Scaling Automation Responsibly with CoE Manager

In enterprise automation, speed is seductive. Every team wants to move faster by deploying automations, integrating systems, and scaling digital workers across business units. But, for companies in highly regulated industries like banking, healthcare, and insurance, speed without oversight can be a liability.

That’s the paradox of automation governance: how do you move fast without breaking trust?

The answer is smarter design.

At Automation Anywhere, we built CoE Manager with one guiding principle: governance should accelerate automation, not strangle it.

The Governance Dilemma

Every large enterprise eventually confronts the same reality: the more successful your automation program becomes, the harder it is to manage.

What starts as a few departmental automations can quickly evolve into a portfolio spanning hundreds of processes, multiple geographies, and countless stakeholders. Without a structured approach, visibility disappears. Security teams worry about compliance exposure. Finance worries about cost justification. IT worries about access controls.

Historically, governance meant slowing down to stay safe. But, in the world of intelligent automation, the goal is to bake control into the process — to make governance an enabler of velocity rather than a constraint on it.

That’s where CoE Manager redefines the playbook.

Security by Design

One of the most important decisions we made in designing CoE Manager was what not to touch. The Control Room is the operational heart of an automation program. It contains sensitive credentials, execution logs, and data pipelines. Instead of embedding governance features directly inside this environment, CoE Manager operates as an independent cloud service, purpose-built for analytics and oversight.

By keeping automation intelligence separate from automation execution, we achieve two things:

1. Risk isolation: Reporting and ROI analytics never expose live automation data.
2. Scalability: Governance can evolve independently of production systems, ensuring upgrades and audits don’t disrupt operations.

This architectural separation is a deliberate move toward secure agility, giving enterprises the freedom to scale automation safely.

Data Privacy in Practice

When dealing with regulated industries, data flow design is not just a technical choice, it’s a legal compliance requirement.

For customers using on-premises Control Rooms, inbound connections from the cloud can trigger alarm bells for security teams. CoE Manager takes the opposite approach: it lets customers push automation metadata out, rather than requiring us to pull it in.

This “push model” means no inbound firewall openings, no external reach-ins, and no compromises. The data transfer is handled by a lightweight automation available in the Automation Anywhere Agentic App Store, where customers simply schedule the automation to push the latest operational statistics once a day (or more often if desired).

For cloud customers, data syncing happens automatically every few hours through secure, pre-authorized channels.

In both cases, the principle remains the same: you control your data, we help you make sense of it.

Layered Approvals and Role-Based Access

Governance isn’t just about protecting data — it’s about ensuring the right people see the right information at the right time.

CoE Manager’s role-based access control (RBAC) and multi-stage approval workflows give organizations the flexibility to define how automation decisions move through the enterprise. Each automation idea or project passes through configurable approval gates, two is the default, but that’s extendable to as many as desired.

For healthcare or financial institutions, that might mean five levels of oversight, with each stakeholder logging in and authorizing progress at defined checkpoints. Every approval is auditable, every change is traceable, and every participant has visibility proportional to their role.

The result is transparency without micro-management. It’s a governance model that builds trust by design.

Scaling Securely in Healthcare

One of our customers, a major healthcare provider, faced exactly this governance challenge. Every automation touched patient-related workflows and therefore sensitive PHI (Protected Health Information). Their internal policy required local, regional, and corporate-level approval before any new automation could go live.

Before adopting CoE Manager, this multi-layered review process relied on spreadsheets, email chains, and manual sign-offs — a system that slowed innovation to a crawl.

With CoE Manager, they established a five-tier approval workflow directly within the platform. Each gate aligned to a compliance requirement, and every action was logged automatically.

The impact was immediate: the automation pipeline accelerated safely because everyone could see what was happening and why.

The Bigger Picture: Governance as a Catalyst for Scale

The notion that governance and innovation exist at opposite ends of a spectrum is outdated. In modern automation ecosystems, good governance is the foundation of sustainable speed.

By embedding security principles, privacy safeguards, and transparent approval mechanisms into the automation fabric, CoE Manager helps enterprises scale with confidence.

In an era where trust is as critical as efficiency, governance is no longer the cost of doing business, it’s the competitive edge that keeps automation moving forward.

By Arun Mudaliar, Principal Product Manager, Automation Anywhere