3 minutes
Free up your IT resources to focus on strategic initiatives by leveraging automation technology.
COVID-19 has severely impacted staffing dynamics across all industries. As pandemic uncertainty wanes and the new normal becomes the newer normal, financial institutions continue to bear the brunt of resources stretched thin and workloads exceeding pre-2020 heights.
Nowhere is this burden more acute than in recruiting and retaining highly valued tech talent—an area where credit unions and other financial institutions have long struggled to meet IT staffing and resource needs. The Great Resignation has only worsened the deficits: 4.5 million workers left their jobs in November 2021 alone, many of whom were overburdened IT professionals leaving to pursue a post-pandemic fresh start. The combination of these factors has led to significant talent gaps in many credit unions’ IT teams, increasing workloads for the remaining staff to handle.
While CompTIA’s 2021 workforce trends survey revealed that 40% of companies were able to onboard IT support during the pandemic, this still does not mitigate the fact that manual IT workloads are incredibly time-consuming. In addition, these manual tasks pull staff away from strategic digital initiatives that can improve service levels to members and help propel the business forward.
Reducing the Burden on IT
To overcome today’s workforce shortages, many financial institutions are turning to workload automation to reduce the burden on IT employees. Unlike traditional job schedulers that are limited in functionality, modern-day WLA solutions provide operational control over the most complex IT environments and easily scale as business needs grow.
This remarkable, under-the-radar technology is empowering financial institutions to scale the benefit of automation well beyond traditional core processing to broader IT and business applications. Leading solutions seamlessly orchestrate workloads across siloed technologies from legacy systems to cloud, virtualization and the Internet of Things (smart devices) on a single, integrated platform. Additionally, robust features like self-service functionality empower non-technical business users to trigger automated processes, reports and other tasks with a click of a button, further reducing the burden on IT staff.
While the possibilities for automation are nearly endless, common areas where credit unions are deploying WLA to free up IT resources include:
- Lights-Out Processing: Workload automation and orchestration enable credit unions to process manual transactions from ACH to mortgage servicing to online and mobile banking payments automatically, eliminating the need for manual processing and 24/7 operations staff.
- ETL and Data Warehouse Automation: With WLA, credit unions can easily automate ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) processes in a repeatable way to streamline data warehouses and provide IT a single dashboard for automating and managing critical data processes.
- Enhanced Security and Compliance: Automation enables credit unions to efficiently manage security privileges across an organization and create an audit trail by logging all actions to satisfy compliance requirements.
- Improved Business Continuity: Credit unions can enable self-healing routines to keep operations running during unplanned application or system interruptions.
Automate to Adapt
The shortage of tech talent for credit unions is real, and it’s not going to magically disappear once this pandemic and the Great Resignation are in the rear-view mirror. But modern-day workload automation can help bridge the current resource gap by freeing IT staff from time-consuming manual tasks. Not only does this path help address current staffing shortages, but it makes IT roles more attractive to current and future employees by allowing them to focus on more strategic contributions. Credit unions that embrace robust, scalable workload automation and orchestration technology will stand more resilient against the tight talent challenge.
Todd Dauchy is CEO of SMA Technologies. He started his career with SMA as chief technology officer in 2012 and was promoted to president in 2018. Prior to joining the company, Dauchy was a client of SMA working for a large credit union.
