The automation talent shift: Building teams that thrive in the SOAP era

After years of working with SAP customers, partners and internal teams, one thing has become clear to me: automation has outgrown its roots as a technical initiative tucked inside IT. Today, automation is the connective tissue of modern digital infrastructure and, increasingly, of the teams that run it.

What doesn’t get talked about enough is that this shift isn’t primarily about tools. It’s about us as humans.

That’s why I find the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs) so relevant as both a technology lens and a talent and operating-model conversation.

SOAPs aren’t simply better schedulers. They orchestrate end-to-end business services with precision, context and intelligence. And when an organization adopts one, it doesn’t just modernize its automation stack, but reshapes how teams work together, learn and create value.

From my perspective, this isn’t a skills gap problem. It’s about how roles are naturally evolving. With the right guidance, encouragement and space to grow, people can thrive in change rather than just adapting to it.

The shift from task execution to service ownership

SOAPs dramatically expand the surface area that automation touches. We’ve moved from “run this job” to “run this entire business service — with events, conditions, dependencies and real consequences.” 

That evolution changes the nature of the work. You’re no longer optimizing isolated workflows inside a single system. You’re orchestrating processes that span ERP, SaaS applications, cloud platforms and external services. That requires broader thinking and deeper collaboration. The work itself becomes more strategic.

People are still central, but they’re now enabling resilience, business agility and real-time orchestration, not just maintaining automation.

What high-performing automation teams think differently about

The first real shift has to happen in how teams think about automation. Over time, I’ve seen successful teams move from:

• “Automate the task” → “Orchestrate the service”
• Siloed responsibility → Shared, cross-functional enablement
• Versioned scripts → Reusable templates and modular components
• Maintenance thinking → Platform thinking
• Support role → Strategic enabler
  

This mindset shift is subtle, but it changes everything from design decisions to how people collaborate across SAP and non-SAP landscapes.

How automation responsibilities are being redistributed

As SOAPs reshape operational models, new roles naturally emerge. Many organizations already have the talent; they just haven’t named or empowered these roles yet.

Some patterns I’m seeing more often:

• Process architect/Orchestration designer: Connects workflows across business services, APIs and cloud-based environments
• Automation data translator: Bridges operational logic with analytics, logs and business context
• Workflow monitoring and exception manager: Manages signals, dependencies and upstream/downstream impact
• Adoption lead or Change champion: Drives orchestration consistency across business ops, IT operations and development teams
• Automation culture steward: Shapes shared norms around reusable assets, platform thinking and feedback loops

Revisiting how automation work is distributed can unlock capacity you didn’t realize you had.

The conditions that make orchestration stick

Technology expands what’s possible. Culture determines what actually sticks. As automation spans more of the business, shared ownership becomes essential.

That starts with a shared vocabulary. If one team calls it “dependency mapping” and another says “event chaining,” you’ll end up with silos — not orchestration.

It continues with a learning loop that goes beyond training. People and teams need space to experiment, compare patterns and refine their instincts. As a leader, your job isn’t to prescribe every step but to create the conditions for repeatable learning that scales naturally.

And all of the above depend on clear ownership. Without visible leaders accountable for process optimization, templates and tooling standards, automation efforts remain reactive.

How to help your team thrive

If SOAPs unlock new levels of human potential, your team’s job is to take that and run. The environment you create — and the initiatives you choose to prioritize — will bring the shift to life.

At a minimum, I’d focus on the following.

1. Build capability with intention

Capability building can’t be accidental. It should be purposeful. Help teams build fluency in event-driven automation, API integration, cloud orchestration and monitoring patterns. Give legacy automation specialists room to evolve into orchestration designers or platform operators.

The goal isn’t to turn everyone into a developer. But everyone should understand how services fit together and how dependencies behave. You’ll be designing for resilience when your teams understand the “why” behind SOAP-driven workflows.

2. Create a structure that supports orchestration

Orchestration doesn’t thrive without structure. Establish an automation Center of Excellence as a guide for standard workflow patterns, exception handling and reuse. Make ownership explicit for templates, connectors and observability.

Most importantly, bring your practitioners into governance conversations. That’s how you remove friction between process design and automation design.

3. Equip teams with tools that let them excel

People do their best work when technology reduces complexity instead of adding to it. Choose platforms that make dependencies visible and support both low-code and advanced design approaches. Each persona should be able to contribute at their level.

I often ask one simple question: Will this tool make it easier for my team to design, understand and maintain end-to-end processes? If the answer is yes, the value shows up quickly.

4. Avoid the usual traps

Automation stalls when it’s treated as an IT-only scripting exercise, when adoption is an afterthought or when success is measured by output instead of outcomes. You can avoid these traps by formalizing enablement, designing for orchestration — not tasks — and tying KPIs to reliability and business impact.

Your people = your differentiator

SOAPs raise expectations for how work flows across the enterprise. But it’s your people who turn those expectations into outcomes.

When you make space for teams to think bigger about how data, work and ideas move across the business, you unlock something far more powerful than automation alone.

If you’re building that kind of culture, it helps to understand where the market is headed. The 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SOAPs report offers a grounded view of the Leaders and orchestration capabilities shaping the next chapter of enterprise automation — and the teams that will thrive in it.