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EDITOR’S QUESTION
MARIANNE CALDER, VP &
MD EMEA AT PUPPET
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A
lthough automation and AI is often seen as a threat to
workers it can benefit both employees and allow businesses
to transform and create a whole new customer experience,
making way for new jobs.
IT departments spend as much as 50% of their time on repetitive
tasks, but with growing demands from all corners of the organisation,
you simply can’t keep doing everything manually. Automation will
free up time to work on more valuable initiatives and therefore allows
employees to focus on forward-thinking projects and developments
that are driving businesses forward in the digital age.
However, the wide adoption of automation has been picked up
a little slower than anticipated and there are a couple of reasons
behind this:
• Siloed/grassroots automation
Many businesses trial the first automation projects within specific
functional teams and not throughout the business as a whole.
Examples of this can been seen across all verticals where teams are
organised by function; meaning teams that are focused on a specific
set of activities, such as server provisioning, testing or deployments.
These teams tend to develop their own automation practices for
the set of processes they are responsible for. However, d espite the
success within one team, other teams are often still following manual
processes to manage other parts of the infrastructure, platform or
applications. This will change as automation becomes a CIO-priority
and achieves visibility across the organisation.
• Limited visibility
Automating technology infrastructure requires making changes
to processes and resources in use, but you cannot change what
you cannot see. In many cases, organisations don’t have visibility
into what’s running across their entire IT stack. Discovering and
understanding what you have is the beginning of the automation
journey. Once you know what you have, you can take action and
drive automation across the full IT environment.
So, what does this mean over the next year? It means we’ll see
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progress towards widespread automation, but we aren’t there yet. IT
teams will still spend a significant amount of time on routine tasks,
but it will be less than in previous years.
Achieving widespread automation is a whole journey and it starts
with gaining the insights required to make informed decisions.
Knowing what resources need to be automated most urgently
removes the first hurdle. IT organisations can build automation on
two dimensions:
Depth and breadth: Depth is about identifying a domain, for
instance infrastructure configuration and striving to automate every
change in that domain. Breadth is about breaking up the automation
silos and going broader by automating across infrastructure,
platforms and applications.
Across Europe, the majority of large organisations have taken steps
towards implementing widespread automation, with some further
through the journey than others. It’s important to ask ‘where in the
journey are we and where do we go from here?’ This will ultimately
determine the success of the transformation. Only then will we see
the impact it will have, freeing up workers from manual tasks to focus
on adding value and driving change to the business around them.
INTELLIGENTCIO
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