Automation is a broad set of practices, and never is that truer than when an organization sets out to automate a function, process, or solution. There are several questions that get asked when an initiative to automate begins, such as:
In this blog series, we are going to help you answer these questions and give you tools to help educate your organization and promote automation throughout your enterprise.
But before we dig into that, we want to start fresh by approaching an IT automation initiative from the beginning, and from the strategic perspective.
Two questions that seldom get asked, but should, are:
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The answers to these questions help answer other, more specific questions later in the process, but they often aren’t answered. Even in the same organization, individual IT professionals can have different answers.
Automation is a confusing term to use because most technologies in IT perform some function that could easily be described as "automation."
Because of this, automation is something of a vague term, and it gets used a lot as a buzzword and as a flag for change. “We need to automate more of our processes” is called for, but whether that means to develop a SharePoint workflow or a mature solution to perform all of the actions based on one data entry, is unclear.
No matter the type of automation, there are a few things that should always be true:
These are the motivators of automation, and when combined we call them the Automation Story. This is the story we are told when encouraged to adopt automation, and this is the story we tell inside our organizations when we are trying to get people on board with automation.
To make it easier to talk about, we are going to carve up this space into three sections:
To keep it brief for later discussions, we will refer to these sections as Apps, Integrations, and Runbooks. There is also Business Process Automation (BPA), which is a more advanced form of Runbooks, but they deserve their own discussion.
Now, let's answer:
WHAT IS AUTOMATION, AS A PRACTICE?
Automation is the use of applications, integrations, and runbooks to configure solutions that remove manual work from IT. These solutions save the organization time, money, and effort while providing an improved service to the customers involved in the function being automated.
With that in mind, in our next post we will tackle the second broad, strategic question – "What should we automate?"
If you have any IT automation questions, cloud automation questions, or comments please leave them in the form below and we would be happy to answer them, or contact us today!
Check out our blog post:
"Understanding the Power of PowerApps."
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Download our free Getting Started with Business Process Automation Infographic