It has been a while since I last posted anything on this site. This is mostly due to a wait and see attitude in terms of the buy-out of Opalis by Microsooft. This happened a year ago now and it has been a frustrating and rather painful year seeing one of the worlds largest software companies take a great product and nullify it.
In this time I have tried to partner with MS to explore further opportunities, but tthere has been no revenue stream despite days and weeks of effort with them. To crown it all, the Opalis Product Manager has now left MS as well. No clients in SA were contacted by MS other than through my efforts. Really poor.
SO what has the former Product Manager and product owner (essentially) gone and done? It seems he has moved to CA to develop ITPAM into the product that Opalis was. CA has revamped the product to become a standalone product and not just an integration integration and automation tool associated with its own branded offerings.
Is CA doing the right thing? Not sure ... time will tell, but they are moving in the right direction. I am building a relationship with CA in this space since they seem to get it.
Maybe MS will get it together, but I still have bills to pay and have to rebuild the opportunity pipeline.
Monday, December 20, 2010
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Enterprise agility through process automation
Abstract
Much talk exists n the marketplace about how businesses need to be more adaptable to the changing world that we live in. “Constant change is here to stay” has become a hackneyed phrase but it is still reality. The ability of a company to adapt to changing market and business demands helps to stay at the crest of the wave and lead the market rather than play catch up. Even organisations that claim to be “Expert followers” rather than “pioneers” need to have the ability to change. Agility defines manner in which a business can effect change. Process automation, integration and orchestration provides an organisation with the ability to change how things are done within an organisation while honouring the business structures, governance requirements and other rigidities that are in place in established enterprises. In addition, significant improvements can be realised by the enterprise in areas of service delivery, IT cost reduction, reduction of MTTR to system outages, etc.
Introduction
The world seems to change rapidly: 9/11 changed the world and resulted in a global crisis governed by fear and inconvenience and the dynamics for business changed. Airlines and many other companies collapsed. The collapse of Enron and Andersen Consulting introduced heightened awareness of the need for corporate governance resulting in interesting arrival of new acronyms – SOX, HIPAA, FICA, etc. The global credit crunch of late has had similar impact on the world’s economy and the pressures and demands on companies has resulted in the need to adapt through cutting budgets, finding new ways to tackle the market, system improvements, retrenchments, search for new markets, etc.
This has created demands on IT to facilitate the changes and some have risen to the challenge better than others. One of the clear observations of the highs and lows of the past decade is that the ability to change and change quickly is becoming crucial. But the reality is that organisations need to have systems in place that are rigid and reliable and will restrict the ability of people to manipulate the systems for their benefit. How does one adapt with all these conflicting demands on the business? Is there a “silver bullet”? Or are there approaches that will make the impossible a little more attainable? IT and Business Process Automation has been instrumental in helping a number of companies achieve greater flexibility while reducing costs, freeing up key resources to do more meaningful work, cut expenditure and increase system availability and adaptability.
The Gartner Group recently published the fact that Run Book Automation (RBA) (or IT Process Automation (ITPA)) is one of the two high priorities for the next two years for IT Operations Management – Gartner report G00168343. RBA tools will have a significant effect by providing consistent, measurable, better quality services at optimal cost. They will reduce the human factor (error and latency) and associated risks by automating safe, repeatable processes, and will increase IT operations efficiencies by integrating and leveraging the IT Management tools needed to support IT operations processes across IT domains. This can be done without days or months of complex coding and reliance on armies of professional services people and regardless of architecture and technology choices.
Let’s explore this a little …
Defining Enterprise Agility
In order to understand what is intended in the claim that process automation is a key component in business agility it is important to understand what we mean by the terms. Then it is possible to explore the implications and opportunities.
Define agility
Agile Methodology is an approach to Software Development and has protagonists for it and others opposed and still supportive of the traditional System Development Life Cycle approach. Do we mean the same thing when we talk about Enterprise Agility? Definitions of the term “agility” include the following:
- Marked by ready ability to move with easy grace
- Having a quick resourceful and adaptable character
- About timely and cost effective implementation
- Capability and capacity to act when required
A simple summary that works is: “the capability, capacity and willingness to respond appropriately to changing stimuli to obtain the best results to meet the desired objectives.”
An interesting statement that I came across stated “Planning is nice. Analysis is good. Governance is groovy. Agility is action.” (Source unknown). It shows that Agility is about doing when it needs to be done.
Agility means different things to different people
Let’s take an example from the world of sport. A wrestler can be defined as being agile as they position themselves to escape the holds of their opponent and then to try to pin their elusive opponent while fending of their efforts. A successful wrestler demonstrates supreme agility. In contrast an Olympic downhill skier has to also demonstrate agility as they negotiate gravity, friction, undulations, snow conditions, flags, time, weather, etc. They can both be very agile but in completely different ways.
Agility for the CIO will typically have a very different expectation to the Supply Chain Manager who works in a Just-In-Time world. The ability to be flexible for these roles has very different requirements and deliverables. One of the challenges for IT is to enable the agility to meet the objectives of each of the roles involved to enable the business “wrestler” to become the best wrestler they can be and the “skier” the best that they can be.
