Day 3/ Session

Driving business benefits with automation

Girish Krishnamurthy, Managing Director, Kaseya argued for measuring the strategic value of IT with automation accruing benefits of IT management through a fully automated, single platform

Krishnamurthy agreed that the CIOs need quantifiable and meaningful contributions from IT understanding IT services, given the business units falling under two categories such as cost centre and enabler and revenue driver. While making his observations with regard to enterprises and services, Krishnamurthy said that processes were based on manual labor with a bias toward static rules as a general observation, with policies heavily depending on people for support with little or no use of run-books or run processes, use of legacy tools where a holistic view of IT seemed missing.

Krishnamurthy strongly opined that it became complex to maintain IT infrastructure tools with lack of scalability, predictability and repeatability concepts combined with the misalignment of IT goals and business aspirations, which also extended to the services business.

He expressed that there is a need for change which called for full procedural automation, run book automation, full interactive work flow, single and integrated ERP, capability to manage resources anywhere across domains, blending people and IT assets in the IT lifecycle, provide quantifiable results.

Krishnamurthy called upon the CIOs to lay thrust on productivity as automation meant greater productivity which lead to a better return on investment. This can be measured through scheduled work flows, patch 10K machines and through one click. From a scalability point of view, the end sight for instance, as Krishnamurthy pointed the value should be around 14 people IT group to reach $5 million revenue. “About 10,000 machines on managed services plan with no increase in staff will lead to 20% of profits,” he said. According to him predictability in business would lead to better SLAs which are possible through automation, followed by effective codification of procedures.

The effective way to measure IT as a business according to him is to ask oneself if ERP principles can be applied, is it possible to come up with IT income statement, balance sheet, use of standard costing, eliminate rate deviations to use of inputs etc. Krishnamurthy stated that automation is possible with seamless and consistent Integration and customizable reporting Creating monitoring and automation process flow, unified dashboard, report filters, pre-configured executive report, which depends on automation could definitely drive business benefits.

— N Geetha