Taking automation seriously - sunset the "recreational automation" practices

Nearly every organization's IT department employs some level of task automation.  And most of the automation was born from system administrator's  great abhorrence for routine drudgery or in pursuit of a talisman to protect them from the increasing workloads brought on by "do more with less" executive directives - both of which are very valid and noble purposes.

Unfortunately most automation is in the form of randomly developed scripts - an administrator with the absolute best intentions - writes a script that performs some time saving function.  However most likely the script isn't well documented, may or may not tell others about it,  and does not usually meet any sort of coding standards.  The script may even have potential security risks as it hasn't gone through proper software development controls.  And this practice is probably more prevalent than you may imagine.  

OK, so these are some of the 'recreational' practices going on currently in the enterprise, but what are the implications?  It's a fact that whether businesses are trying to cut costs, take on new ventures, grow the business, address regulatory concerns, improve operations or just about any other business initiative, information technology will be used.  There are no signs of the IT proliferation slowing down  especially with the advent of virtualization which enables businesses to do so even faster and with lower cost of capital.  So the risks to the business are only going to increase with the current way automation is being conducted.  We also know that businesses are not interested in increasing IT operational costs, certainly not in-line with current ratios. 

In the recreational approach to automation its also most likely true that business continuity is not taken into consideration.  The more an organization becomes automated using these recreational practices, the less possible it becomes to be able to recover from a disaster as the automation has eliminated the manual procedures and there is no one that could even revert these operations in the case of a disaster or business impacting incident.  Automated operations require strict planning.

So the implication of not instituting structured automation development and control processes and eradicating the recreational automation practices is a significant increase in risk to business operations.  By conducting a structured program of automation, there is also higher potential of productivity improvement and cost reduction because a systematic method will be used over an ad-hoc method of convenience.

An implication of leveraging a professional approach to automation also provides the ability to reduce the dependence and risks associated with off-shoring.  You see, there is a definitive labor cost 'floor'.  Regardless of the country that actually offers the lowest labor costs, there is a bottom and the bottom will continue to rise in that country due to demand for that labor.  We've also seen where demand for this type of labor has sparked significant frenzy for 'job-hopping' in those countries.  This creates another significant problem for operating a stable operation. 

Automation when coupled with a stable (and capable) organization, on the other hand, is an ideal solution as it creates characteristics I call CASM²

• Cost
• Consistency
• Accuracy
• Availability
• Accountability
• Speed
• Scalability
• Measurability
• Manageability

Automation will increasingly become a fundamental and essential  IT management practice if for no other reason than simply because of the economic driver to do so.    With this desirable business capability, corporations must start to transition out of the current automation practices they find themselves using and to a professionally and 'planned' automation model.

To further the discussion and help the transformation from recreational IT, I'll talk about an interesting topic in my next blog entry  - "Does the Automation Team belong in the Application Team or in Operations"?