The conundrum
IT systems must by nature be rigid. But, the business changes.
Systems must be predictable. But, the business changes.
Technologies change and the business changes.
Technology must be able to adapt to the changes, but it must be reliable.
Technology choices dictate what can and can’t be done.
Choices determine capability in terms of what systems can do and how they can do the things. These choices are in the areas of system architecture, application suites, operating systems, hardware, etc. These mostly result in islands of technology that are typically linked together by people or complex undocumented scripts and consequently somewhat fragile. These silos include:
- Event Management – Triage and diagnose
- Service Desk – Integrate service desks and data centre tools
- Asset/CMDB – Update CI and asset systems
- Config tools – coordinate tasks in change processes
- Virtual – Lifecycle management
- Security – Patching & user on-boarding/password reset
- Storage – Provision, deploy, verify, manage and retire
- Server – Provision, deploy, verify, manage and retire
- Network – Provision, deploy, verify, manage and retire
- ERP system
- Financial system
- Scada
- Communication tools
The manner in which we operate is also determined by some of the following aspects:
- Architectural choices
- Business Systems and related modules
- Governance requirements – industry specific and IT specific
- Skills set employed
- Budgetary considerations
- Time
- Business demands
Additional considerations that are impacting IT service delivery at this time:
- Cost rationalisation – operational cost reduction and higher RoI
- Increasing efficiency – do more with less and more for less while still being innovative
- Business improvement – drive operational and business efficiencies, increase system availability by improving MTTR of outages, enable new ways of doing things
- Prioritisation – aligning critical projects with the business objectives
- Data centre consolidation – reduce footprint and resources, green computing, virtualisation, cloud computing
- Regulatory compliance – governance requirements: both generic and industry specific
- Quality assurance – mostly through punitive SLAs
- Green IT – social responsibility and cost management
- Infrastructure resilience and security – service availability to be 100% for when it is required and to be secure at all times
- Managing infrastructure – ongoing management of legacy and new systems collectively
- Skills utilisation – retention of migrant staff, headcount reduction, extract higher levels of productivity
- Strategic partnering – to augment internal capabilities
With the large number of influencing factors on IT, the ability to be agile gets severely impacted. Resources are mostly occupied in managing operational matters to maintain the current environment and it becomes increasingly difficult to have strategic work completed since resources are less than before but the demands are higher. This often exposes IT as fragile rather than agile.
The enterprise systems are inherently inflexible – and they need to be
The demand on companies to implement more stringent governance practices means that systems must become more rigid and unbreakable. The consistency of business processes must be guaranteed. Many of these processes traverse multiple systems and have dependencies which are typically facilitated by people (prone to error and unpredictable latency) or complex scripts (not documented).
Systems are designed to not be agile. They need to be reliable and consistent. That is critical. However, the business expects IT to have the ability to change to meet changing business requirements.
Some questions arise including:
- Can you manage agility without creating chaos?
- Can a company be agile while committed to other conflicting expectation?
- Agility exists in context – agility for whom?
What is Process Automation?
Firstly, what it is not … Process automation is often understood to be a slight improvement on job scheduling or steroid injected workflow or even boosted BPM approaches.
IT process automation (ITPA), also referred to as run book automation (RBA), is the ability to orchestrate tasks across systems without manual intervention. IT process automation provides faster service delivery with fewer errors and benefits any enterprise where systems, departments and tasks need to be coordinated to deliver IT services.
Automation on its own is not the real objective. The primary objective of the incorporation of a formal automation approach is to take the repeatable work in an enterprise and manage the variables across different platforms and systems in a manner that limits and mostly eliminates human intervention in a manner that delivers on the business objectives. This approach provides a reliable approach that can be scrutinized for audit purposes, maintains a documented and consolidated repository for the activities and not the haphazard spiders-web of scripts that typically haunt the enterprise.
Process Automation Benefits
Providing the bridging across these silos through automated process allows the completion of complex tasks that have dependencies on multiple systems to deliver activities that are:
- Documented
- Consistent
- Accurate
- Integrated
- Standardised
- Predictable
- Compliant
- Efficient
- On-time
- Auditable
- Staff are allocated to higher value and strategic activities
- Technical staff also move from dealing with “symptom” to dealing with “cause”
- Reduced reliance on PS armies
- Predictable performance
- Respond quickly to changing requirements
Considerations for process automation
This is all possible across all the technology silos and disciplines but there are some considerations that must form part of the strategy. These are listed by Gartner and a few other consultants involved in this discipline:
- Integration must be un-biased and capable of heterogeneous operation without technology ties (Gartner – Aug 14 2009: “Purchase a stand-alone RBA tool and use it as the primary automation engine, if process automation is what you seek.” Article – Will Vendor Initiatives Deplete the Value of RBA?)
