Automation brings discipline

IT automation: the way ahead

IT automation helps reduce costs and raise efficiency levels. It is a matter of educating business users and decision-makers about the benefits of doing so, writes Nivedan Prakash

Information Technology (IT) is a bit paradoxical. It is about technology, but in many ways IT itself is probably the least automated department in an enterprise. The IT department spends so much time building an infrastructure and servicing other areas of the business that, somewhere along the line, it forgets about itself.

As IT is focused towards providing tools and automation to the rest of the organization, the automation in the working of the IT department itself takes a back seat. The IT team should realize that if it does not automate some of its own processes, then the quality of service to users gets affected.

Historically, the automation portion of IT changes have not been paid sufficient attention resulting in inadequate preparation and changes often resulted in problems and incidents that caused downtime and business stoppage. Enterprises rely on their IT infrastructure to give them the edge they need to compete, tap new revenue streams and grow their businesses. However, the automation of IT did not get much attention due to the cost and complexity of this automation solution, which would take a serious bite out of corporate profits. To combat this, an increasing number of businesses are adopting ITIL (Information Technology Information Library) best practices in an effort to automate and manage their Information Technology assets and services more efficiently and effectively.

In the present scenario, organizations are using IT in various functional departments to formulate and streamline standard processes. IT process automation reaches a step further by removing the manual interactions or steps in an IT process to provide a consistent and accurate approach in executing a task, which in turn, will increase task efficiency and ensure business agility. Automation in IT has been the key area of interest for certain organizations aiming to reduce manual interaction in IT processes.

Murli Manohar, Head–Sales and Marketing, Dialajob, pointed out, “IT is paradoxical. I myself in my experience with large giant like Oracle have experienced this. In many cases, these large giants themselves do not use the technologies they sell and talk about.”

However, the encouraging part of the paradox is that most Indian organizations have started realizing this and are taking big strides in planning the automation of key processes. Indian enterprises are gradually realizing that they need to better manage IT environments and control hardware and software automation to improve business agility and reduce IT costs.

Although enterprises abroad have realized the need to automate IT processes and it has become essential to driving business growth and creating a competitive advantage, the need in our country has been realized in certain sectors specifically the multi-national organizations, which are labor intensive. For the small and medium businesses, that have a smaller workforce at cheap rates and smaller business requirements in comparison to the big ones automation of IT may not be a cost-effective solution. Further, the awareness of such automation is low in India and it would take some time for enterprises to realize its potential.

Suneel Gupta, CTO, FINO, commented, “This realization of the need to automate IT processes is dawning on Indian enterprises. At least some of the more basic processes such as the IT HelpDesk, IT Asset Management, and Network Monitoring are being done with the help of tools. The companies have started realizing that if they need to deliver a particular level of IT services, then automation is the way ahead.”

Reducing downtime and OPEX

IT automation would depend on where a company uses IT. Is it being used only for internal processing or is it being used to provide services to end customers. The IT Helpdesk is one such area. Automation enables the IT team to provide much better services to the users, which results in lesser downtimes. Automation is also required in monitoring business systems to ensure that they are working 24x7 and in case of any issue, the IT team is intimated so that they can rectify the issue at the earliest.

Automation in IT has many advantages. In the case of large organizations with high costs associated with maintenance, automating IT can reduce the operational costs after capturing and automating repeated tasks. It will also reduce the cost associated with hiring and training skilled IT personnel. IT automation increases business agility by reducing the lag time in IT processes. As there is a reduction of human intervention, there is lesser chance of error associated with them.

It also ensures compliance with corporate policy or external regulations. By aligning processes with policies, managers can also ensure the desired results and the standards expected by their customers. Automation can also increase accountability as the solutions can assist with reporting and audit trails for the end-to-end IT operations. Realization of these advantages will generate the need to automate IT.

