7 Key Steps to IT Automation

In a widely circulated study, Forrester states that 70% of IT spending goes to just “keeping the lights on.” That leaves less than a third of IT budgets to invest in strategic initiatives and innovation to drive the business forward and create a competitive advantage. This constraint poses a significant challenge to CIO’s in a time when IT is being asked to work closely with other segments of the business to grow market share.

The increasing reliance on Cloud resources and virtualization has created more of these “keep the lights on tasks” as workload is being passed between on-premises and cloud-based resources. In most cases, the running, monitoring, and troubleshooting errors of these mundane tasks is being managed manually, tying up valuable IT resources. One way to free up these resources and make them available to help drive innovation and value creation is to streamline routine tasks through automation.

In its white paper on automated provisioning and deployment, VMware outlined seven key steps that need to be part of any IT automation initiative.

1. Define and Document Processes

Tasks and processes need to be defined and documented before they can be automated. In many cases, routine IT tasks are carried out with no formal definition of the workflow. They reside in someone’s head or are simply tribal knowledge. These processes need to be clearly spelled out and appropriate metrics assigned to each before they can be successfully automated.

2. Identify Process Owners

This goes hand-in-hand with step one. If the process hasn’t been clearly defined, chances are that ownership of that process or task hasn’t been established either. Before moving forward, assign owners to each process. They will be crucial in working with the automation team to provide insight and help in quality assurance and testing.

3. Optimize Process Before Automating

 Automating a flawed or convoluted process will likely result in a failed implementation. Review and optimize each process before attempting to initiate automation. Several accepted methods of process review can be used such as DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control), which is a key part of Six Sigma projects.

4. Establish Baseline Metrics

If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Automation is an ongoing process that requires continuous monitoring and revision to ensure success. Before beginning an initiative, establish a baseline metric to be used to benchmark improvement as the process moves forward. Key metrics could be: time from application request to activation, outages as a result of configuration errors, and user satisfaction results.

5. Develop Policies to Drive Automation

As you move to automate, optimize the processes behind governance and control. Streamline the approval process for requests and make it policy based rather than depending on manual approval. Organize the support organization to minimize delays that could arise during purchasing or installation.

6. Update Financial Controls

Examine financial control procedures to avoid further bottlenecks in an automation initiative. Requiring full management approval for every expenditure will bog down the project and reduce the goal of agility and efficiency. A better approach is to go with a pre-approved line of credit without requiring explicit approval for individual requests.

7. Create a Separate Pilot Implementation

Although moving forward with automation as quickly as possible should be a goal, implementing a smaller, pilot project might be a good first step. This will avoid impacting the entire business should there be any glitches. It will also allow IT to thoroughly test and enable users to try out the new systems and provide feedback crucial to a full rollout. Once the pilot program is operating efficiently, you can move on to a full implementation.

Demands on IT Ops will continue to grow while budgets remain tight. An effective way to navigate in this difficult environment is to automate wherever possible and then repurpose the resources you have.

What are you doing to automate your processes? What benefits have you seen from your automation initiative?