10 steps to develop your IT automation strategy
Setting business goals, establishing governance practices, identifying and deploying the right tools, and providing training are the foundations of a sound IT automation strategy.
The pace of business is getting faster every day. Competition takes place on a global scale, and modern data analytics can reveal unimagined opportunities to explore, all while businesses must navigate the roadblocks posed by ever-growing regulatory constraints. IT has evolved from a business burden into a vital business service that must support and keep pace with constant change. Traditional manual IT management simply can't meet modern business needs, and technologies such as automation and orchestration have become indispensable to facilitate today's business processes.
Ironically, IT automation is not automatic. Successful automation demands a well-developed strategy that encompasses factors from tool selection and implementation to ongoing management, monitoring and periodic change. A successful IT automation strategy does the following:
- Details and documents the approach an enterprise will use to automate repetitive, time-consuming and error-prone tasks.
- Accelerates tasks and workflows across the infrastructure by reducing errors and delays from human intervention.
- Delivers necessary IT services faster and for lower costs than manual actions.
Why is an IT automation strategy important?
All automation is all about efficiency -- accomplishing more repeatable, consistent and accurate work in less time for lower costs. These are the same business outcomes that drove factory automation in the industrial age. As today's information age matures, the use of IT automation addresses those same business outcomes and facilitates additional business considerations:
- Greater efficiency. Automation can accomplish more tasks, or work, in less time.
- Fewer errors. Once properly established, automation can achieve consistently successful outcomes without errors or oversights commonly associated with manual human intervention.
- Higher scale. The speed offered by automation can handle greater workloads -- i.e., accomplish more tasks -- than manual human effort.
- Better staff utilization. Automation alleviates the burden of time-consuming and repetitive tasks, enabling professionals to focus on more strategic and professionally satisfying tasks that are more valuable to the business.
- Increased security and compliance. Once an automated task is validated, its consistency helps ensure that proper security checks and regulatory compliance requirements are implemented -- avoiding the common errors and oversights of manual processes.
- Lower cost. The greater speed and lower human intervention enabled by automation can reduce the business costs associated with many important tasks and workflows.
It's worth noting that IT automation strategies typically focus on the what rather than the how. The point of a strategy document is to delineate the goals. The pathways to achieving those goals can often be relegated to other supporting analyses or separate supporting design documents. Selecting an automation tool, platform or framework, for example, is certainly an important element of an IT automation strategy, but the strategy need not detail the tool or how it's selected -- only the need for its proper evaluation and selection.
Developing an IT automation strategy
No two IT automation strategies are identical and will vary depending on the needs of the specific business and unique demands of the associated industry vertical. Developing an IT automation strategy for a healthcare business, for example, will emphasize different concerns than a logistics or manufacturing business. Yet the methodology used to develop many IT automation strategies can typically comprise 10 general steps.
1. Set goals
Any IT automation strategy should start with a clear understanding of the goals and objectives required. Setting goals is not a technology project; rather, it's a business initiative that involves IT leaders, department heads, project managers, developers and often the C-suite. It's vital that all stakeholders support and participate in the goal-setting process because establishing the why of IT automation will guide decisions and implementations moving forward. Common goals for IT automation can include accelerating service, improving service quality, enhancing system availability and reducing costs.
2. Establish governance
IT automation requires participation from across the business, and it's important to set guidelines to govern the automation strategy development and implementation. That typically involves defining roles and responsibilities for the varied automation team participants, such as the automation lead or process owner; setting guidelines for process analysis and automation platform adoption; establishing monitoring and reporting requirements; and requiring regular reviews to ensure that the IT automation strategy remains updated and consistent with business goals while maintaining compliance, continuance and security.
3. Analyze the business
With goals and governance in mind, it's time to analyze and understand the current manual tasks, workflows and processes related to the established goals. It's not necessary to analyze every task or process immediately. Instead, focus on the tasks and processes that relate to the goals. The most successful analyses will typically concentrate on the most repetitive, time-consuming, error-prone and resource-intensive tasks. For instance, if a principal goal is to improve business continuance or data protection, a common task to analyze might be backup and restoration processes. The current tasks and processes identified in this step can later be translated into automation elements, such as scripts.