- The automation solution must have factory engineered integrations to speed time to value
- The automation should allow simple and effective “publish and subscribe” access to data within the silos
- The creation and editing of workflows must happen without coding or scripting
- Workflows must be intelligent as execution along the path can change based on data in the path
- Drag, drop and link designer
- Branching and parallel processing
- Embedded Rules Engine
- Out-of-the-Box Integration – not field integrated
- Supports all tools, no vendor lock-in
- ITIL compliant process catalogues for rapid implementation & fastest time to value
- Form-based configuration – not hard wired scripts
- Auto-detection of data, schemas, forms and field
- No programming knowledge required
Where can agility really be realised?
The process automation approach straddles many aspects of IT and business operation and are represented in a number of areas. Some of these are mentioned below:
- IT Service Delivery – MTTR reduction up to 90%, overtime cost reduction, SLA enforcement, governance compliance
- Cloud Computing – inclusive of some of the newer developments enabling an environment to grow and shrink as required
- Virtualisation – the ability to control the provisioning, maintaining and ending virtual machines as they are required. Linked into approval systems, allocation of IP addresses, etc.
- Automated incident response – almost immediate response to incidents as they occur, required triage and restoration or escalation as required. All with full audit trail
- Data Centre Automation – Run Book Automation – the automation of data centre administration tasks to enable lights out operation
- Provisioning – of new services within IT, new customer services, mobile phone services, electricity, etc.
- Order processing – handling of orders, invoicing, stock validation, etc without manual intervention
- Data dissemination and collection – ensuring that distributed offices and information repositories are all updated with latest information and EoD files collected and collated
- Data migration/consolidation – migration of data from legacy systems to newer platforms. Consolidation of records between disparate databases
- Service Desk consolidation – providing synchronisation between disparate service desks while they are all running and possibly consolidate into one
Can an enterprise become more agile through process automation?
A few examples have been cited for companies and initiatives that would testify to an increase in agility through the usage of ITPA technology. A question that arises asks whether ITPA is the eagerly desired cure-all to IT challenges. No, sadly it is not as the diversity of environments and their respective challenges makes that a fairly unrealistic expectation. It is, however, a highly effective tool that enables agility and increased ability to deliver higher levels of service into the enterprise.
Gartner, as mentioned before, suggest that this is one of the two high priority items for IT Operations in the next two years. This is validated by a number of other entities and the increase in players in this market.
What then is a suitable approach to start with? Almost all implementations have started with an area of pain or problems within the enterprise and then tactically tackle these areas. When positive results were achieved others areas for enhancement were sought. It then moves into a strategic approach, but it very seldom starts that way. Seems like a reasonable approach and a low risk approach too. If it works for you there are massive gains available.
Much talk exists n the marketplace about how businesses need to be more adaptable to the changing world that we live in. “Constant change is here to stay” has become a hackneyed phrase but it is still reality. The ability of a company to adapt to changing market and business demands helps to stay at the crest of the wave and lead the market rather than play catch up. Even organisations that claim to be “Expert followers” rather than “pioneers” need to have the ability to change. Agility defines manner in which a business can effect change. Process automation, integration and orchestration provides an organisation with the ability to change how things are done within an organisation while honouring the business structures, governance requirements and other rigidities that are in place in established enterprises. In addition, significant improvements can be realised by the enterprise in areas of service delivery, IT cost reduction, reduction of MTTR to system outages, etc.
Introduction
The world seems to change rapidly: 9/11 changed the world and resulted in a global crisis governed by fear and inconvenience and the dynamics for business changed. Airlines and many other companies collapsed. The collapse of Enron and Andersen Consulting introduced heightened awareness of the need for corporate governance resulting in interesting arrival of new acronyms – SOX, HIPAA, FICA, etc. The global credit crunch of late has had similar impact on the world’s economy and the pressures and demands on companies has resulted in the need to adapt through cutting budgets, finding new ways to tackle the market, system improvements, retrenchments, search for new markets, etc.
This has created demands on IT to facilitate the changes and some have risen to the challenge better than others. One of the clear observations of the highs and lows of the past decade is that the ability to change and change quickly is becoming crucial. But the reality is that organisations need to have systems in place that are rigid and reliable and will restrict the ability of people to manipulate the systems for their benefit. How does one adapt with all these conflicting demands on the business? Is there a “silver bullet”? Or are there approaches that will make the impossible a little more attainable? IT and Business Process Automation has been instrumental in helping a number of companies achieve greater flexibility while reducing costs, freeing up key resources to do more meaningful work, cut expenditure and increase system availability and adaptability.
The Gartner Group recently published the fact that Run Book Automation (RBA) (or IT Process Automation (ITPA)) is one of the two high priorities for the next two years for IT Operations Management – Gartner report G00168343. RBA tools will have a significant effect by providing consistent, measurable, better quality services at optimal cost. They will reduce the human factor (error and latency) and associated risks by automating safe, repeatable processes, and will increase IT operations efficiencies by integrating and leveraging the IT Management tools needed to support IT operations processes across IT domains. This can be done without days or months of complex coding and reliance on armies of professional services people and regardless of architecture and technology choices.
