Automation and process orchestration can deliver significant benefits, but many organizations are stymied in their efforts to capitalize on these opportunities. Why? First, many teams struggle with the complexity of integrating legacy technologies and cloud-native infrastructures, applications, and services. In addition, Gartner’s “Market Guide for IT Process Automation” outlines a couple additional factors that are limiting the potential gains:
- Limited vision: “Adoption of IT process automation (ITPA) tools continues to be slow because many infrastructure and operations (I&O) organizations continue to opportunistically automate with limited strategic vision.”
- Limited scope: “Organizations that are maturing beyond I&O task automation are focusing on narrow bands of service automation such as cloud management and DevOps, rather than starting with general ITPA and orchestration.”
As a result, it’s all too common for enterprises’ highly skilled workers to be stuck with mundane, time-consuming, and repetitive tasks. Too often, teams have to manually create and track incident tickets. From event triage through to remediation, teams struggle with undocumented, non-standardized processes.
These realities leave organizations exposed to lengthy resolution times, increased risk of errors, high IT support costs, and staff inefficiency. Ultimately, skilled employees spend too much time on administrative tasks and too little time on the strategic projects that generate business value. Further, IT teams increasingly struggle to effectively support the new business models and innovative applications that boost business agility and competitive differentiation.
How can IT teams overcome these obstacles and free skilled employees from mundane, repetitive tasks and processes? By employing event-driven IT process automation, organizations can automate common, frequently occurring IT tasks and workflows. Through this automation, teams can offload labor-intensive efforts and reduce the costs, errors, and risks associated with these efforts.
By harnessing automation and orchestration, enterprises can redeploy their skilled resources and enable teams to focus on pursuing strategic, value-added initiatives that yield such benefits as increased business agility, faster time to market, deeper insights, and enhanced client engagement. Process automation enables IT teams to improve their operational efficiency and respond more quickly to strategic business demands. IT process automation enables teams to gain the following advantages:
- Reduce the time team members spend on recurring, high-volume, low-impact activities, freeing resources to focus on critical business initiatives.
- Automate every stage of incident management, reducing mean time to resolution.
- Establish standardized event resolution processes that increase predictability, consistency, operational efficiency, and speed.
- Minimize the manual efforts needed to resolve incidents, resulting in reduced costs.
Transamerica Life Insurance Company is an example of an enterprise that has embraced IT process automation. Through its automation efforts, the company has improved the utilization of its skilled IT resources and reduced repetitive administrative work.
By leveraging integrated automation and orchestration solutions, IT teams can achieve increased efficiency, responsiveness, and productivity. As a result, they can realize improved business agility, reduced operational costs, and minimized risks of non-compliance. Following are some of the most common, high-value IT process automation and orchestration use cases:
- Event-driven IT automation. IT teams can automate the resolution of recurring events that have standard remediation processes. Organizations have automated the entire process, from incident response to proactive problem management. Enterprises that have adopted orchestration for event-driven IT automation may speed mean time to resolution by up to 90% and reduce operating expenses by up to 50%.
- Closed-loop change and configuration management. This use case enables organizations to reduce labor costs and errors by automating process compliance. Through this approach, enterprises can ensure speed and compliance in their change and configuration processes, bolstering efficiency and security.
- Service desk automation. This use case focuses on automating the fulfillment of common IT requests and processes for end users. Teams can automate such efforts as new hire on-boarding, password resets, and service provisioning. Through orchestration, organizations can realize a number of benefits, including increased efficiency and productivity, enhanced responsiveness, and faster resolution, which can help improve end-user satisfaction.
To learn more about how IT process automation can free your skilled workers from mundane administrative tasks, while enabling improved operational efficiency, reduced costs, and accelerated business innovation, please visit the TrueSight Orchestration page.
These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.
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