WHITEPAPER PROCESS AUTOMATION

Introduction to Process Automation

Marcel Karman, Service Management
Consider any successful and well run enterprise today and you will find a focus on innovation and cost control. Investments are made in projects and lines of business that will provide an opportunity for the business to attract new customers, enter new markets or improve efficiency with a goal towards revenue and profit growth.

IT, as an ever increasingly important function in how these businesses operate, often plays a key role in these projects. It should be no surprise therefore that the cost cutting measures that began in this decade continue to pressure the IT organization into improving efficiency and effectiveness. To some this creates a paradox that pits innovation, efficiency and agility against the budget constraints and cost controls.

Industry benchmark data, however, suggests that nearly 70% or more of a company’s IT bud get is spent on operations 1 – keeping the lights on for existing services and applications and the infrastructure upon which they run. While this number has improved slightly in recent years, all one has to do is to look across these same IT organizations and it’s clear that there remains significant room for improvement in IT operations. The challenge, not just for IT but the enterprise as a whole is and has been clear: improve effectiveness and maximize agility and do so at less cost.

To maximize an organization’s agility and efficiency, the business must converge the management of business and technology. Nearly 80% of CEOs surveyed in the annual IBM Global CEO study believe integrating business and technology is fundamental for innovation. 2 Independent, quantitative research supports this belief and finds that industry leaders who are successful at making this convergence beat their industry peers in every financial metric, including an astounding 3X higher revenue growth and 2X in profitability. The research found that successfully converged industry leaders “conduct fully data-driven decision-making enabled by consistent, coordinated, integrated use of automation.”3 To support these enterprise objectives, the IT organization should also look to embrace an approach that provides for datadriven decision making and a consistent, coordinated and integrated use of automation to improve IT effectiveness, agility, and efficiency.

Challenges to success

Unfortunately, many IT organizations lack a coordinated approach to automation and find themselves in a situation with dozens of management tools, hundreds of scripts and thousands of lines of highly customized code. Managing today’s IT infrastructures and organizations can be a complex if not daunting task. To get anything accomplished with today’s architectures requires cross functional coordination efforts that would rival a successful beehive – communication, collaboration and the best information available with a tried and true means of operating. Unfortunately few endeavors are as efficient and effective when it comes to IT.

The obstacles to success include complexities in how people work and how the environment they work on is architected. To succeed, you need not only the data and automation, but data and automation that works at all levels of this operational and architectural complexity. Consider that at the lowest level, IT has employed tools, scripts and people to manage individual components with specific tools: servers, applications, routers, storage devices, etc… each using its own tools and best practices. But, many apps or services are being managed across these domains, again using tools and scripts, some that are not related to those being used to manage the individual assets. In addition, these activities and tasks need to be compliant within the processes and govern how the infrastructure are managed and controlled.

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- Service management