Let’s explore this a little …
Defining Enterprise Agility
In order to understand what is intended in the claim that process automation is a key component in business agility it is important to understand what we mean by the terms. Then it is possible to explore the implications and opportunities.
Define agility
Agile Methodology is an approach to Software Development and has protagonists for it and others opposed and still supportive of the traditional System Development Life Cycle approach. Do we mean the same thing when we talk about Enterprise Agility? Definitions of the term “agility” include the following:
- Marked by ready ability to move with easy grace
- Having a quick resourceful and adaptable character
- About timely and cost effective implementation
- Capability and capacity to act when required
A simple summary that works is: “the capability, capacity and willingness to respond appropriately to changing stimuli to obtain the best results to meet the desired objectives.”
An interesting statement that I came across stated “Planning is nice. Analysis is good. Governance is groovy. Agility is action.” (Source unknown). It shows that Agility is about doing when it needs to be done.
Agility means different things to different people
Let’s take an example from the world of sport. A wrestler can be defined as being agile as they position themselves to escape the holds of their opponent and then to try to pin their elusive opponent while fending of their efforts. A successful wrestler demonstrates supreme agility. In contrast an Olympic downhill skier has to also demonstrate agility as they negotiate gravity, friction, undulations, snow conditions, flags, time, weather, etc. They can both be very agile but in completely different ways.
Agility for the CIO will typically have a very different expectation to the Supply Chain Manager who works in a Just-In-Time world. The ability to be flexible for these roles has very different requirements and deliverables. One of the challenges for IT is to enable the agility to meet the objectives of each of the roles involved to enable the business “wrestler” to become the best wrestler they can be and the “skier” the best that they can be.
The conundrum
IT systems must by nature be rigid. But, the business changes.
Systems must be predictable. But, the business changes.
Technologies change and the business changes.
Technology must be able to adapt to the changes, but it must be reliable.
Technology choices dictate what can and can’t be done.
Choices determine capability in terms of what systems can do and how they can do the things. These choices are in the areas of system architecture, application suites, operating systems, hardware, etc. These mostly result in islands of technology that are typically linked together by people or complex undocumented scripts and consequently somewhat fragile. These silos include:
- Event Management – Triage and diagnose
- Service Desk – Integrate service desks and data centre tools
- Asset/CMDB – Update CI and asset systems
- Config tools – coordinate tasks in change processes
- Virtual – Lifecycle management
- Security – Patching & user on-boarding/password reset
- Storage – Provision, deploy, verify, manage and retire
- Server – Provision, deploy, verify, manage and retire
- Network – Provision, deploy, verify, manage and retire
- ERP system
- Financial system
- Scada
- Communication tools
The manner in which we operate is also determined by some of the following aspects:
- Architectural choices
- Business Systems and related modules
- Governance requirements – industry specific and IT specific
- Skills set employed
- Budgetary considerations
- Time
- Business demands
Additional considerations that are impacting IT service delivery at this time:
- Cost rationalisation – operational cost reduction and higher RoI
- Increasing efficiency – do more with less and more for less while still being innovative
- Business improvement – drive operational and business efficiencies, increase system availability by improving MTTR of outages, enable new ways of doing things
- Prioritisation – aligning critical projects with the business objectives
- Data centre consolidation – reduce footprint and resources, green computing, virtualisation, cloud computing
- Regulatory compliance – governance requirements: both generic and industry specific
- Quality assurance – mostly through punitive SLAs
- Green IT – social responsibility and cost management
- Infrastructure resilience and security – service availability to be 100% for when it is required and to be secure at all times
- Managing infrastructure – ongoing management of legacy and new systems collectively
- Skills utilisation – retention of migrant staff, headcount reduction, extract higher levels of productivity
- Strategic partnering – to augment internal capabilities
With the large number of influencing factors on IT, the ability to be agile gets severely impacted. Resources are mostly occupied in managing operational matters to maintain the current environment and it becomes increasingly difficult to have strategic work completed since resources are less than before but the demands are higher. This often exposes IT as fragile rather than agile.
The enterprise systems are inherently inflexible – and they need to be
The demand on companies to implement more stringent governance practices means that systems must become more rigid and unbreakable. The consistency of business processes must be guaranteed. Many of these processes traverse multiple systems and have dependencies which are typically facilitated by people (prone to error and unpredictable latency) or complex scripts (not documented).
Systems are designed to not be agile. They need to be reliable and consistent. That is critical. However, the business expects IT to have the ability to change to meet changing business requirements.
Some questions arise including:
- Can you manage agility without creating chaos?
- Can a company be agile while committed to other conflicting expectation?
- Agility exists in context – agility for whom?
What is Process Automation?
Firstly, what it is not … Process automation is often understood to be a slight improvement on job scheduling or steroid injected workflow or even boosted BPM approaches.
IT process automation (ITPA), also referred to as run book automation (RBA), is the ability to orchestrate tasks across systems without manual intervention. IT process automation provides faster service delivery with fewer errors and benefits any enterprise where systems, departments and tasks need to be coordinated to deliver IT services.
