The Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference is a renowned event that brings together IT infrastructure, IT operations, and cloud leaders. This year's conference in Las Vegas focused on the tools, technologies, and techniques required to deliver agility and cost optimization for organizations. One of the pressing challenges discussed was the critical technical skill shortages and high rates of employee attrition affecting organizations' ability to adapt and meet the growing demands of IT infrastructure. Automating repetitive manual tasks stands out as a valuable solution to overcome these challenges, improve company effectiveness, and optimize the potential of skilled employees. Here, we explore the benefits of embracing automation and its potential impact on company productivity.
Automation For Company Effectiveness
Automating operations will help to:
Eliminate The Mundane
Skilled employees often find themselves stuck in a continuous loop of routine tasks, preventing them from utilizing their expertise to its fullest potential. By automating these tasks, organizations can enable their teams to focus on higher-value work and strategic company goals, ultimately increasing overall job satisfaction and reducing employee attrition.
Eliminate Operational Silos
Manual and siloed operations can hinder a company's effectiveness by creating communication barriers and inefficiencies. Automation promotes seamless integration and collaboration between teams, ensuring that vital information and resources are accessible across the organization. As a result, businesses can benefit from improved collaboration, streamlined processes, and increased operational transparency.
Reduce Wait Times
Excessive wait times for approvals, responses, and feedback can slow down operations and hamper productivity. Automation enables faster decision-making, reduces bottlenecks, and accelerates overall workflow. This improved efficiency empowers employees to work without long delays, leading to increased output and a more agile organization.
Secure a Competitive Edge
As companies worldwide recognize the potential of automation, not embracing it can put your organization at a competitive disadvantage. Leveraging automation can help your company stay at the forefront of innovation within your industry, ensuring long-term success and resilience.
Automation For Network Efficiency
“By 2026, 30% of enterprises will automate more than half of their network activities, an increase from less than 10% of enterprises in early 2023.”
The evolution of networks was another key discussion, with Gartner Director Analyst Karen Brown emphasizing the importance of automation and AI in networking. She suggested investing heavily in automation, testing AI networking, and prioritizing a dedicated AI fabric for on-premises GenAI workloads to evolve an organization's network operations. To help navigate this changing landscape, Brown provided three actionable insights for organizations looking to evolve their network operations:
Invest heavily in automation: To keep up with the growing demand for efficient and responsive network management, organizations should explore various platforms, tools, or combinations thereof. Investigating these options and sharing findings can fuel discussions around skillset requirements and the necessary cultural changes within your organization.
Test AI networking: Adopting AI-driven networking technologies can seem overwhelming. Brown recommends starting small, experimenting with functionality in a proof-of-concept environment before moving into production. This incremental approach allows for organizations to iterate and refine processes, ensuring a smooth transition to AI-enhanced networking solutions.
Plan for the infrastructure to support GenAI: As AI adoption grows, it's crucial to prioritize dedicated AI fabric for on-premises GenAI workloads. Planning for the necessary infrastructure now will provide an organization with the foundation needed to successfully support AI-driven solutions in the future.
Automation For Customers
Better Performance and Availability: With automated infrastructure operations, the company can ensure optimal resource allocation and load balancing, resulting in enhanced performance and higher availability of its services. This directly benefits customers by providing faster response times and minimizing downtime.
Up-to-Date Features and Technologies: Infrastructure automation ensures that the company can quickly deploy updates, patches, and new features across its platform. Customers, in turn, gain access to the latest features, technologies, and security updates, while enjoying a smooth and seamless experience.
Increased Security and Compliance: The automation of infrastructure operations allows the company to monitor and respond to security threats proactively. This enhanced security, coupled with adherence to industry standards and compliance requirements, leads to a secure environment for customers and reassures them that their data is well protected.
Effective Automation KPIs: Improve Your Digital Transformation Journey
Industry experts highlighted the critical role effective key performance indicators (KPIs) play in digital transformation initiatives involving automation. By monitoring these KPIs, organizations can optimize their processes, deliver better customer value, and maintain a competitive edge.
Here's an overview of some essential KPIs across multiple categories that can help measure the effectiveness of your automation strategy:
1. Operational Efficiency
Avoided Capital and IT Investment: Calculate infrastructure cost savings resulting from the reduction in manual processes stemming from automation.
Availability and Utilization: Assess the uptime and utilization of automated systems to determine how effectively they are functioning within your organization.
2. Service Quality
Error Reduction: Track the decrease in manual errors, leading to improved quality and reliability of your processes.
Improved Compliance: Measure the impact of automation on your organization's adherence to industry regulations and internal policies.
Technical and Functional Exception Rate: Monitor the frequency of exceptions in automated systems and aim to continually minimize these occurrences.
3. Service Velocity
Deployment Rate: Keep track of the speed at which new automation solutions are implemented and deployed within your organization.
Number of Deployments: Measure the scope of your automation initiatives by gauging the total number of automation projects deployed.
4. Organizational Effectiveness
Cycle Time Reduction: Assess the decrease in the time required to complete processes as a result of automation.
Employee Satisfaction: Evaluate improvements in staff morale and job satisfaction resulting from the elimination of manual, repetitive tasks, allowing employees to focus on higher-value activities.
5. Customer Value
Customer Satisfaction: Analyze any improvements in customer satisfaction and overall experiences resulting from quicker response times and more accurate, efficient processes.
Reduction in Average Handle Time: Measure the decrease in handling time for customer interactions, which often leads to improved customer experiences and team efficacy.
Monitoring these KPIs provides organizations with vital insight into the success of their automation strategies, enabling them to fine-tune operations to maximize results and maintain a competitive edge. Stay ahead of the automation game by continuously evaluating these crucial KPIs and adjusting your strategy to deliver the most value.
In conclusion, the 2023 Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference served as a valuable platform for sharing insights, discussing challenges, and outlining strategies for the future of IT infrastructure. As we strive to empower businesses with efficient hardware automation solutions, MetalSoft is committed to incorporating these insights to better serve our customers and drive innovation in the industry. Stay ahead of the curve with MetalSoft's cutting-edge software solutions for automating hardware like servers, storage, and switches.