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.