Member Article

IT Professionals Must Embrace Automation to Improve Efficiency

IT professionals must adopt a significant change in their strategic behaviour and embrace a new era of cloud automation technologies if they are to succeed in driving business efficiencies. This is the advice from a new white paper published by leading managed service provider Advanced.

Automation solutions are now seen as a catalyst to reduce operational costs and errors by replacing manually-intensive business processes without requiring human intervention. However, the white paper highlights that IT is one of the slowest adopters of developing and implementing these technologies compared to other business departments.

According to *research, automation is affecting a variety of business disciplines with IT (33%) just behind Customer Service (35%) as expecting the greatest impact, followed by Accounting and Finance (32%) and Assembly / Production (30%). Furthermore, **analysts believe 94% of paralegal work within the legal practice sector could be undertaken by robots using Artificial Intelligence (AI) by 2030 due to recent developments in AI technology.

Neil Cross, Managing Director – IT Services, Advanced, says, “Organisations are increasingly looking to connect users, data and networks to boost collaboration through innovative technologies. But after a legacy of incomplete attempts to introduce automation previously, IT workers are understandably wary of further failures.

“To ensure automation project objectives are met, IT must adopt a major shift in their strategic outlook. Automating IT operations in the cloud seldom seems to be considered but is one area which can generate major savings in a short space of time.”

IT is a business function where greater levels of automation are entirely possible but is also an area where expectations of delivering value-added services to end users are equally high. IT departments therefore must balance maintaining existing operational services whilst creating an environment that is capable of delivering the speed and agility invariably required by organisations.

The acceleration of public and private cloud solutions provide IT departments with an opportunity to benefit from new technologies from trusted cloud providers and also streamline their own internal processes. A new wave of ‘as-a-service’ solutions also employ comprehensive levels of automation to deliver services more effectively and efficiently, in addition to creating an effective alliance between people, process and accountability.

Cross comments, “Automation is most successful when technology is used to execute routine tasks whilst maintaining a human centric approach to allow employees to gain fresh perspectives. The challenge for IT workers is to become the integral component for the delivery across the business, whilst reviewing their own procedures to generate further efficiencies.

“By adopting fully automated cloud solutions from trusted providers, IT departments can address both of these conflicting needs. In doing so they will greatly enhance their value through providing enhanced business capability and reducing cost burdens to improve commoditised services.”

To read the white paper, ‘Automation in the IT industry – Will we see adoption in this area any time soon?’, click here.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Advanced .