Beware The Automation Paradox

Automate all the easy things, and what’s left for people to do? The hard things. Automation reduces toil, but is this always a good thing? When systems become too automated, their behavior becomes harder and harder to predict. For example, mean-time-to-resolve (MTTR) is going up in some organizations because support teams are no longer managing the low-hanging fruit of repetitive incidents. Furthermore, fixing complex automated systems when they go wrong requires deeper and deeper expertise. Humans must step in when it ceases functioning. This is why every automated system must be designed with humans at the center.