The role of WLA is expanding as organizations increase use of all forms of automation to become more efficient and competitive. Digital transformation, DevOps, and microservices architectures are increasing the pressure on workload automation systems. Building on EMA's 2016 "Issues and Priorities in Modern Workload Automation" and 2013 "Workload Automation in an Era of Cloud, Analytics, Enterprise Mobility, DevOps, and Big Data" research, the 2018 study revisits many important questions to monitor trends while exploring this expanding role and the convergence of workload automation with other automation disciplines.

 

This study was conducted as an email invite web-based survey in July 2018 and includes 427 respondents from North America and Europe. To be included in the study, respondents had to work for companies with 500 or more employees and those with IT job titles (80%) had to be involved in leading or using WLA tools, while those with business job titles (20%) had to use WLA dashboards. The study includes roughly one-third each of individual performers, managers and directors, and senior executives.