Digital Transformation - Automation

Automation is the foundation of the digital transformation. Though automation benefits are clearly visible across IT organizations in large enterprises, while large enterprises trying to implement, they often failed. Few important reasons for the same

Its necessary to do some enough groundwork and analysis before take into?automation seriously,?Let’s see how we can avoid those.

Four key areas of Automation

?1. Application Maintenance and Infra maintenance – Indirect Impact with Business

?2. Testing Services (Agile based testing / DevOps adaptations) – Indirect Impact with Business

?3. Big Data and Analytics – Direct Impact with Business

?4. Business Process Management – Direct Impact with Business

Automation – What Should be automated?

?Just because something can be automated, doesn’t mean we have to automate the same. Feasibility analysis and ROI must be done before signing of automation activities.

?Not every process can be automated or is even worth automating. It is better for automation teams to invest time in studying applications, understanding the business flow and future priorities before beginning an automation project.

?Just like any other capital investment, automation should not be treated as an “infinite-ROI” initiative. Its utility is always time-bound in a changing technology landscape. Decision makers should pre-plan and tailor the budget to meet automation needs rather than the other way around.

?It is always better to take a phased approach, initially picking the low-hanging fruit that is simple to automate and will generate a quick return, before moving on to more complex tasks. This serves a dual purpose of earning the confidence of project sponsors, while also allowing the automation team to gain confidence before attempting more complicated projects.?

Automation – How Should it be automated?

?There are variety of tools and technologies available for automation. So we need to take a decision about using the right tool, right process for adopting this. Whatever relevant today may not be relevant in future (functional or technical) perspective

?With automation becoming more ubiquitous, SME knowledge in the team is gradually being codified in the form of automated assets.

?Before committing a substantial amount to one tool or the other, organizations should undertake a detailed study and prepare a benefits timeline at least five years out, during which time they can recoup their initial investment.?

Automation – When Should it be automated?

?Our business objectives and technical objectives needs to be considered to find answer for this. In this Agile basis development sometimes waiting for few sprints until the maturity of a system happens, sometimes just before a large transformation, we could wait and align this automation as part of that transformation process.

?We need to keep Automation sync across the enterprise architecture model and future alignments

3 Key elements in Automation

?The cost of change: ?Enterprises want significantly reduced technology costs and are unwilling to fund technology changes that do not result in direct customer benefits.

?The pace of change: Quarterly or even monthly release cycles no longer meet user needs. Customers expect more frequent rollouts, even multiple times a day, to keep pace with their informational and service requirements.

?The quality of change: Decision-makers want to improve the scalability of applications and deliver a rich, interactive and dynamic user experience on a wide variety of devices, while minimizing the risk of change.