3 Major Factors to Consider in Deciding What to Automate

Automation is increasingly a necessity in the enterprise, a juggernaut of use cases fueling lots of guidance – from ITIL’s succinct “Optimize and Automate” credo, to deeper dives by media and industry analysts on the fine art of when, where, and how to apply automation. At SES, we also get requests for something in the middle – a quick rule-of-thumb evaluation, just a step beyond a governing principle and meant to shape whether a deeper assessment to consider automation might be warranted.

Gaining a High Level Assessment
For the high level gut checks we’re talking about, consider these 3 key assessment guidelines that tend to play an outsized role in deciding when and where to automate: 

• Frequency of Occurrences – You want to invest in automating a task or process that happens frequently vs. rarely or just once. Automation takes time, resources, and planning that might otherwise go into R&D, Quality Assurance or other organizational functions. 

 

• ROI and Business Value – Always evaluate how automation would tie to back to costs, benefits, and real impact to the organization. These include TCO considerations like capital, licenses, software, training, IT support; as well as ensuring the automation activity ties back to established architectural principles and SLAs.

 

• Maturity of People, Processes, and Technology – Look to automate in environments where the people, processes, and technologies are already mature. This guideline echoes that ITIL credo we mentioned above to Optimize and Automate – in that you don’t want to prematurely automate an operation that’s not yet perfected manually.

Making it All a Reality in the Enterprise
You’ll find these factors play a role in most automation decisions. For example, it could be the Frequency of Occurrences is driving your decisions on where to build automated job scheduling algorithms. Or perhaps you’re assessing the Maturity of your monitoring team’s handling of alert de-duplication before deciding whether to automate that particular process. And ROI and Business Value in a modernization project can help gauge whether a certain legacy process is worth automating before that process gets retired at some point in the future.

The takeaway here is that automation has a cost, so your decisions should be guided by North Star principles around risks and opportunities, just like any other organizational investment.