Automation on its own is not the real objective. The primary objective of the incorporation of a formal automation approach is to take the repeatable work in an enterprise and manage the variables across different platforms and systems in a manner that limits and mostly eliminates human intervention in a manner that delivers on the business objectives. This approach provides a reliable approach that can be scrutinized for audit purposes, maintains a documented and consolidated repository for the activities and not the haphazard spiders-web of scripts that typically haunt the enterprise.
Process Automation Benefits
Providing the bridging across these silos through automated process allows the completion of complex tasks that have dependencies on multiple systems to deliver activities that are:
- Documented
- Consistent
- Accurate
- Integrated
- Standardised
- Predictable
- Compliant
- Efficient
- On-time
- Auditable
- Staff are allocated to higher value and strategic activities
- Technical staff also move from dealing with “symptom” to dealing with “cause”
- Reduced reliance on PS armies
- Predictable performance
- Respond quickly to changing requirements
Considerations for process automation
This is all possible across all the technology silos and disciplines but there are some considerations that must form part of the strategy. These are listed by Gartner and a few other consultants involved in this discipline:
- Integration must be un-biased and capable of heterogeneous operation without technology ties (Gartner – Aug 14 2009: “Purchase a stand-alone RBA tool and use it as the primary automation engine, if process automation is what you seek.” Article – Will Vendor Initiatives Deplete the Value of RBA?)
- The automation solution must have factory engineered integrations to speed time to value
- The automation should allow simple and effective “publish and subscribe” access to data within the silos
- The creation and editing of workflows must happen without coding or scripting
- Workflows must be intelligent as execution along the path can change based on data in the path
- Drag, drop and link designer
- Branching and parallel processing
- Embedded Rules Engine
- Out-of-the-Box Integration – not field integrated
- Supports all tools, no vendor lock-in
- ITIL compliant process catalogues for rapid implementation & fastest time to value
- Form-based configuration – not hard wired scripts
- Auto-detection of data, schemas, forms and field
- No programming knowledge required
Where can agility really be realised?
The process automation approach straddles many aspects of IT and business operation and are represented in a number of areas. Some of these are mentioned below:
- IT Service Delivery – MTTR reduction up to 90%, overtime cost reduction, SLA enforcement, governance compliance
- Cloud Computing – inclusive of some of the newer developments enabling an environment to grow and shrink as required
- Virtualisation – the ability to control the provisioning, maintaining and ending virtual machines as they are required. Linked into approval systems, allocation of IP addresses, etc.
- Automated incident response – almost immediate response to incidents as they occur, required triage and restoration or escalation as required. All with full audit trail
- Data Centre Automation – Run Book Automation – the automation of data centre administration tasks to enable lights out operation
- Provisioning – of new services within IT, new customer services, mobile phone services, electricity, etc.
- Order processing – handling of orders, invoicing, stock validation, etc without manual intervention
- Data dissemination and collection – ensuring that distributed offices and information repositories are all updated with latest information and EoD files collected and collated
- Data migration/consolidation – migration of data from legacy systems to newer platforms. Consolidation of records between disparate databases
- Service Desk consolidation – providing synchronisation between disparate service desks while they are all running and possibly consolidate into one
Can an enterprise become more agile through process automation?
A few examples have been cited for companies and initiatives that would testify to an increase in agility through the usage of ITPA technology. A question that arises asks whether ITPA is the eagerly desired cure-all to IT challenges. No, sadly it is not as the diversity of environments and their respective challenges makes that a fairly unrealistic expectation. It is, however, a highly effective tool that enables agility and increased ability to deliver higher levels of service into the enterprise.
Gartner, as mentioned before, suggest that this is one of the two high priority items for IT Operations in the next two years. This is validated by a number of other entities and the increase in players in this market.
What then is a suitable approach to start with? Almost all implementations have started with an area of pain or problems within the enterprise and then tactically tackle these areas. When positive results were achieved others areas for enhancement were sought. It then moves into a strategic approach, but it very seldom starts that way. Seems like a reasonable approach and a low risk approach too. If it works for you there are massive gains available.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Why do Top IT Executives care about IT Process Automation
Automation as a recommended priority
The Gartner Group recently published the fact that Run Book Automation (RBA) (or IT Process Automation (ITPA)) is one of the two high priorities for the next two years for IT Operations Management – Gartner report G00168343. RBA tools will have a significant effect by providing consistent, measurable, better quality services at optimal cost. They will reduce the human factor (of error and latency) and associated risks by automating safe, repeatable processes, and will increase IT operations efficiencies by integrating and leveraging the IT Management tools needed to support IT operations processes across IT domains.
Some of the current realities
These are some high-level realities regarding IT budgets:
- Capex is generally controlled and has been for a while
- Opex has been growing at reasonable rate over the last few years. The reasons for this include: Virtualisation, Compliance, Bridging disparate technology silos.
- 2009 economic pressures call for a controlling of operational expenses
ITPA/RBA is a strategy that will help deal with this need and many other to boot.
