There are so many areas within the organization that could benefit from automation that it can be difficult to determine where to start. Choosing poorly could bog the organization down in lengthy modernization projects that lack a tangible return on investment. If that occurs, some will question the wisdom of automation. It may become difficult to obtain approval for urgent purchase orders approved for technology investments. Therefore, it is vital that the right priorities are selected for automation. By doing so, the CIO brings about an increase in income and productivity that will, in turn, accelerate digital transformation across the enterprise.
Here, then, are five IT processes that should be among the top priorities for automation.
1. Employee experience optimization.
An organization is composed of people. If those people are overwhelmed by surging workloads, manual and repetitive processes, and general inefficiency, dissatisfaction will rise along with attrition. In such an environment, productivity and profitability will be difficult to achieve. Automation makes it possible to reimagine what’s possible in the workplace and boost the job satisfaction of employees. That will carry over into better customer experiences and improved business performance.
2. Business process automation.
Errors and time delays are the norm when complex business processes require multiple manual steps to be completed. Business process automation streamlines critical business processes, eliminates most of the manual touchpoints, raises service quality, accelerates delivery, and frees up personnel to add more value to the business. Advanced Robotic Process Automation (RPA), too, can be applied to customer interfacing and back-end business process to dramatically increase the amount of time available to focus on the activities that will have a positive impact on the business.
3. Infrastructure orchestration
The IT infrastructure must be fluid enough and responsive enough to identify, quantify, and mitigate threats before downtime and revenue loss occur. Infrastructure orchestration provides the monitoring required to stay on top of any situation. Automation speeds the response process by eliminating manual processes and legacy technologies.
4. Infrastructure maintenance
Infrastructure maintenance can be tedious and highly repetitive. IT personnel can easily become tied up in endlessly checking hardware for signs of potential failures and addressing software and networking bottlenecks to ensure that everything continues to run smoothly. Infrastructure automation can relieve the burden on IT by taking care of routine actions and providing alerts about the areas that are most in need of attention. Automation can save enormous amounts of time in activities such as backup and restore, configuration management, provisioning, cloud governance, and virtualization/container management.
5. Security automation
Over the last five years, security has come to absorb more and more of the IT workload. Automation is urgently needed to lighten the load. It can be implemented in a multitude of ways. For example, firmware, bios, and driver updates can be set up automatically. Similarly, patch management and vulnerability management processes can be instituted that minimize IT time while enabling personnel to remain in control and remediate any security issues rapidly. Compliance, too, can be enhanced via automated alerts as well as reports showing the overall state of compliance, and actions to be taken based on compliance-related priorities.
These are five of the most critical areas for automation. There may be others that take precedence for specific organizations. But whatever processes are automated, business leaders can look forward to lowered operating costs, key resources having more time to devote to strategic objectives, greater workforce efficiency, and higher profitability in secure environment where employee satisfaction is high and customers receive excellent service.
Verinext offers a way to rapidly automate and simplify infrastructure management, enhance security and resilience, deliver resilient data protection, and provide operational reporting and trend analysis for continuous improvement. Read here to learn more. Then check out this solution brief for additional information: Top Elements of an Intelligent Automation Strategy.