Naveen Reddy, Country Manager, BMC Software India, stated, “Faced with the adage to ‘do more with less’, many IT organizations we feel will be looking at automation for improving service delivery. While IT spending may be largely reduced, investments that are made will be in solutions that help bolster service, reduce cost, lower risk, and better leverage IT resources, which is the value proposition of automating historically manual, mundane tasks. Automation solutions can have a short ROI, which is important, particularly when investments are being closely watched by the business and immediate improvement is expected.”

Aligning IT with business objectives, ensuring compliance, and improving operational efficiency are driving IT executives to look at best practices and a more process-centric approach to managing their IT infrastructure, which could consist of a variety of vendor and homegrown solutions. Today, however, organizations tend to operate in silos, and the lack of integration between departmental and application silos inhibits an automated process approach. This leaves a significant amount of work to be done manually, resulting in the risk of error, latency, inconsistency, and lack of visibility and reporting.

“IT process automation provides the ability to deliver IT services faster, with fewer errors. This is achieved by defining workflow processes that integrate and orchestrate infrastructure tools in an automated fashion so that highly skilled IT staff can be reallocated to strategic business initiatives. Automating IT processes drives down management costs and increases productivity while enforcing compliant best practices aimed at improving performance and availability of all critical business applications,” said Murad Wagh, Senior Consultant–Technical Sales, CA India.

Meanwhile, automating workflow, network infrastructure and application performance can result in mega savings for large organizations that have some standard repetitive workflows in place existing in the system. However, this may not be true for small and medium enterprises with fewer repeated tasks and a smaller workforce.

While the definition of ‘mega savings’ may differ from organization to organization, it is now clear that automating workflow, network infrastructure and application performance monitoring can not only maintain costs but also improve service levels and reduce the probability of outages or downtime.

Shankar Velayudhan, Executive Vice President–India & Europe, Mindteck India, added, “Automation in long run saves both time and money for organizations. Automation also will help streamlining existing processes and bring greater discipline and control over critical complex and repetitive tasks.”

Reducing network and maintenance costs

Here, we would like to mention that the solutions such as Tivoli, OpenView, and Unicenter amongst others can help reduce network-and maintenance-related costs. These tools certainly help to implement the complex IT infrastructure and service management life cycle effectively. The capital expenses in acquiring the necessary licenses and implementing these solutions would need serious investment commitment. However, the depth and breadth of the features, business benefits, and long-term cost savings on the infrastructure maintenance would make these investments viable for larger enterprises.

Smaller enterprises can consider scaled down versions of IT service management or Managed Service Platforms, which are easy to implement and lower in cost as an alternative to these solutions.

Moreover, IT operational staffs continue to be asked to do ‘more with less’ and business requirements continue to grow in both number and complexity. IT operations often face flat and even reduced budgets, but the increased complexity of the environments and 24x7 global business requirements make it increasingly difficult to control the cost of the IT environments that they manage.

Mayank Saxena, Senior Industry Analyst–ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan, South Asia and Middle East, explained, “Automation in IT is expected to be useful in multinational organizations where there are huge costs related to staffing.” He added highly skilled IT personnel demand a premium, but many of the low level but critical operational processes they manually perform today can be captured and automated. In addition to reduced workforce and training costs, less time is spent reworking IT tasks; IT automation can help in reducing the budgets allocated towards network-and maintenance-related costs. To achieve this, the set of repetitive tasks related to maintenance can be evaluated and once these tasks are captured and automated, the operational costs can reduce within the organization.

BMC Software’s Service Automation solution automates repetitive, manual tasks like provisioning, patching and compliance. It reduces the margin for error and allows IT to get things done faster. It also makes compliance standards and policies actionable. As a result, IT can cut operations expense and increase the availability of their applications and infrastructure.

Similarly, CA’s Network and Voice Management solutions reduce the mean-time-to-repair by rapidly identifying faults in large and complex networks and increase the mean-time-between-failures (MTBF) by proactively identifying performance degradation before it affects end-users. Both lead to the common goal of maximizing business service uptime. The explicit reduction in cost is seen when the number and expertise of IT staff required to monitor the network is drastically reduced when augmented with enterprise-class tools.

