How important is business, IT process automation to the CIO?

CIOs are under increasing pressure at this time to deliver improved information technology services to the business, while certain realities exist. Is it possible to do so?

Research entities and other organisations have determined the challenges facing CIOs, including Gartner, Forrester, CIO Insight, etc.

The purpose of this article is to highlight the challenges that have been listed and to show how most of these areas can be improved greatly through the use of technology that will enable integration (regardless of platform), automation and orchestration of business and IT processes and subsequently improve IT service delivery in a predictable, audited, guaranteed manner to the broader organisation.

The challenges faced include the following:

* Cost rationalisation - operational cost reduction and higher ROI
* Increasing efficiency - do more with less and more for less while still being innovative
* Business improvement - drive operational and business efficiencies, increase system availability by improving MTTR of outages, enable new ways of doing things
* Prioritisation - aligning critical projects with the business objectives
* Data centre consolidation - reduce footprint and resources, green computing, virtualisation, cloud computing
* Regulatory compliance - governance requirements: both generic and industry specific
* Quality assurance - mostly through punitive SLAs
* Green IT - social responsibility and cost management
* Infrastructure resilience and security - service availability to be 100% for when it is required and to be secure at all times
* Managing infrastructure - ongoing management of legacy and new systems collectively
* Skills utilisation - retention of migrant staff, headcount reduction, extract higher levels of productivity
* Strategic partnering - to augment internal capabilities

This list is representative of a number of lists that have been published in the last six months and has been validated by a number of organisations in southern Africa.

One of the questions is: how is it possible to meet all of these expectations when the delivery of improved services requires additional resources? Budget cuts and head count reduction are often not voluntary and yet the expectations remain. Can the introduction of enhanced business and IT process automation help meet the business objectives in the midst of the current challenges?

Developments in IT and business process automation has made it possible to take many of these challenges and accomplish the objectives by automating the repeatable components that often are subject to human error and unpredictable human latency, and complete the actions in an auditable manner without relying on people. People skills can now be applied to dealing with exception rather than the routine. Resources can subsequently move from dealing with "symptom" to dealing with "cause" and also be freed up to deal with more strategic initiatives.

Integrating event monitoring systems, service desk systems and business services enables automated responses to error conditions, providing lag-free restoration of services in accordance with the standards that are defined with a full audit trail made available to the enterprise.

Change management systems can also be incorporated. This ensures that the best skills are applied to exceptional situations, incidents are tackled according to the compliance principles adopted, all aspects are documented and service restoration time is dramatically reduced, as are operational expenses. Best practices can be implemented by experts. This provides improved service availability and delivery, cost reduction, infrastructure resilience, quality assurance and an infrastructure that is managed more efficiently.

Tools proliferate within most IT infrastructures. Most of them were properly justified at the time of purchase, but skills sets change and often the technology gathers dust. These tools include event monitors, trouble ticketing systems, monitoring, provisioning, storage and backup systems, etc.

Historically, the interoperation between these disparate worlds has been achieved by people in the technology "silos" and the external exchange of information or by complex undocumented scripts. Additionally, environments consist of an assortment of hardware technology, operating systems, tools and application portfolios.

The ability to leverage the existing tools in your environment to ensure approval, build, configure, support, restoration, monitoring, assign, verify and tear-down procedures are standardised and automated, improves service delivery to the enterprise, makes consolidation possible, results in cost reduction and compliance.

Many clients are seeing improvements in speeding up operational tasks by up to 90% and increased service availability with standardised incident, problem and change management. All this without the introduction of sensitive APIs on the systems included.

The ability of the IT division to respond to the needs of the business is often lower than expectation, even in the day-to-day operational areas. As systems grow over the years, varying techniques and operational procedures creep in and are often propagated, mostly without proper governance.

Using best practices to deliver remediation, provisioning and integration functions are critical to meeting business and governance expectations. Delivering predictable services to the business enables the IT department to commit to service levels that it previously has been unwilling to do due to the possible penalties that could be imposed. Standardisation and automation ensures compliance and predictable provisioning and attendance to issues.

Skills utilisation is increased significantly as policies are established and persons move to higher level activities, and the routine is handled without intervention.

Virtualisation has become mainstream technology for adding servers to the IT infrastructure. However, it has also added a layer of complexity and overhead due to the exponential growth in the number of servers under management. In order to control server sprawl and optimise virtualisation without increasing the staff and cost required to manage these environments, companies need to automate management best practices.

Automation enables greater control over the virtual infrastructure by automating virtualisation activities, by eliminating the latency and risk associated with introducing new services, and ensures licences and assets are reclaimed when the server is no longer needed. It is possible to trigger workflows that:

* Orchestrate storage, server, application and management tools to build compliant services.
* Approve, clone, configure, deploy, restore and verify virtual machine status.
* Backup, notify, tear down and reclaim assets.
* Power up and power down servers.

Dynamically consuming and releasing public or private cloud services through automated best practices reduces operational costs and ensures compliance. Rapid response to changing business conditions through unattended operations under clearly defined parameters increases agility and the ability to provide services and service levels as they are required.

These aspects facilitate cost rationalisation, increased efficiency, business improvement, consolidation, compliance, greater facility usage - hence greener IT, improved resilience, management and skills utilisation improvements.

Most of the challenges that are faced by CIOs at this time can be directly addressed through automation. Integration, automation and orchestration of business and IT processes can provide real reduction in operational costs, infrastructure rationalisation, governance compliance, enhanced service delivery to the business, improvement in system availability, quality assurance, ability to commit to SLAs, increased management capability, better use of skills and fewer skills required, efficient use of existing technologies, etc.

The ability to achieve this with your own personnel and not having to ship in an army of professional services people has great appeal. The normal approach to the introduction of this type of technology is to tactically implement to address key troublesome areas. It can grow from there to becoming a strategic initiative. This can be accomplished without any "rip and replace", as existing resources and technologies are harnessed more effectively.

Maybe you would like to join the growing number of companies that have derived significant benefit from the technology. (One client has been able to justify 70% of the cost of the technology by implementing only one policy). We would love to engage with you to discover areas within your business that could benefit.