A combination of forces, including sky-rocketing complexity and severe economic pressure, are radically and irreversibly altering the IT landscape. New methods, new functional sourcing and new organisational structures are needed to address this onslaught, but one theme is obvious throughout all of these approaches, ie a need to automate more of what is done in IT.
A typical IT organisation wastes a significant portion of its budget on inefficiencies often arising from inconsistent practices and processes that result in duplication of effort, mistakes, re-work and service instability that only gets worse as the complexity of the situation grows. However, through the automation of many of these tasks, a leaner unit can emerge that is more responsive to business changes. All the evidence indicates that an automation 'tipping point' is already under way and that IT units need to consider their plans for automation, including the many derivative outcomes for process refinement, staffing, tools and the organisation itself. With approximately 75% of the IT budget spent on simply maintaining existing IT operations, improvements through the use of automation can represent big savings. These include:
* Software deployment and update: Software is automatically updated as new versions are introduced and approved;
* Patch management: Detects vulnerability and ensures all systems are protected, even remote users on laptops and workstations;
* Agent procedures: Provides proactive service delivery capabilities that result in increased productivity, consistent service levels, increased utilisation of staff, expanded service capabilities and cost reduction;
* Monitoring: Proactive monitoring of servers, workstations, remote computers with instant notification of problems or changes;
* Reporting: Complete, integrated management reports can be scheduled for automatic distribution.
"Without a shadow of a doubt, there are some significant benefits to be gained from automation, which can be realised through working with us and exploiting our managed services capabilities that in turn have been enhanced to address these issues," commented Aliki Droussiotis, Director, MCI Consultants. "This has already been recognised by a growing number of our clients who have embraced and adopted our managed services solution. The benefits include having access to unlimited remote and telephone support from the MCI helpdesk, which means no extra costs for support on non-on-site days; faster reaction and turnaround time; automation of routine IT management tasks; 24x7 monitoring of all the workstations and servers; less downtime as most remote support can be done without interrupting the users; proactively managing operations to prevent problems from arising, moving away from a break-fix or reactive model."
For further information, please contact Aliki Droussiotis, MCI: tel (011) 454 3420, fax (011) 454 3417, e-mail aliki@mci.co.za.
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