Challenges & Opportunities of Driving Agility Through IT Process Automation for Real Business Impact
As CIOs lead the charge in digital transformation, agility, and automation, they can be the driving force behind tomorrow’s innovation engine. Challenged with a growing skills gap, automation allows organizations to do more with less, better supporting business units that have themselves become automated. For CIOs looking to spearhead their organization’s digital transformation, it increasingly means creating agility for their organizations through IT process automation in order to facilitate change at the pace of business.
Yet, the implications of this are vast for enterprises, as automation touches everything from technology to IT processes and even the corporate culture. As boards of directors challenge CIOs to balance security, risk, and resources with an open approach to digital business, automation becomes integral to solving today’s business challenges while keeping an eye on tomorrow’s opportunities.
Automation Isn’t New, It’s Evolving
Many people critique a renewed focus on automation, saying it has been around as long as IT itself has existed as a function — or even longer, pointing back to Henry Ford and the assembly line. While automation itself may not be new, today’s IT automation offers new and exciting ways to drive digital transformation that impacts business innovation and revenue-generating activities.
I’ll explain using an anecdote about the “A-Enter Guy”. This story comes to us from a former colleague of mine who worked at a previous employer with a person they called the “A-Enter Guy,” a person whose job it was to walk into a room full of computers every morning, go to the first computer, type a command and press enter. He’d then go to the second computer and type the same command and press enter until he’d gone through the entire room; to reach every computer would consume his entire day. To make himself a little more efficient, he aliased the command to the letter “A”. So, rather than typing a full command and enter for each computer, he needed only type “A” and enter. Hence he became known as the “A-Enter Guy”.
With new levels of sophistication in automation and digital transformation, CIOs are able to transform “A-Enter Guys”, using their ingenuity for much more strategic, business-impacting work. Truly, there really is no need for human resources to be spent on something that’s so streamlined and so easy to automate like copying files over from one computer to the next. These things can be fully automated, to the Nth degree, freeing the organization to focus on innovation and agility, instead of manual, rote tasks.