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Shift Left! Avoid This IT Automation Mistake

Organizations must Shift Left and look at automation as prologue to combat the IT resources gap, increase IT agility, and keep pace with digitalization.

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IT’s Responsibilities Are Evolving

IT is constantly facing barriers that are slowing them down and hindering them from achieving their goals. Traditional IT methods and processes are no longer able to keep pace with industry and organizational changes. Many IT teams are searching for new methods and solutions to combat potential pitfalls that may accompany such changes, but there is one common mistake IT needs to be aware of.

These barriers to success are common to IT across just about every industry. Old processes cannot handle new tasks. Technologies are not only more advanced, but so plentiful and there are not enough IT staff to manage them all. Demands on IT to become more agile are prevalent, and IT is working to become faster, smarter, and more responsive to change. And to top it off, CIOs are pushing on IT to drive digitalization throughout the organization.

For these reasons and more, IT is turning to automation to manage processes faster and more reliably. Automation increases efficiency, productivity, and reliability. However, organizations need to ensure that they’re taking the best approach to automation, or IT may miss out on some transformative automation capabilities.

What’s the best way to approach automation?   

The answer to this question stems from one of the most common IT automation pitfalls.

IT teams are inundated with critical, but repetitive tasks. Taking the time to undergo an organizational change, like automating tasks previously done manually, can seem complex and risky.  Teams don’t want to interfere with their mission-critical tasks, and because of this, automation is implemented only (if at all) when that task becomes unmanageable, or when they’re directed to by a colleague or manager who is looking at the efficiency of that process. The issue with this approach, looking at automation as postscript, is that bringing in automation solely at the end (or not at all) closes off IT to countless potential benefits that automation could provide.

IT organizations who are currently looking at an IT Automation solution as a postscript need to flip that approach. They need to take their automation from postscript to prologue if they want to realize the full ensemble of benefits offered from automation solutions. Bringing in automation early, using automation from the start, and building and automating processes all through one single unified solution introduce benefits from efficiency, to reliability, to security, and more.

This new white paper highlights the need for a Shift Left mentality among next generation automation teams. Learn as we highlight the three major problems facing IT, how IT can Shift Left to address these three major problems while increasing efficiency and reliability, and how one company took their automation from postscript to prologue to realize benefits that extend from IT to their entire organization.

Read the new white paper, and learn how your IT team can proactively prevent problems while enhancing their internal processes, here:

Caroline Boyland was a contributor to IT Automation Without Boundaries, covering workload automation, data center automation, cloud management, and more.