InformationAge: Cognizant’s Global Head of Markets for Infrastructure Services Says Automation of Infrastructure Management Must Closely Align to a Company’s Strategic Objectives

“The key is to ensure that automation of infrastructure management is closely aligned to and integrated with a company’s strategic objectives; without a clear path, businesses can fall into the trap of automating for the sake of automation, without taking actual business objectives into consideration,” says Venu Lambu. Excerpts:

“To avoid the pitfalls many companies encounter when automating certain processes, businesses should be clear on their current state coupled with desired business outcomes and objectives.

Automation can support many business objectives. These include cost, end-user experience, always-available infrastructure to support digital business transformation and increased service availability or compliance. It is important to decide on which to focus and automate where it makes the most sense.

The goal should be either to focus on technology and identify how automated processes can help enhance productivity and efficiency, or identify ways that automation supports objectives such as powering a constantly-ready business or converging machine, and user data to enable real-time business decisions.

Automation is not just about removing or reducing human effort; it is about removing repetitive work and focusing human effort on high-skill areas by automating traditional tasks. This way an enterprise can deliver higher levels of value to users inside and outside the firewall.

IT needs to take a service-led approach and prioritize which areas of the business should be automated for maximum impact. This means taking into account possible limited resources and time, and balancing the business performance improvement and business digital transformation agenda.

Not only is it important for businesses to identify the outcomes they want to achieve through automation, they also need to match it with the state of automation in the current environment and then decide on an approach.

To do this, organizations have to classify their state of automation, for example on a scale from Expected (with outcomes needed to keep an environment healthy) over to Needed (outcomes required to clamp down on costs) and Desired (examples are automated reporting or automated fulfillment of requests) up to Delightful (examples are automated provisioning of an application anytime/anywhere or automated capacity predictions).

Some enterprises tend to fall victim to internal challenges or, due to a complex multi-vendor landscape with too many interdependencies, are unable to carry out any meaningful level of integrated automation.

By joining forces with trusted business and IT partners, the company can be helped through the automation journey. A competent partner allows the company to focus on its core business and keep a close eye on market changes to ensure it adapts in time.”

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