Benefits of Process Automation

• Reduced operational expenditure. The highest costs in any IT organization are those related to staffing, in fact research shows up to 80% of a total IT budget can go towards daily operations and maintenance. Highly skilled IT personnel demand a premium, but many of the low level but critical operational processes they manually perform today can be captured and automated. Once these tasks are automated, these valuable human resources can be better utilized on projects that are focused on providing real business value, such as new strategic initiatives.
• Increased business agility through automating IT service management process execution. As much as 90% of a typical IT process is lag time, (i.e. requests waiting in in-baskets or queues, effectively dead time that does not add any value to the business). If this lag time can be tackled through automation, processes can be executed significantly quicker, thus improving business agility. Typical activities in a manual server provisioning process include requests via service desks, authorizations via change management systems, potentially hundreds of trouble tickets routed for various groups to perform their part of the provisioning process, pre and post build tasks, patch and security compliance checks etc. With automation in place, the provisioning process can be significantly reduced, meaning that the new services requested by the business can be delivered in a much quicker time, ensuring the competitive advantage that the business desired. For more detail see the use-case section
• Reduction in risk - removing manual, error-prone, human intervention. It has been proven that around 40% of service outages are down to human error. Outages can be caused by something as simple as applying the wrong patch to an OS system or changing some network configuration settings on a firewall. These type of mistakes can be avoided through automation by ensuring tasks are performed accurately and in-line with business requirements and authorized by the appropriate stakeholders. Automation can remove the human element from many of these situations, thus avoiding costly and embarrassing outages.
• Improved Compliance - IT Managers are accountable for ensuring compliance with company or legal policies. IT process automation can ensure that compliance objectives are always met, and never forgotten or overlooked as can easily happen when tasks are exposed to human interactions. For example, when new servers are provisioned they need to be built in a way that is compliant with company policies. It is usual that there are pre and post build processes that have to be followed such as installing the latest OS patches and configuring security settings. Automating these pre-and post build tasks not only saves a lot of time, but it also ensures that all server builds are always 100% compliant.
• Support Best Practices - IT to business alignment initiatives and increasing IT operations efficiency. Adopting best practices such as those proscribed by the ITIL framework can bring significant financial and procedural efficiency benefits for organizations. Many organizations now have clearly defined processes in place and the next step on the maturity curve is to start automating them. Automation enables ITIL best prac tices to be visualized and monitored, to show increased efficiencies providing proof of best practice value.
• Increased Accountability. IT Automation solutions can assist with reporting and audit trails for the end-to-end IT operations. One advantage of automation is that all steps taken in a process are recorded so you have a full audit trail available. This information can be used in a number of ways, for example it can be used for compliance purposes (e.g. Sarbanes Oxley) so it is clear who has done what and when. Other uses could include a productivity report so IT can report back to the business on the levels and performance of the work done.

See our Solutions section for more detail about the benefits IT Process Automation can bring to these areas.