In addition to the company’s service support solutions, including CA Service Desk and CA Client Management Solutions, provide extensive automation capabilities to IT staff so that they can focus on innovating rather than maintaining. Tasks such as inventory collection from IT assets, rolling out applications/patches, providing self-service capabilities to end-users are toppers on the priority list for automation.

Gaurav Agarwal, Country Manager, Tivoli–IBM Software Group, India/ SA, added, “Our Tivoli solutions help reduce network and maintenance related costs by helping operational staff to proactively manage and optimize complex IT environments by providing policy-based and event-driven task automation—increasing productivity by freeing administrators from low-level task management so that staff can focus on higher value activities. It helps clients mitigate the risk of human error and the potentially significant associated cost so that the IT resources are utilized more effectively and efficiently.” These offerings help customers to have a unified view of IT operations, so they can easily and quickly resolve problems as they arise. The unified foundation, built on the ITIL v3 best practices framework, provides a typical user the ability to cut service request costs by up to 50%, he added.

A fillip to SOA efforts

Automating IT is likely to give a fillip to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) efforts. This helps speed-up and simplifies identification and resolution of SOA problems, automates SOA management, and promotes management throughout the SOA development lifecycle.

Automation and SOA are two technologies that help IT to deliver services to a business faster. Moreover, automation also helps to bring in compliance, which is also an important challenge that CXOs are focusing on.

Shiv Kumar, Executive Vice President–Technology Strategy and Innovation, Zylog Systems, pointed out, “In recent years, enterprises have increasingly shown interest in adopting the SOA approach for their enterprise architecture, by integrating disparate systems and structuring their applications as assemblies of smaller modules or services to maximize automation. The reusability of the existing IT assets and responding faster to the business requirements drive SOA initiatives in coming years among the small to mid-sized enterprises.”

“Leading companies are tackling the complexity of their application and IT environments with SOA, which facilitates the development of modular business services that can be easily integrated and reused—creating a truly flexible, adaptable IT infrastructure,” asserted Shailender Kumar, Vice President, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle India.

Inter-operability of various IT infrastructure components has always been a pain for most organizations. In most cases, it resulted in large integration services efforts that have been a costly affair. SOA and protocols such as SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) are what most companies refer to as ‘Web Services’ that intend to unify and simplify communications between disparate IT components.

Process automation

Given the shrinking budgetary allocations to IT, it is somehow viable to fit something like process automation in the existing processes as well as budgets. It would all depend on the criticality of that process and the size of any organization. If a company has less than hundred people, then it might not need immediate process automation, unless otherwise the process is at the center of its core operation/business.

On the other hand, if the company is a large one and needs several resources to manage a linear/clerical process, automating the process might help it bring down the costs immediately. Meanwhile, if a manual process is completely inefficient and bleeding costs for the organization, it may be the time to embrace process automation.

It is true that budget allocations to IT are shrinking however, it is seen that smarter CIOs envisage the value of automation in the long run and allocate appropriate funds to automate business critical processes. While ROI is a much abused term and each organization uses its own formulae to compute the same, it has been seen that well planned automation has always resulted in tangible as well as non-tangible returns to the organization. Sometime there is resistance at the organizational level to implement/automate processes. Workshops and education can help in addressing these concerns

Meanwhile, process automation will play a key part in ensuring that organization opt for Web services enabled applications/appliances thus ensuring that automation is not a costly affair. For example, a job scheduling application will now have to just issue a standard based Web services call to a banking application to initiate a job instead of writing expensive code that needs maintenance.

Automation is an area where investment will continue, even in a tough economy as it helps reduce IT costs and also has fast ROI.  While IT investments may be more carefully scrutinized in 2009, automation provides the functionality and process improvements that are in demand for IT organization to continue or improve the quality and speed of the services they deliver to the business that they support.

nivedan.prakash@expressindia.com