Product Automation, Workflow Automation and Process Automation

It’s “official”.  The limited purpose automation bundled by the big 4 vendors IS NOT IT Process Automation.  So says David Williams of the Gartner Group in his August 14 paper entitled Will Vendor Initiatives Deplete the Value of RBA?   He draws a distinction between vendors using the RBA capabilities they’ve purchased to solve integration problems within their suites and end to end IT operations process automation, or RBA.  In this post I’ll dive into the distinctions between those, and between ITPA and the workflow contained within the Service Desk tools you likely already own.

IT Process Automation has two key subcategories.  The first is end to end IT process automation in support of a business process.  In most shops, this means integrating, orchestrating and automating existing task tool silos like service desks, change management, configuration tools, event management and the like.  The second is automating repetitive tasks within those silos.  Let’s take automation within a silo first.

Task tools have made IT efficient within silos allowing fewer people to do more work with fewer errors.  This is all obviously goodness, but it hasn’t eliminated routine, time robbing tasks.  Two good examples come from Event Management and Database management.  When events are first captured, some of the first activities include filtering, correlation and triage.  Some Service Desk products offer these capabilities as part of the product or as add-on tools.  If you haven’t already purchased those capabilities, those are tasks IT Process Automation can tackle, but aren’t the focus of this post.  What those tools don’t offer is initial investigation that’s where I’ll focus.  In most shops, valid events are routed to the operator most skilled with that type of incident/problem.  Invariably, that black belt will have a sequence of things that she checks and scripts she runs to collect information before doing anything that is specific to the reported symptoms.  This sequence is ideal for automation.  IT Process Automation can listen for valid events (and may also be the software that determines the event is valid) and run the diagnostics prior to opening up the ticket.  In this way, the first time a person sees the ticket, all of the basics are done and it is time for a person to do what only a person can do—exercise judgment and creative problem solving.

In database management there are routine sequences of actions in CDL and ETL jobs.  In many organizations the run book for this job takes 40 man hours per week and looks like this:

1. Accept Request – The input for the process.
2. Validate – Check readiness for the process.  This includes checking for available disk space, etc.
3. Dump – Create a backup image of the database.
4. Copy – Transfer the backup image to the target.
5. Load – Restore the backup .
6. Cleanup – Delete all temp files and dumped DB images.
7. Verify – Check to make sure the new database is the same as the original database.  Close process (notify end-user).

These routine actions can all be automated, freeing a significant amount of time for work the business places a higher value on.  See the Opalis case study HERE (National Building Supply) that goes into greater detail about these types of processes.

End to end IT Process Automation in support of a business process integrates, orchestrates and automates overarching processes that are supported by multiple task tool silos.  The more evolved IT Process Automation products can also discover the information within the task tool silos, share that information with other task tools involved in the process, and take actions based on that information—like triggering a process, completing fields in a form to document the process, or changing the execution of the process based on context.  Compliance and Change Management is a good example.  The trigger could be a change request or an event.  The tools that are orchestrated could include event management systems, Service Desks, CMDBs, configuration tools and compliance scanners.  This is the “big bang” area for IT process automation and why Gartner now rates it as high in priority for IT Ops implementation as the Service Desk itself.  Ensuring consistently accurate, low cost execution of these complex chains of tasks is a big opportunity for improving service to the business while lowering IT operational expenses.

Product Automation is the solving of a vendor problem, not a customer problem.  Vendors like HP, CA and BMC are offering what at first looks fairly attractive—the bundling of their acquired RBA capabilities with tools such as server configuration and service desk.  This may include templates for limited purpose automation of tasks executed between the tools.  This clearly solves the vendor’s problem of integrating their acquired RBA, Service Desk and server configuration tools.  The limited purpose automation they’re offering may solve a limited problem within customer IT shops but it ignores the larger opportunity for IT Process Automation and may lead to vendor lock in and higher costs.  If your shop is like most shops, you have tools from HP, BMC, CA, IBM, Microsoft, EMC, VMware, and others.  The larger opportunity for IT Process Automation is to span all of these tools so that your automation mirrors your processes.  With all of these vendors in your shop, if you took advantage of the limited purpose automation now being offered, you’d then have to integrate your automations and have automation experts to do that.  That’s just trading one problem for another.  Gartner’s advice?  “Purchase a stand-alone RBA tool and use it as the primary automation integration engine, if process automation is what you seek.”  This is from the same document referenced earlier—read the whole thing (requires subscription or purchase of this document).

Workflow Automation contained within Service Desks is sometimes confused with ITPA and RBA.  Folks often say “I already have automation—it’s built into the Service Desk tool I use”.  Service Desk tools often do have great workflow automation for people to people processes—approvals, escalations, and the creation of task lists and the monitoring of the task list’s execution.  What ITPA and RBA excel at are the system to system or people to system processes.  How does the task list in your Change Management system get executed?  People either work with the target systems directly or people use a configuration tool to make the changes.  ITPA can execute the task list and update the Change Management system. 

ITPA, vendor bundled limited purpose automation, and workflow are 3 different things.  Being clear on the differences is one key to successful outcomes.

Tags: IT Process Automation, ITSM, linkedin, RBA