Replacing fear with relief: how automation makes life better in IT

Peter Villeroy, Director of IT Department Practice, UiPath

During preparation for a UiPath FORWARD 5 workshop on automation in IT, several themes occurred to me. Alongside the positive reasons for automation, I wondered about what stops people; it occurred to me that a perfectly normal, human reaction to change is fear – like “If I disclose too much about what I do, a robot will do it, then I’m out of a job.”

In my experience, anybody who benefits from task automation actually feels relieved, rather than displaced, and they’re now free to devote time to something of more value, something they actually want to do.?

The Finance department has traditionally been the clear beneficiary of automation, and there are thousands of mature, highly successful examples. Finance teams now spend time on interesting, challenging work rather than shuffling data and copying spreadsheets. Relief, not fear!

Can IT departments start enjoying the same benefits, with automation removing a ton of repetitive, high-volume tasks, and making life so much better for technicians?

I’ve found that the answer is 'Yes' and I would like to expand your view of automation and what is automatable, particularly in the IT department.

Automate tasks, release folks for their true work

For starters, let’s recognize that tens of thousands of IT departments are already delivering automation solutions like UiPath to business partners in Finance, HR, Supply Chain, Legal, and others. However, surprisingly few IT departments I engage with are automating their own internal processes with this technology. Granted, many use, to a greater or lesser extent, traditional automated routines like backup and recovery, and rudimentary orchestration for scheduled tasks, but that’s not what I am talking about. I’m looking for automation that handles day-to-day, tedious, repetitive tasks that clutter up a technician’s life.

The combination of RPA and artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the reach and power of automation, and IT departments themselves can take huge advantage of these technologies across everything from service management and incident resolution, application management and development, cloud infrastructure and management, and cyber security

Don’t click buttons, solve problems

It’s a constantly repeated mantra that IT departments must do more with less. My starting point is that IT teams are commonly faced with conflicting workload: high-volume tasks generated by day-to-day operations, and high-value work directed by the business strategy.

The challenge is to drive business growth and to support an ever-growing tech stack without increasing the size of your team. The only way to do this is to remove manual effort. By injecting AI into the mix, many high-volume tasks previously seen as ‘human-only’ are now fully automatable.

For example, IT teams deal with large numbers of incoming requests, often as unstructured emails. In some cases, leaders tell me that they have dozens, if not hundreds, of people spending their time monitoring email inboxes, trying to determine whether something is actually a problem, if it should become a ticket or if it can be ignored, and decide whom to route it to for prompt handling. RPA and AI can retrieve and understand this huge volume of incoming emails, categorize each one, extract relevant data and either forward it to responsible parties or convert it to a ticket/request, for example in Service Now or Remedy. Finance teams among UiPath’s customer base are already doing this, using RPA and AI to process tens of thousands of incoming supplier emails and invoices, customer complaints and similar items every month. IT teams could be – and should be – doing the same.

Of course, not everything in the service management arena is triggered via email. Some companies have conditioned their users to create tickets themselves, for example via web forms, removing the need for routing and ticket creation for a large portion of the service and incident management work. Still, regardless of how a ticket was created, the fulfillment or resolution of such tickets is another valuable target for automation. In a recent webinar with Reckitt, I discussed some of the strategies used by industry trailblazers to achieve zero-touch resolution of 20% or more of their ITSM tickets. Combining chatbot integrations, process mining, and AI models, a quarter of the work is low-hanging fruit, and the potential for a large majority of service and incident management to be handed completely over to robots is near at hand.

With RPA and AI, the relatively boring task of classifying and categorizing emails into ticket requests, and the manual fulfillment of those requests, disappears. Hours spent clicking buttons can be recovered for much more valuable work. For example, without the constant distraction of ticket processing, your team can now get down to problem management and comprehensive root cause analysis, which is why they trained as an IT professional in the first place.

You can automate more than you thought

We are all human, though, and resistance to change is part of our nature. IT technicians are rightly proud of the tools that they have automated, especially around Python scripts and complex cron jobs that quietly hum away in the background keeping the lights on for years.

Unfortunately, those ad-hoc automations represent technical baggage that is difficult to test and maintain; many a technician coyly admits to me that these scripts are not generally touched, especially after the creator leaves the role or company. As a result, a Python script for example that updates user authentications as people join or leave the company is very difficult and time-consuming to adjust when new role definitions are created or new backend systems introduced, and generally must be rebuilt from scratch if the department changes its identity management solution.

UiPath workflows are not technical baggage: not only are they visually constructed and easily human readable, but they are built on a foundation of out-of-the-box integrations that make updating someone else’s work natural and easy. Workflows are built with modular sequences that can be saved, shared, version-controlled across projects and teams, and can be updated easily and quickly when underlying infrastructure changes. Automated workflow and application testing has been built into the platform since 2020, rounding off a future-ready automation platform built for the modern enterprise.

IT teams should both expand what they think can be automatable (such as reading and categorizing incoming emails), and readdress the tools they use to automate tasks (RPA and AI, not ad-hoc scripts).

A rallying cry for IT department automation

At the board level, CIOs are tasked both with keeping the lights on from an IT operations standpoint, and with providing innovative solutions to business problems. These are tough twin challenges, with constant pressure on productivity and budget, and over past years CIOs, IT managers and their teams have developed amazing new skills and technologies.

UiPath automation is inexpensive, un-intrusive (no need to re-engineer underlying systems, just introduce the automation layer on top), and fast to implement. Being able to increase operational efficiency feeds straight into being able to provide new business solutions.

Once they get their teeth into RPA and AI, IT professionals love what automation can do, and will start actively looking for ways to eliminate the boring stuff so they have time for the cool stuff. In the IT department, automation offers an almost perfect match of personality and technology, and very soon highly skilled Automation Champions will emerge, boosting productivity within and beyond the team.

In summary, there are undoubted resistance points to introducing automation in IT. But the moment technicians get a taste of the automated better life, you’ll see soaring innovation, enjoyment, and job satisfaction!

To find out more, join me at my IT workshop at FORWARD 5, our one-of-a-kind automation event between September 27-29 in Las Vegas. I’ll be co-presenting with product manager Andrei Oros , introducing some new products and features that will delight automation champions in IT departments, so don’t miss it! Just follow this link to register. And feel free to Connect with me here on LinkedIn: