One of the generally unheralded trends in enterprise IT is the proliferation of automation tools. Dozens of vendors offer systems to automate various tasks and business processes, and countless companies have developed their own homegrown tools. Many of these tools have begun overlapping, or sprawling, over time. I’d like to have invented the term “automation sprawl,” but I have to credit Vince Dimascio, CIO and CTO at BAL, an immigration law firm based in San Francisco. He was one of the panelists at a session I facilitated recently on the future of process automation at the 2019 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium. It’s clear that one aspect of that future is more sprawl.