IT Silos
The investment made by IT over the last few years has made organisations fairly efficient in each of the technology silos and have improved efficiencies in these silos.
- Event Management – Triage and diagnose
- Service Desk – Integrate service desks and data centre tools
- Asset/CMDB – Update CI and asset systems
- Config tools – coordinate tasks in change processes
- Virtual – Lifecycle management
- Security – Patching & user on-boarding/password reset
- Storage – Provision, deploy, verify, manage and retire
- Server – Provision, deploy, verify, manage and retire
- Network – Provision, deploy, verify, manage and retire
Automation within the silos happens within the better tools. People, however, bridge these silos either manually or through complex scripting. This introduces latency, risk and cost and limits the scalability of the enterprise.
IT Process Automation benefit
Providing the bridging across these silos through automated process allows the completion of complex tasks that have dependencies on multiple systems to deliver activities that are:
- Documented
- Consistent
- Accurate
- Integrated
- Standardised
- Efficient
- On-time
- Auditable
- Staff are allocated to higher value and strategic activities
- Technical staff also move from dealing with “symptom” to dealing with “cause”
Considerations
This is all possible across all the technology silos and disciplines but there are some considerations that must form part of the strategy:
- Integration must be un-biased and capable of heterogeneous operation without technology ties (Gartner – Aug 14 2009: “Purchase a stand-alone RBA tool and use it as the primary automation engine, if process automation is what you seek.” Article – Will Vendor Initiatives Deplete the Value of RBA?)
- The automation solution must have factory engineered integrations to speed time to value
- The automation should allow simple and effective “publish and subscribe” access to data within the silos
- The creation and editing of workflows must happen without coding or scripting
- Workflows must be intelligent as execution along the path can change based on data in the path
Applying these principles has resulted in IT operational costs being reduced by upwards of 25%.
Opalis RBA/ITPA 2.0
Opalis Software meets these objectives and is regarded as the market leader in IT process automation software. The technology features include:
- Drag, drop and link designer
- Branching and parallel processing
- Embedded Rules Engine
- Out-of-the-Box Integration – not field integrated
- Supports all tools, no vendor lock-in
- ITIL compliant process catalogues for rapid implementation & fastest time to value
- Form-based configuration – not hard wired scripts
- Auto-detection of data, schemas, forms and field
- No programming knowledge required
- A dashboard with real-time and historical data to measure the impact of automation
Who has embarked on this and are they seeing value
The global client base is growing rapidly and includes many household names of international companies in almost every market segment at this time.
So … why do IT Execs care about IT Process Automation?
The reasons include:
- Strategic thinkers suggest that it is of high importance at this time
- Economic pressures demand that budgets are reduced and that more needs to be done with less
- ITPA/RBA reduces overtime costs dramatically
- ITPA/RBA helps exploit the capabilities of existing tools without adding human capital costs
- ITPA/RBA enables improved service delivery with consistent response and ability to commit to SLAs
- ITPA/RBA enables full accountability of operations
- ITPA/RBA enhances governance compliance
- ITPA/RBA enables greater interoperation without an army of professional services personnel
- ITPA/RBA enables Operations Managers to use their skilled staff to handle higher value work and strategic initiatives
It is one of those technology initiatives that can revolutionise IT Operations for those who take the time to investigate a little, then invest a little and then reap a fair amount.
(Source - Acknowledgements to recent webinar presented by Opalis with the same title and a few articles from Gartner referenced in the article)
BIAMIC ICT Solutions (Pty) Ltd is the appointed reseller for Opalis Software throughout Africa.
Opalis Software Inc., headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, is the leading provider of IT process automation (run book automation) software that orchestrates, integrates, and automates IT processes such as incident, problem, configuration, and change management across the IT infrastructure - all from a single console. This is achieved through Opalis' extensive out-of-the-box process catalogues, deep integration with application, management and operating environments, and its script/code-free approach. Opalis solutions incorporate the people, process, and technologies involved in operational procedures, so IT organizations can reduce costs, improve service delivery, and ensure compliance through repeatable, reliable, and standardized best practices.
For further details:
Ronnie Schmitz
Director
082 825 8601
ronnie@biamic.co.za
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Why Top Executives Care about IT Process Automation
This short presentation shows some reasons why the matter of Run-Book Automation or IT Process Automation is important for top IT Executives. This is presented by Opalis Software Inc.
Automation of Incident Response improves MTTR and cuts costs
This video shows how significant cost reduction can be achieved through IT Process Automation. In addition, MTTR of incidents can be reduced by up to 90%. This video is a webinar presentation provided by Opalis Software Inc.
Monday, September 7, 2009
CIO Key Challenges
A recent job specification for Head of IT for a retailer in Cape Town listed the following:
Key Challenges:
• Balance scarce resources and budget with conflicting demands.
• Ensure systems stability and availability.
• Development, recruitment and retention of key skills.
