Empower I&O Staff With Automation

The explosive growth in mobile, video, cloud, and social technologies is creating a new movement that empowers individuals to solve customer challenges. Individuals who leverage these new powers are reshaping business, but their efforts are often hampered by manual and complex IT processes. Automation changes that. It presents an opportunity to empower infrastructure and operations (I&O) staff in a way that is proving to transform this IT entity from the stereotypical wasteful and sloppy band of geeks into a catalyst for business service. To make sure you empower your I&O staff with automation, you need to build a well-rounded automation portfolio and a business case that focuses on decreased skills costs, increased reliability, and enabling end user self-service. Next, you'll need to recruit automation champions from among the ranks of your most technical subject matter experts and avoid the common pitfalls of automating unrefined processes, starting with too large a project, and not implementing control points.