Key Takeaways
- Business-led automation moves quickly but often lacks long-term stability, while IT-led automation is safer yet slower to deliver value.
- Neither side can succeed in isolation; business-only efforts tend to break under pressure, while IT-only initiatives risk losing relevance.
- A federated approach works best—business units can experiment, but IT should step in to certify and scale what proves useful.
- Governance needs to be light-touch. Rules should enable safe experimentation, not drown teams in approvals.
- The right balance depends on industry context: heavily regulated environments demand tighter IT oversight, whereas faster-moving sectors can give business teams more freedom.
For years, automation was filed under “IT’s responsibility.” If something needed scripting or integration, it was logged as a ticket. That worked—until it didn’t. Today, automation tools don’t just live in the hands of software engineers. Business teams are armed with RPA, low-code platforms, and AI assistants that make “citizen development” possible. In theory, this is liberating. In practice, it often creates friction.
There have been meetings where finance managers proudly show off bots they’ve built to reconcile vendor invoices, only for IT to interrupt with concerns about credentials being hard-coded. The tension is rarely about intent—it’s about ownership. Who decides what is safe, sustainable, and strategic? That’s why the debate between business-led vs. IT-led automation isn’t academic. It’s playing out in every large enterprise today.
Also read: Top 10 Automation Pitfalls in Complex Enterprise Environments
What Business-Led Automation Really Means
Business-led automation isn’t just “employees building bots.” It’s a mindset. Business leaders identify pain points and act directly—sometimes bypassing IT altogether.
Typical traits include:
- Ownership in the business units. The people who feel the inefficiency are the same ones designing the solution.
- Speed over polish. Solutions appear in weeks, not quarters.
- Use of off-the-shelf tools. Excel macros, RPA bots, low-code forms, AI plug-ins—all stitched together with little ceremony.
- A touch of shadow IT. Many of these solutions never appear on IT’s radar until something breaks.
In some firms, this is formalized. For example, one insurance company I worked with created “automation champions” inside each function. These weren’t developers but analysts trained enough to build and maintain bots within agreed boundaries.
It sounds messy—and sometimes it is. But it reflects a reality: business users are tired of waiting.
The IT-Led Tradition: Order, Structure, and Its Drawbacks
The IT-led model takes the opposite approach. Automation is treated like any other enterprise software project—planned, reviewed, approved, and executed within the technology organization.
The benefits are clear:
- Consistency. No rogue bots with admin passwords stored in plain text.
- Compliance. Every workflow is logged, audited, and aligned with regulations.
- Integration discipline. IT ensures automations tie cleanly into ERP, CRM, and data platforms.
But this orderliness has a cost. When HR wants a bot to onboard new hires next month, IT places the request in a queue—behind a security upgrade, a CRM migration, and three other critical projects. By the time the workflow goes live, the business may have already hired contractors to do the work manually.
Business-Led: Where It Excels and Where It Breaks
Where it excels:
- Local expertise matters. A supply chain manager knows every quirk of a vendor portal. That nuance rarely survives requirements handoffs.
- Agility. If a department head wants a small automation this quarter, business-led approaches can deliver.
- Employee engagement. People feel empowered when they’re not stuck waiting for IT approvals.
Where it breaks:
- Fragility. A bot built quickly may collapse when the ERP screen layout changes.
- Duplication. Finance builds one bot, procurement builds a near-identical one, and nobody realizes until both fail.
- Compliance headaches. Regulators aren’t impressed by “but it was just a business prototype” when sensitive data is mishandled.
The irony: business-led initiatives often start as shortcuts but end up creating more work for IT later when they require rescue
IT-Led: Strengths and Blind Spots
Strengths:
- Enterprise-grade reliability. IT builds automations that survive version upgrades and scale across geographies.
- Vendor discipline. Instead of ten platforms scattered across departments, there’s one centrally negotiated license.
- Risk awareness. IT teams live and breathe security threats; business users often underestimate them.
Blind spots:
- Distance from daily pain. IT may optimize processes they think are important while neglecting those that really slow the business down.
- Slow response. By the time an automation rolls out, the process itself may have changed.
- Perceived obstruction. Fair or not, IT often earns a reputation as the “no” department.
Predictable Failure Modes in Both Camps
- Business-led failures usually collapse under their own weight. Too many uncoordinated bots, not enough documentation, no monitoring. A year later, nobody remembers who built what.
- IT-led failures fail more grandly. Budgets are burned on enterprise-scale automation programs that look beautiful on slides but underwhelm in practice because adoption lags.
Both fail for the same reason: lack of alignment. Business optimizes for speed, IT for control. Without a bridge, both sides lose.
Federated Approaches: The Middle Ground
The most sustainable models are neither purely business-led nor purely IT-led. They’re federated.
How this looks in practice:
- Business units are free to prototype. They can build small-scale automations within guardrails.
- IT acts as the certifier and scaler. Anything that touches core systems or sensitive data must be hardened under IT.
- A shared Center of Excellence (CoE) provides training, platforms, and governance but doesn’t micromanage every request.
A manufacturing company runs exactly this way. Procurement can design onboarding bots for suppliers. Once the bot shows value, IT productionizes it and integrates it with SAP. Everyone gets what they need—speed plus sustainability.
Industry Snapshots: Banking, Pharma, Manufacturing
- Banking. A European bank allowed its credit teams to build dozens of bots. It was a gold rush—until regulators demanded consistency in reporting. IT had to rebuild the entire estate. The lesson: speed without oversight creates rework.
- Pharma. A drug manufacturer kept automation locked inside IT. Every workflow faced a 90-day review cycle. Frustrated, business units stopped asking. Adoption flatlined until leadership launched a CoE with embedded business leads.
- Manufacturing. A global producer uses a hybrid model. Shop-floor managers can experiment with automations for quality checks, but IT validates anything touching production data. This mix encourages innovation without putting compliance at risk.
Practical Advice for Leaders Trying to Balance the Two
If you’re a CIO, COO, or head of automation, a few principles help avoid extremes:
- Distinguish prototypes from production. Let business users experiment, but draw a line where IT must step in.
- Invest in a common toolkit. Standard platforms prevent the chaos of five different RPA vendors scattered across departments.
- Create lightweight governance. Guardrails don’t need to be suffocating. Think traffic lights, not roadblocks.
- Build joint incentives. CoEs should be measured on how much value they unlock for business—not on how tightly they centralize control.
- Recognize context. A pharma firm under FDA scrutiny needs more IT control than a retailer experimenting with marketing workflows.
Final Reflections
The argument over business-led versus IT-led automation won’t vanish, because both sides have legitimate priorities. Business teams crave immediacy; IT protects the enterprise from fragility and risk.
The organizations that thrive don’t treat this as an either/or decision. They strike a balance. Business identifies needs and sometimes prototypes; IT ensures sustainability and compliance. It’s less about who “owns” automation and more about how both groups share accountability.
When automation is framed not as a turf war but as a shared mission, the benefits multiply: faster deployment, safer operations, and ultimately, an enterprise where technology and process finally move at the same rhythm.