The development in IT and Business Process Integration and Automation, as confirmed by Gartner and Forrester, will go a long way to meeting the first two of these key challenges. It has been our experience that companies have significantly benefited from the use of technology to Integrate, Automate and Orchestrate both Business Processes and IT System Administration with measurable benefits.
Examples of areas that companies have benefitted significantly include:
- Service level commitments to on-boarding and off-boarding of users
- Reduction of MTTR of IT systems problem by up to 95%
- Business process improvements reducing new investment approvals from 2 weeks to under 4 hours
- Dismantling of a complete call centre due to accurate automated processing of B2B transactions
- Automation of “overtime impacted tasks” with huge reductions in overtime expenses
- Freeing up of operational staff to dealing with higher value work and also from dealing with Cause rather than Symptom
- Staff are also freed up to be able to tackle more strategic objectives
- A large international retailer has been able to increase POS device availability from low 90%s to 99.999% in approx 6 months
- Many others ……
Monday, August 17, 2009
Can business and IT process automation help CIOs achieve their business objectives?
CIOs are under increasing pressure at this time to deliver improved information technology services to the business, while certain realities exist. Is it possible to do so?
Research entities and other organisations have determined the challenges facing CIOs, including Gartner, Forrester, CIO Insight, etc.
The purpose of this article is to highlight the challenges that have been listed and to show how most of these areas can be improved greatly through the use of technology that will enable integration (regardless of platform), automation and orchestration of business and IT processes and subsequently improve IT service delivery in a predictable, audited, guaranteed manner to the broader organisation.
The challenges faced include the following:
* Cost rationalisation - operational cost reduction and higher ROI
* Increasing efficiency - do more with less and more for less while still being innovative
* Business improvement - drive operational and business efficiencies, increase system availability by improving MTTR of outages, enable new ways of doing things
* Prioritisation - aligning critical projects with the business objectives
* Data centre consolidation - reduce footprint and resources, green computing, virtualisation, cloud computing
* Regulatory compliance - governance requirements: both generic and industry specific
* Quality assurance - mostly through punitive SLAs
* Green IT - social responsibility and cost management
* Infrastructure resilience and security - service availability to be 100% for when it is required and to be secure at all times
* Managing infrastructure - ongoing management of legacy and new systems collectively
* Skills utilisation - retention of migrant staff, headcount reduction, extract higher levels of productivity
* Strategic partnering - to augment internal capabilities
This list is representative of a number of lists that have been published in the last six months and has been validated by a number of organisations in southern Africa.
One of the questions is: how is it possible to meet all of these expectations when the delivery of improved services requires additional resources? Budget cuts and head count reduction are often not voluntary and yet the expectations remain. Can the introduction of enhanced business and IT process automation help meet the business objectives in the midst of the current challenges?
Developments in IT and business process automation has made it possible to take many of these challenges and accomplish the objectives by automating the repeatable components that often are subject to human error and unpredictable human latency, and complete the actions in an auditable manner without relying on people. People skills can now be applied to dealing with exception rather than the routine. Resources can subsequently move from dealing with "symptom" to dealing with "cause" and also be freed up to deal with more strategic initiatives.
Automated incident response
Integrating event monitoring systems, service desk systems and business services enables automated responses to error conditions, providing lag-free restoration of services in accordance with the standards that are defined with a full audit trail made available to the enterprise.
Change management systems can also be incorporated. This ensures that the best skills are applied to exceptional situations, incidents are tackled according to the compliance principles adopted, all aspects are documented and service restoration time is dramatically reduced, as are operational expenses. Best practices can be implemented by experts. This provides improved service availability and delivery, cost reduction, infrastructure resilience, quality assurance and an infrastructure that is managed more efficiently.
Data centre automation, orchestration
Tools proliferate within most IT infrastructures. Most of them were properly justified at the time of purchase, but skills sets change and often the technology gathers dust. These tools include event monitors, trouble ticketing systems, monitoring, provisioning, storage and backup systems, etc.
Historically, the interoperation between these disparate worlds has been achieved by people in the technology "silos" and the external exchange of information or by complex undocumented scripts. Additionally, environments consist of an assortment of hardware technology, operating systems, tools and application portfolios.
The ability to leverage the existing tools in your environment to ensure approval, build, configure, support, restoration, monitoring, assign, verify and tear-down procedures are standardised and automated, improves service delivery to the enterprise, makes consolidation possible, results in cost reduction and compliance.
Many clients are seeing improvements in speeding up operational tasks by up to 90% and increased service availability with standardised incident, problem and change management. All this without the introduction of sensitive APIs on the systems included.
Standardised IT service delivery
The ability of the IT division to respond to the needs of the business is often lower than expectation, even in the day-to-day operational areas. As systems grow over the years, varying techniques and operational procedures creep in and are often propagated, mostly without proper governance.
Using best practices to deliver remediation, provisioning and integration functions are critical to meeting business and governance expectations. Delivering predictable services to the business enables the IT department to commit to service levels that it previously has been unwilling to do due to the possible penalties that could be imposed. Standardisation and automation ensures compliance and predictable provisioning and attendance to issues.
