An entrepreneur with a small startup in the Research Triangle told us a while back, “We try to automate everything,” and quipped, We’re discussing how to automate our pinball games.” Seriously, though, many organizations could increase their productivity by automating IT support functions.
Rather than focusing on automating simple tasks, organizations should identify commonly occurring activities which are time consuming and often frustrating, and seek to find system-driven improvements, says IPsoft, which, of course, sells autonomic-based managed services.
It says businesses can benefit from automating services such as these:
- Running diagnostics: Up to 70 percent of the time taken to fix an issue is in diagnosing the cause. Automating can free up significant amounts of employee time.
- Predictive incident management: Automations can be taught to recognize impending issues and take corrective action beforethey have any impact.
- Requesting permission: Many support tasks stall because staff have to seek approval. Automations can seamlessly manage approval and escalation processes.
- Service readiness checks: Many applications require complex multi-stage “ready for service” checks before opening for business, where automation can save both effort and time.
- Password management: While password self-service is commonplace, automation can take the next step and provide SMS users a new password immediately after they hit the retry limit.
Terry Walby, UK managing director of IPsoft, comments: “By integrating an expert system that can automate complex processes and continually learns and develops, businesses can immediately cut up to 70 percent of wasted effort and recoup an average 30-35 percent in costs.”
Autonomic systems are the only solutions that can not only automate tasks, but continually learn and adapt. By mapping logical workflows into dynamic decision trees and logic, such systems are able to follow the same end-to-end processes as human experts, and thus automate not just the task, but the ‘how’, ‘what’ and ‘when’ decisions as well.
We don’t think that’s going to help our entrepreneur friend with his ping pong games, but the way things are going, we wouldn’t be surprised if he gets to play against a robot before long.
A large majority – 86 percent – of IT pros surveyed by InformationWeek’s 2012 Strategic Security Survey view social media sites as a security risk. Malware infection via malicious links, however, ranked as the top threat.
