Accelerate Your Digital Transformation Journey: A Buyer’s Guide to IT Process Automation

Automation Is The Answer To Critical IT Challenges Common IT challenges prior to automation 76% Skilled employees spending too much time on manual tasks 53% The pressure on IT to do more with less is increasing as IT infrastructures become more complex and digital transformation accelerates change. Those responsible for infrastructure and operations (I&O) must deal with more data, devices, applications, users and demands for faster delivery of innovative services, all while meeting service level agreements (SLAs) and delivering high quality of service (QoS). As the pace increases, I&O organizations...

What Can Automation Help You Achieve? The story is about more than efficiency Lower cost – Automating everything from simple tasks to entire workflows and complex interconnected processes reduces the need for support. Service desk volume is reduced, as is the need for expensive escalation. This frees your high-value IT staff to spend their time on strategic initiatives that drive business value. Enhanced business agility – Leveraging automation enables IT to become a driver of business value, rather than a cost center. It helps you manage change more effectively, enable the delivery of innovative...

What’s The Difference In Automation Approaches? There’s more than one kind of automation + Task-level automation is applied to individual, isolated IT management tasks to reduce manual intervention. IT process automation combines disparate management tools, predefined workflows, people and even machine learning to automate and orchestrate entire IT processes across multiple functions and domains, enhancing the speed, accuracy and effectiveness of IT service delivery. Automating tasks makes them faster and more efficient, but cannot deliver meaningful business outcomes such as improved compliance or...

Why Does Orchestration Matter? Focusing on task automation leaves a lot on the table According to Gartner1, many enterprises see automation as a tactical tool, using it opportunistically to increase the efficiency of specific workflows. For them, coordinating, sequencing and orchestrating service delivery across multiple IT functions and domains remains an aspirational goal. A survey by the Enterprise Strategy Group2 mirrors the Gartner findings. When asked what developments need to take place in order to improve the management of complex IT environments, respondents cited improved performance management,...

What Should You Look For ? Two things differentiate leading ITPA approaches4 Depth of content. Solution providers are looking to help their clients speed time to value and link processes together by building in predefined workflow templates, actions and connectors. In this way, organizations can leverage expert knowledge by adopting and/or slightly modifying what’s already included in the platform rather than having to start from scratch. Breadth of integration. As vendors (and their clients) start to look beyond the automation of simple tasks and isolated processes to sequencing and orchestration...

Prioritize Simplicity Complexity can be a significant barrier to achieving your automation goals. Your process automation solution should make hybrid IT environment integration, workflow definition, testing, debugging, version control, execution and monitoring as simple as possible within a single product to avoid redundancy. An ITPA solution should be straightforward to set up and deliver results quickly to speed time to value, which is essential to reaching cost reduction, productivity and compliance goals. Simplicity facilitates automation and coordination of workflows, making them faster and...

Focus On Orchestration Gartner5 recommends maximizing automation investments by selecting ITPA tools that can orchestrate workflow execution across functional requirements, groups and management tools. An effective solution should integrate with multi-vendor environments that employ a diversity of management tools. Some approaches, however, primarily address automation needs in their core functional domain, are practice-specific or designed to work primarily within a particular vendor’s solution set. This can limit the value of automation to the business as a whole, as IT’s mission broadens to include...

Seek Out Integration No real-world IT environment is homogenous. To be truly useful, an IT process automation and orchestration solution needs the flexibility to bridge the gaps between systems, platforms and domains. It must integrate seamlessly with enabling technologies and tools such as event management, configuration management, virtualization tools, service desk solutions, security tools and cloud management in order to close the automation loop. When an ITPA solution is designed to simplify deployment and integration with relevant management and automation systems through prebuilt connections,...

Real-World Results From TrueSight Orchestration IT event management Change & configuration management Service desk automation Challenge: Wipro needed to help a global bank address slow resolution of IT requests, along with high costs and service desk volume. Challenge: Transamerica Life Insurance was facing elevated compliance risk and cost due to the complexity of performing infrastructure change requests. Challenge: A multinational IT and telecommunications company was experiencing inefficiency and high costs associated with service desk requests. Solution: TrueSight Orchestration was used as...

Leading Analysts Agree: BMC Is A Leader Find out why BMC ranks so highly The judgments are in BMC earns high rankings among infrastructure and operations (I&O) solution providers on a consistent basis and across multiple dimensions. To learn more, download the full analyst reports Forrester Wave, Forrester Wave, Forrester performed an evaluation of the 11 most significant infrastructure automation platforms, across 31 criteria. BMC led the pack in the strength of its offerings, with the analyst firm calling it “Best for I&O professionals who manage a diverse set of heterogeneous infrastructure components."...