4. Identify tools
IT automation will depend on a suitable tool set capable of creating automation elements and often composing those automation elements into more complex orchestrated workflows. There are countless tools capable of automation, such as PowerPoint for creating and running scripts, so product identification and evaluation are important early in strategy development. The tool should provide features and functionality that support IT automation goals, integrate well with current IT software stacks and offer scalability -- headroom for more frequent and complex automation tasks -- into the future. IT automation tools will become pivotal to the strategy, so it's worth evaluating and testing several tools with proof-of-concept projects to find the best choice for the business. It's not necessary to make the complete investment in the tool at this point, but selecting a preferred tool will make the remaining strategic process easier.
5. Deploy the tools
With a preferred tool selected, it's time to consider making a working deployment in a live environment that can be accessed by process managers responsible for detailing tasks and software developers who create the scripts and other code needed for the actual automation elements. Deployment typically involves setting up servers, storage, user accounts and other infrastructure components to support the IT automation tool. IT generally handles deployment in close collaboration with the rest of the automation team.
6. Provide training
IT automation tools can be complex and nuanced, with each offering different support for programming languages and user interface features, such as drag-and-drop or WYSIWYG composition. Once a selected automation tool is deployed and validated, the automation team must ensure that team members and other staff -- such as software developers and other process owners -- receive training on the automation tool as well as the guidelines and guardrails established for its use. Training should be provided on a regular basis, especially as team members change over time. IT can usually provide some amount of help desk support for the tool, but vendor support can be essential for broader and more comprehensive adoption.
7. Approach incrementally
Take a slow and incremental approach to IT automation. It's not necessary, or even desirable, to adopt an all-or-nothing attitude. Look for quick wins and easy successes by starting with IT tasks that can be automated most easily, pose the lowest risk and provide the greatest benefit to the business. It's those initial tasks that can be translated into automation elements. Additional tasks, increasingly complex tasks and even comprehensive workflows can be automated after the IT automation initiative has demonstrated suitable value to the business -- and any unforeseen problems or limitations, such as unexpected integration issues, have been addressed.
8. Create elements
At this stage of strategy development, it's possible to convert analyzed tasks into automation elements, such as scripts and other code. Creating automation elements typically falls to software developers, especially if the task is complex enough to require detailed code. However, modern drag-and-drop or WYSIWYG tools can enable nonprogrammers, such as process owners or automation leads, to create new automation elements. Regardless of who creates automation elements, it's important to follow established guidelines for version control and deployment protocols so that the automation team remains aware of who works on each element and which versions are live in production environments.
9. Test and monitor
Automation can fail for many reasons. An automated task can fail because of a defect in the IT infrastructure, perhaps from a storage component that's inoperative, full or offline; a change in the infrastructure, such as a new server configured improperly; or other factors, such as a mistake in a selected parameter or command line. Regardless of the underlying reason, it's important to monitor the behaviors of the automation system and recognize when errors need to be addressed. Changes to the infrastructure might require testing and validation to ensure current automation elements continue to function as expected. Any problems should be pursued for troubleshooting and remediation before production is impaired.
10. Revise and update
IT automation is not a fire-and-forget technology. Business needs and policies change, IT infrastructures evolve with new technologies and configurations, regulatory and legislative demands grow and security vulnerabilities emerge unexpectedly. All these factors demand regular attention to the overall IT automation strategy as well as the specific automation elements in use across the enterprise. IT automation must be revisited regularly, allowing the automation team to reevaluate the strategy, reassess the tasks and workflows, and implement updates to the automation elements to ensure IT automation continues successfully over time. Although there's no single time frame for updates, an annual review and update cycle is typical.
Stephen J. Bigelow, senior technology editor at TechTarget, has more than 30 years of technical writing experience in the PC and technology industry.
