Build Seamless IT Operations With Automation
Create a framework to improve processes, reduce risks, and scale effectively.
IT operations are increasingly exploring automation as a critical lever for driving efficiency and innovation – but automation is complex and successful implementations remain elusive. Our comprehensive methodology balances suitability, value, and risk to deliver the right automation use cases for your organization’s unique needs.
Automation presents an unprecedented opportunity to improve IT’s effectiveness, but myriad obstacles stand in the way of realizing its potential, including incompatible processes, poor quality data, and legacy systems. Organizations must adopt a tailored automation strategy that not only meets IT needs but also enhances its ability to achieve greater organizational goals.
1. First, fix IT’s underlying problems.
Though automation can greatly enhance many IT functions, if the underlying processes are poor, inconsistent, or otherwise flawed, then automation will be neither useful nor productive. IT must first identify and address those deeper foundational issues before embarking on an assessment of automation feasibility and value.
2. Hunt for the right automation candidates.
Not all of your IT processes are ripe for automation. Find the best prospects by building an evaluation framework and prioritizing them according to value and efficiency. Start with repeating tasks – automating them will free your team to focus their energy on higher-value tasks.
3. Don't forget the big picture.
Many organizations pursue automation for specific, immediate improvements. But IT leaders must take a wider view, balancing impacts, feasibility, and risk, as they think about automation in the context of broader organizational goals. By applying that balanced vision to your roadmap, automation can help achieve substantial strategic outcomes rather than quick wins.
Use this step-by-step blueprint to successfully boost IT operations with automation
Our research includes three-phase guidance, templates, workbooks, and other simple-to-use resources to unlock the benefits of automation in your IT operations. Use our comprehensive framework to make sure you automate the right things, the right way, in order to free up your IT team to focus their energies on long-term strategy and innovation.
- Understand your starting point by defining your automation goals and assessing IT operations readiness.
- Discover automation opportunities by identifying and prioritizing use cases and creating an inventory of initiatives.
- Execute your automation plan backed by a business case and detailed roadmap that are properly communicated to stakeholders.
Build Seamless IT Operations With Automation
Create a framework to improve processes, reduce risks, and scale effectively.
Analyst Perspective
Formalize your automation plan through a realistic evaluation of business expectations and IT capabilities.
Automation has become a necessity for managing complex organizational tasks, enabling speed and agility of response. But implementing automation needs a comprehensive understanding of business requirements and IT's alignment with organizational goals. Technology vendors promise they have solutions to tackle IT issues and improve operations through automation and AI. However, tools alone cannot improve IT operations when processes are poor or inconsistent.
On the other hand, implementing automation itself is challenging and time consuming. Processes that are not documented or handled consistently won't get much benefit from automation. In such cases automation may even lead to further complexities, introducing new bottlenecks and outages. Lack of a clear automation plan makes it harder to proceed with a successful automation integration into IT operations.
This research is designed to help you identify use cases and create a roadmap of improvement initiatives to utilize automation capabilities effectively.
Mahmoud Ramin
Senior Research Analyst, Infrastructure and Operations
Info-Tech Research Group
Executive Summary
| Your Challenge | Common Obstacles | Info-Tech's Approach |
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Many organizations are demanding a more effective IT engagement model, prioritizing reduced downtime, faster service recovery, and seamless delivery of new solutions. However, IT faces the following challenges to fulfill such requests:
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AI and automation are usually hailed as transformative solutions, but many organizations are even struggling with automating simple tasks due to the following obstacles:
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This research will help you:
At the end of this research, you will walk away with a list of automation use cases that will provide the most value, and a strategy to get ready for other use cases. |
Rethink automation goals
Drive meaningful, sustainable effects by selecting the right goals. Many organizations think about metrics such as reducing mean time to resolve; however, they overlook broader goals such as delivering real business value and innovation. Effective automation starts with balancing suitability, value, and risk. Through this balance, you can achieve strategic outcomes rather than quick wins.
Key business challenges due to manual work
Automation can resolve pain points and help businesses empower success
- Frequent problems disrupt business operations, leading to end-user frustration. Repeated downtimes cause productivity losses and slow organizational growth.
- Long wait time for fixes due to high volume of requests and incidents result in ticket backlogs and delays.
- Access difficulties due to permission rights, manual approvals and inconsistent processes lead to employee frustration and an inability to meet business goals.
- Inconsistent service delivery due to disjoined workflows and immature processes reduce trust in IT's ability to deliver expected benefits through automation.
- High costs as a result of significant time and resources for service delivery and operations management decrease the business budgets, reducing the chance of getting approval for adopting automation technologies.
98% of organizations that participated in a survey believe that one hour of downtime costs them over $100,000, indicating how crucial it is to proactively mitigate system and service failures.
Source: Pingdom, 2023
81% of end users try to self-solve their issues before contacting the service desk. The self-service capabilities of ITSM platforms show the major impact of these tools in revolutionizing customer service.
Source: SDI, 2024
44% Artificial intelligence has rapidly emerged as the top trend in IT service management over the past year, which marks a significant increase from 28% in 2023.