Skills utilisation is increased significantly as policies are established and persons move to higher level activities, and the routine is handled without intervention.
Virtualisation, cloud computing
Virtualisation has become mainstream technology for adding servers to the IT infrastructure. However, it has also added a layer of complexity and overhead due to the exponential growth in the number of servers under management. In order to control server sprawl and optimise virtualisation without increasing the staff and cost required to manage these environments, companies need to automate management best practices.
Automation enables greater control over the virtual infrastructure by automating virtualisation activities, by eliminating the latency and risk associated with introducing new services, and ensures licences and assets are reclaimed when the server is no longer needed. It is possible to trigger workflows that:
* Orchestrate storage, server, application and management tools to build compliant services.
* Approve, clone, configure, deploy, restore and verify virtual machine status.
* Backup, notify, tear down and reclaim assets.
* Power up and power down servers.
Dynamically consuming and releasing public or private cloud services through automated best practices reduces operational costs and ensures compliance. Rapid response to changing business conditions through unattended operations under clearly defined parameters increases agility and the ability to provide services and service levels as they are required.
These aspects facilitate cost rationalisation, increased efficiency, business improvement, consolidation, compliance, greater facility usage - hence greener IT, improved resilience, management and skills utilisation improvements.
In conclusion...
Most of the challenges that are faced by CIOs at this time can be directly addressed through automation. Integration, automation and orchestration of business and IT processes can provide real reduction in operational costs, infrastructure rationalisation, governance compliance, enhanced service delivery to the business, improvement in system availability, quality assurance, ability to commit to SLAs, increased management capability, better use of skills and fewer skills required, efficient use of existing technologies, etc.
The ability to achieve this with your own personnel and not having to ship in an army of professional services people has great appeal. The normal approach to the introduction of this type of technology is to tactically implement to address key troublesome areas. It can grow from there to becoming a strategic initiative. This can be accomplished without any "rip and replace", as existing resources and technologies are harnessed more effectively.
Maybe you would like to join the growing number of companies that have derived significant benefit from the technology. (One client has been able to justify 70% of the cost of the technology by implementing only one policy). We would love to engage with you to discover areas within your business that could benefit.
Friday, August 8, 2008
Automation to help with on-boarding and off-boarding of staff
Seems like the more companies I talk with, there are similar problems that plague most of them. One of the simple, but fundamental matters is the interaction between various business department, HR and IT for the inclusion of new personnel into the corporate IT environment. These systems seem to fail as there are many instances where new personnel are unable to access corporate systems for periods exceeding a couple of weeks. Additionally, when people leave, the process loop is not always closed and there are many occasions when former staff are still being paid.
The ability to automate these steps is of immense benefit and saves real cash for a company, makes the induction process smooth and get s people productive earlier.
An ideal process: HR obtains an accepted job offer and commences a number of aspects that can be initiated, completed, monitored and verified automatically. These are some of the options available:
- creation of new login name and password
- creation of new mail address
- creation of home directory
- creation of mail-box
- creation of authorisations for system access
- allocation of telephone number
- allocation of access control card and associated authorisations for physical access (as required)
- allocation of parking bay (if required)
- allocation of office or desk
- allocation of tools and facilities for the job
- printing of corporate documents to be completed
- scheduling of induction session
- etc.
The reverse would take place once someone has resigned or left the company.
- suspend user accounts
- archive user data and mail
- suspend access control cards
- initiate tools and equipment recovery and reconciliation
- assign returned items or available items to be made avalable to other employees
- recovery of sensitive and key informaion
- handle non-compete or restraint of trade agreements as required
- finalise financial matters
If the process is defined and managed, very little is left to chance.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Linking SCADA and ERP
Production environments that are controlled largely by Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems provide great control and efficiency over the manufacturing process. The additional introduction of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems over the last while has created an opportunity of suitable information exchange between these systems for more accurate production control and order fulfilment tracking. For companies that manufacture to order or bulk manufacture, this provides better efficiency in terms of the po production logistics.
Not a well tested area, but one that has great opportunity.
ITPA in South Africa
IT and Business Process Automation is becoming more of a consideration for companies as they seek to tackle the fairly obvious challenges to gain financial success from more business agility and also to use IT as a competitive differentiator. In addition, IT departments are also faced with managing the IT complexity with right-sized talent pool, commitments for service delivery (SLAs), the reduction of human error and subsequent freeing up for strategic initiatives and also reducing costs while implementing best practices. The ability to create automation across disparate platforms creates a strategic advantage to companies that are faced with the challenges mentioned above.
Opalis Software Inc is represented in Africa by BIAMIC. Opalis is regarded as the leading suppliers of this technology. Existing clients in South Africa include Woolworths, Tiger Brands, Ackermans, Pep, Stanchion EPS, amongst others.
I have included a few documents for your review as well as a link to a recent press article in ITWeb (http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/computing/2008/0803110802.asp?A=WFL&S=Workflow%20and%20BPM&O=FPIN). It would be good if you would review these documents and let me know if there is a willingness to chat further about these matters.
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