Automation is not new. This has been around for years. Many of the retailers have automated their ordering process using touch screens. In airports we see self check-in kiosks; and the immigration process in major airports are completely automated now. These are called Industrial automation which addresses the manufacturing processes automation by deploying set of robots in assembly lines to perform assembling all parts, activities in an automated fashion. We have seen automated mining, video surveillance in public places and many other examples.
Primary aim for automation is to speed up the production at cheaper cost by automating (using robot) physical or monotonous work, even tasks performed in hazardous environments. Classic example is, robots used in Fukoshima power station to fix the radioactive reactors.
Recently, automation is in news because leading IT vendors across the globe are focusing on improving efficiencies by automating repetitive tasks which can be used across the projects and stay competitive at the marketplace.
For an Industrial client in late 90’s; we had automated sales order process by developing an interface to ‘emulate MFGPro systems call’; which returns parts data back to order management system. Similarly, for a Telecommunication client in early 2000’s; we had automated “customer creation” process in Siebel CRM by reading data from an excel file and logging into Siebel system using screen scraping Software. But, these examples are limited to backend process automation only.
What is the automation we are talking about? Cognitive, Self-healing and Continuous Learner.
- What about an organization able to allocate the right resources/staffs into projects without any human interventions by analyzing structured and unstructured data available in various IT systems?
- Also what about bringing automation in call centers to provide faster, better and consistent customer experiences?
So, Automation in IT services world is more than back end process automation and it deals with “end to end” solution starting from infrastructure, to back end processes and processes extended to end users. We do not require a large IT team to “keep the light on”. In this age of cognitive, automation solution should be able to identify problems in IT environments by continuous monitoring, analyzing the symptoms from various log files; and automatically fixes them before they occur.
Use of Analytics will help in determining the success of automation and will identifying new use cases for future automation. There would be continuous feedback mechanism to automation initiative to perform course corrections as the IT environment matures.
One of the challenge would be “over engineering” of automation agenda. Trying to automate processes which takes longer development time/cost resulting into –ve ROI (Development cost is more that savings).
While automation brings higher efficiency and productivity; this also pose a threat of lowering of revenue for the IT vendors.
I would like to hear your views.
Author:
Ashis Panigrahi: Business Process Management and Automation Expert (in.linkedin.com/in/ashispanigrahi/)
100% Agree with your point on “Over Engineering” . Selecting the right processes to Automate rather than doing it just for the Sake of Introducing Automation is very crucial too.