Identifying automation use cases

We recently ran a poll to gauge where people believe they are in their automation journey and it seems that the majority of organizations are busy identifying candidates for automation. In this light let’s first start with looking at why automation can be beneficial.

At the core, process automation and orchestration is at the foundation of a service driven culture, as automation is driven by a continuous state of improving efficiencies across operations. Automation performs repeatable actions or activities in a systematic fashion. Outcomes of a successful automation programme would be:

• Reduction in manual efforts
• Improved service delivery
• Improvement in productivity and efficiency
• Reduction in operational costs
• Improved accuracy
• Consistent service delivery
• Reduction in error rates

The net effect of these results has a definitive impact on the service management environment as consistency in delivery is achieved and services are more reliable and of a better quality, which translates to improved customer satisfaction which cultivates trust.

From a productivity perspective, people can focus on more complex or challenging tasks as a system takes care of the menial, repetitive tasks. This also has an impact on employee satisfaction as some of the day to day grind tasks are now automated. A reduction of error rates can also be seen as processes become more predictable and repeatable.

So where then can automation be utilized?

• Processes
• Service requests
• Scheduled maintenance / tasks
• Incident management
• Change management
• ?Events
• Ad hoc and on demand activities

The real world

The aim of the above is to direct you onto areas typically associated with automation, there are other examples but these items more often than not include various “low hanging fruits” that can expedite your automation journey and highlight efficiencies realized to support your journey.

However, it is important to note that before attempting automation, the process needs to be understood (by consistently repeating the same steps over a period of time with the same results) and the workflow needs to be tested manually. This is to ensure that the net effect of the actions are expected and thereafter the steps / actions can be automated.

• When looking at process automation identify structured data input fields which can assist in defining decisions, this allows the platform to make conditional based decisions on what steps to take in regards to the workflow.
• From an orchestration perspective the best candidates for automation would be ones that have clearly defined business rules, includes tedious and repetitive work, are time-sensitive, can be error-prone resulting in potentially inaccurate tasks and includes data and or access across multiple systems.

Automation can maximize the usage of resources (both technical and people), reduce errors and improve efficiencies and increase focus on the service driven culture.

Please share your thoughts / comments regarding the topic of automation and the various benefits and or use cases.