By Tom Farre

Do more with less ... cut the fat ... run lean. Such directives have been part of IT’s marching orders for some time. But in today’s economy, they’ve taken on added significance. Now IT executives are under tremendous pressure to reduce costs, make staff more efficient and deliver more value to the business. One such initiative: deploying automation technology to streamline IT processes and operations.

By helping CIOs automate previously manual processes, IT automation can increase operational efficiency and agility, minimize errors and significantly reduce costs. In fact, studies show that IT process automation (ITPA) frees up 77 percent more staff for strategic projects than other approaches. “IT process automation lets you put knowledge into software,” says Andi Mann, VP of Research at EMA. “That lets you free staff for more strategic work.”

One company automating its IT processes is CIBER Inc., a Greenwood, Colo., provider of managed services. Tony Testa, the company’s Enterprise Management Practice Lead, expects IT process automation will make service delivery more reliable while significantly reducing the costs. He also says it will help CIBER to automatically process logs and monitor access across applications, usually a labor-intensive process.

But IT automation is about more than just staff efficiency and cost reductions. At its highest level of maturity, automation is a strategic cornerstone, one that supports IT’s relevance and responsiveness to the business by increasing agility, service quality and control. This maturity level, called business-driven automation (BDA) by some, helps CIOs automate in the context of their business priorities. BDA goes a step above service automation in that it helps IT determine which applications or services are most critical to the business and would benefi t the most from automation. In so doing, BDA can also help CIOs reduce IT complexity, enhance staff productivity, reduce downtime risks and help their enterprises maintain their competitive edge.

BDA is not a product, a stand-alone tool or even a service. Rather, it’s a new approach to informed automation, one that promises to help prioritize IT automation investments for the greatest business impact. As CIOs automate a greater number of IT systems, modules and services, they are increasingly able to drive business value — the key benefit of business-driven automation.

Optimal Stage

“Business-driven automation is the optimal stage in an organization’s IT maturity, where investments in IT automation are governed by business value and operational risk,” says Dominic Schiavello, VP of Enterprise IT Management Solution Strategy at CA, a proponent of BDA. “This is especially welcome in today’s challenging business environment, as it supplies a fact-based methodology for prioritizing IT investments.” At a time when companies are struggling to maintain revenue and keep customers satisfied, Schiavello adds, BDA enables IT to align its priorities and investments with these critical business needs.