, or a decision to change a system, no one person is the decision-maker. Marketing, Sales, IT, and Operations departments all have partial authority, resulting in delays and competing pressures internally.
Numerous studies conducted by the Harvard Business Review support the need for clear executive ownership of the automation strategy, resulting in enhanced cross-functional collaboration and accountability throughout the organization. When companies lack the clarity of executive ownership, they experience slowed progress.
Organizations growing should implement centralized automation governance as they grow, especially if they have automation strategies that will cross multiple departments.
A fractional CAO bridges the ownership versus. no ownership gap. A fractional CAO provides one defined point of accountability for automation decisions, reducing the amount of internal conflict experienced due to a lack of ownership.
Organizations Choose a Fractional CAO Over a Full-Time Hire
For many organizations, leadership of the organization’s automation strategy is important but not always necessary on a full-time basis. Hiring a full-time CAO also requires a major financial commitment and a long-term commitment.
Most mid-sized organizations require counsel from a senior executive during periods of rapid growth, system changes, or process redesigns, yet not necessarily require that executive to be part of the leadership long-term.
Deloitte’s research on workforce models shows that fractional and interim leadership roles are increasingly adopted for transformation-focused functions, including digital and automation leadership. This model provides flexibility, faster impact, and access to experienced operators.
A fractional CAO allows companies to scale leadership involvement based on need while maintaining strategic continuity.
How The Automation Strategy Group Supports Fractional CAO Engagements
At the Automation Strategy Group, we help companies bring order to automation efforts that have grown faster than structure. Many teams already use multiple automation tools, but lack a clear owner, shared standards, or a long-term plan. As a fractional Chief Automation Officer, our role is to introduce clarity, accountability, and direction so automation supports your business goals instead of creating friction.
As a certified HubSpot partner, the Automation Strategy Group begins its assessment of companies’ revenue operations by looking at the central core of marketing, sales, customer support, and finance.
They assess how automation is currently being utilised, where the systems fail to meet expectations, and how companies manage to move data and processes through the systems so teams can work their respective jobs.
From there, the Automation Strategy Group can develop a realistic automation roadmap aligned with a company’s growth priorities rather than creating a band-aid solution to fix automation problems.
The Automation Strategy Group also serves as a single point of accountability for the entire automation strategy of an organization. This helps establish governance standards, enhance the quality of data collected, and guide organizations in making decisions regarding automation based on measurable and sustainable criteria.
Consequently, confusion within the organization about automation and the ability to make quick decisions about automation will be reduced, and the systems and tools will continue to evolve and advance with intentionality and control.
Learn more about our Fractional Chief Automation Officer services.
Bottom Line
In Conclusion, the inability to define ownership of automation initiatives, develop a means to measure them, and a strategy to address automation over time leads to failed automation initiatives. Automation organizations that address these outpace their competitors and can scale their operations confidently.
The fractional Chief Automation Officer position provides organizations with the opportunity to receive Strategic Leadership for their Automation without the cost of having a full-time Chief Automation Officer.
For more information, schedule a free consultation call with one of our experts.
