Effective Approach to Attain Desired Automation By Anand Sahay, CEO, Xebia Group

Effective Approach to Attain Desired Automation

Anand Sahay, CEO, Xebia Group | Monday, 25 July 2016, 06:07 IST

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Several major factors are driving the need for IT to automate more tasks and processes. The requirement is accelerated by automation benefits like cost reduction and decreasing time to market in addition to enhancing quality by avoiding manual errors and making the process repeatable and reliable.

There are challenges involved in streamlining existing IT processes and automating them with tools to improve service delivery and support business effectively. To make a real change, you need to address both organizational and customer aspects; therefore, both management commitments and good understanding are required. Also, IT is inclined to believe that a tool will solve their problem. However, strong consulting services from experts can be helpful for attaining streamlined and uncluttered IT.

IT infrastructures have turned out to warehouses of different environments with different programming languages while supporting multiple versions of applications for business. However, no one endeavours to simplify their architectures due to various complexities. When it comes to complexity, the automation works only as a pain killer and not a complete cure. Hence, you need to re-evaluate your architecture on the long run and assess how much complexity is either intrinsic or incidental.

Enterprises need to update IT skills of their staff to accommodate with new technologies and processes and to enable operations teams for reducing their efforts. This is a pre-requisite for doing anything worthwhile. Though, you can use the assistance of external consultants to set about, however, it necessitates required skills within your own IT for sustaining. Furthermore, the regular investment in training workforce in new IT is the key to keep IT systems scalable and also to exploit the advantages to offer differentiation to their business.

Besides, having right planning and framework in place are important to unlock automation’s complete potential. The process optimization requires a comprehensive view from the very first step of the value creation and all the way in delivering value to the end user or customer. Without planning or process optimization, you are taking risk of putting your efforts in local optimizations and overlooking possibility of an impediment before or after the particular automation step. It is better to take a Lean approach for planning that focus on throughput and single-piece-flow. Additionally, utilizing experts in Agile and Lean Consulting can also be useful for effective planning.

The automation market is taking tools and best practices from the large internet players and making them available to a wider audience. Earlier, such tools fitted best in modern software, green field projects and customer-facing applications whereas the tools were often available as open source. Gradually, these tools are matured to work in the enterprise with their larger and older applications. As more complexity and more architecture do not follow all the best practices required by the open source tools, therefore, tools are available as commercial packages in this segment.

everal major factors are driving the need for IT to automate more tasks and processes. The requirement is accelerated by automation benefits like cost reduction and decreasing time to market in addition to enhancing quality by avoiding manual errors and making the process repeatable and reliable.

There are challenges involved in streamlining existing IT processes and automating them with tools to improve service delivery and support business effectively. To make a real change, you need to address both organizational and customer aspects; therefore, both management commitments and good understanding are required. Also, IT is inclined to believe that a tool will solve their problem. However, strong consulting services from experts can be helpful for attaining streamlined and uncluttered IT.

IT infrastructures have turned out to warehouses of different environments with different programming languages while supporting multiple versions of applications for business. However, no one endeavours to simplify their architectures due to various complexities. When it comes to complexity, the automation works only as a pain killer and not a complete cure. Hence, you need to re-evaluate your architecture on the long run and assess how much complexity is either intrinsic or incidental.

Enterprises need to update IT skills of their staff to accommodate with new technologies and processes and to enable operations teams for reducing their efforts. This is a pre-requisite for doing anything worthwhile. Though, you can use the assistance of external consultants to set about, however, it necessitates required skills within your own IT for sustaining. Furthermore, the regular investment in training workforce in new IT is the key to keep IT systems scalable and also to exploit the advantages to offer differentiation to their business.

Besides, having right planning and framework in place are important to unlock automation’s complete potential. The process optimization requires a comprehensive view from the very first step of the value creation and all the way in delivering value to the end user or customer. Without planning or process optimization, you are taking risk of putting your efforts in local optimizations and overlooking possibility of an impediment before or after the particular automation step. It is better to take a Lean approach for planning that focus on throughput and single-piece-flow. Additionally, utilizing experts in Agile and Lean Consulting can also be useful for effective planning.

The automation market is taking tools and best practices from the large internet players and making them available to a wider audience. Earlier, such tools fitted best in modern software, green field projects and customer-facing applications whereas the tools were often available as open source. Gradually, these tools are matured to work in the enterprise with their larger and older applications. As more complexity and more architecture do not follow all the best practices required by the open source tools, therefore, tools are available as commercial packages in this segment.

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