Automation? Eh, not really.
The term "automation" is commonly used in IT, but this creates the misconception that there is a lot of automation happening. As someone who has deep experience of service management tools such as BMC Remedy, HP Service Manager, and ServiceNow, I have seen first-hand that the opportunities for automation are vast. While automation principles are not new, the latest technologies are more capable and easier to integrate into an IT environment.
As an example, back in 2007 I implemented, what at the time was called Runbook automation, into HP ServiceManager, which enriched incident records with more information about the issue, the potential trigger and root cause, dependencies on other assets (CI’s) and the business impact, all before the incident was auto assigned to a fulfiller team. Where possible the incident was also automatically resolved by triggering an integration to the target system to self-remediate the issue. We achieved this success across 30% of all incidents in an investment banking environment.
Roll forward to 2013 where we implemented almost identical functionality with much more capable automation tools this time in ServiceNow and were able to automatically resolve almost 40% of all infrastructure and application related incidents in the environment. For an organisation that was generating 250,000 incidents per month at the time, just consider for a moment the productivity and cost savings achieved by this level automation! With drivers often being risk and cost reduction (often at the expense of humans), we ticked so many boxes. The net effect of automation is that humans need to “up their game” if they are to survive in this constantly evolving world where repetitive and trivial actions can so be easily emulated by software.
In the change management space, we were able to drive operational efficiencies and reduce risk by fully automating a change, by integrating tightly with the release management and deployment processes, protecting the production environment either through automated (pre) approval or human approval based on the risk and business impact. This was CI/CD before the term was even coined.
So what's my point? In this age of advancing technology where automation is such a buzzword and vendors and suppliers are scrambling to add this term in their lexicon of services, how often is successful automation truly achieved where costs and risks are reduced? Of course, there will always be organisations that trail blaze in this space, they have a culture of innovation with smart people able to implement complex solutions, but the reality is that these examples are few and far between. Too many organisations take ServiceNow deploy ITSM and ITOM and then move on to the next thing. The opportunities to add real-value, mature and exploit technologies to drive true automation, like we were doing over 15 years ago, is simply not exploited.
There are various reasons for this: absence of ServiceNow and wider technology capabilities, unable to see the wood for the trees, lack of ambition and assertiveness, other business priorities and very often, poorly constructed, managed, and governed CMDB’s which hamper the rollout of “informed” automation.
The principles of strong foundations with clear responsibility and accountability for services and associated hardware and software assets are paramount and every IT asset that has the capability to have automation applied to it, should all be identified, configured in the CMDB and the automation facilitation platform. A service driven mantra is at the heart of automation, and services, be they application aligned, infrastructure aligned or business aligned, must all be modelled with their inter-dependencies in the CMDB and enriched and regularly certified for ownership, responsibility and accountability for support and delivery to enable the automation engines to do their work with confidence.
In conclusion, while many organisations are using the buzzword of automation, successful automation that reduces costs and risks is achieved only by a few. To exploit the full potential of automation, it is essential to start small but think big, and to focus on building a strong foundation with clear responsibility and accountability for services and assets.