Source: Danby, ITSM.Tools, 2024
AIOps adoption to improve IT operations
Cambia Health Solutions implemented used an AIOps platform to provide uninterrupted services
INDUSTRY
Healthcare
SOURCE
BigPanda
| Challenge | Solution | Results |
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Cambia Health Solutions provides services to over 3.4 million people. Cambia's event management platform lacked core capabilities such as events filtering and correlation, leading to event duplications and difficulty prioritizing critical incidents. Due to the absence of automated processes, it took 30 minutes on average to resolve incidents, twice the committed 15-minute SLA, which negatively impacted system reliability and service delivery. |
Cambia implemented BigPanda AIOps to help normalize data, filter events, and deduplicate them to make them consistent. The platform enabled the network operations center (NOC) to identify critical incidents within 30 seconds. Buy adopting BigPanda, Cambia automated 83% of alerts, allowing NOC to focus on critical incidents. It reduced the noise and correlated alerts to get actionable insights for faster resolution. |
Cambia successfully met 95% of overall SLA and 91% of critical alert SLA. Teams experienced a significant improvement of operational efficiency due to a reduction of manual efforts and increased visibility into systems, which led to quicker resolution and optimized resource utilization. This resulted in increased system reliability and stability and helped Cambia provide faster, uninterrupted patient care. |
Benefits of automation for IT operations
1. Improved efficiency
Automation reduces manual and repetitive tasks and helps agents focus on high-value and sophisticated ones.
2. Enhanced reliability and availability
Proactive maintenance minimizes downtime and improves SLA adherence.
3. Improved response rates
Automated ticket triage and routing reduces mean time to respond to and resolve incidents.
4. Optimized resource utilization
Automation improves resource allocation, preventing over/under provisioning through dynamic and real-time resource adjustment.
5. Cost saving
Reduction of manual and repetitive activities result in significant cost savings.
6. Improved compliance and security
Real-time monitoring and automated compliance checks ensure security compliance.
7. Better visibility
AI-powered technology enables real-time monitoring, providing insights on systems performance and operational trends.
8. Scalability and flexibility
Automated processes and workflows empower IT operations to adapt to changing business requirements and support organizational growth.
9. Improved collaboration
Automation unleashes the power of shared insights and improves productivity.
10. Enhanced innovation
Automation of mundane and repetitive tasks assists IT in focusing on strategic initiatives that would improve innovation.
IT challenges through automation
Businesses look for innovative solutions to help them remain competitive and improve outcomes. They require IT to lead and support innovation initiatives. However, IT teams are often overburdened with reactive tasks and don't have enough capacity to focus on strategic goals.
Scripts to manage IT systems
60% of teams reported dedicating over 10 hours per week to creating scripts for IT systems and processes.
Poor documentation
A significant 70% of respondents reported that their scripts and APIs lack proper documentation.
Security adherence
Nearly half of respondents (47%) revealed that their scripts and APIs don't comply with established security standards.
Source: TeamDynamix, 2022
Create an automation strategy to help IT tackle challenges
Implementing automation is the end goal, but your roadmap will also contain initiatives that address critical prerequisites to this goal
VISIBILITY
Can you measure success?
These will be initiatives that provide the ability to measure the success of the automation program.
SUITABILITY
Are there roadblocks?
These are initiatives that make automation more suitable for a given process, such as documentation, or process changes that eliminate manual hand-offs.
VALUE & RISK
Are there risks?
These initiatives will affect the overall value vs. risk imbalance by increasing one or decreasing the other (or both!).
FEASABILITY
Are there prerequisites?
These initiatives address prerequisites to automation such as tools, training, and buy-in. They can also improve the ROI and effort to value ratio.
AUTOMATE!
These are the initiatives wherein automation is actually implemented within the environment.
Enhancing IT operations with an automation strategy
Reckitt transformed IT operations with automation
INDUSTRY
Manufacturing
SOURCE
UiPath Agentic Automation
| Challenge | Solution | Results |
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The IT department at Reckitt, a global manufacturing company, wanted to improve IT support and customer service so they assessed how they were providing support. They recognized they were spending a lot of time on manual, repetitive tasks, which were time consuming for IT staff and prevented end users from getting support in a timely manner. Their assessment identified that by automating repetitive tasks, they could focus their technicians' attention on solving more complex issues. |
To tackle these challenges, Reckitt implemented an automation strategy within IT operations. A centralized team was created to take the ownership of automation and ensure consistency of the procedures. They consulted subject matter experts to identify potential automation use cases and prioritize mitigation initiatives. As a result, the team implemented a comprehensive automation operating model. |
As a result of the automation strategy, about 20% of processes within IT operations were automated. As a result of automation within IT operations, 10,000 business hours were saved each month, with about 20% cost savings. The automation led to a 20% increase in net promoter score (NPS) indicating the impact of automation on end-user satisfaction. Additionally, the automation enabled better adherence to security and governance requirements. |
Build a comprehensive business case for automation
A well-constructed business case indicates clear benefits for all involved parties, including end users, IT, and the business. Think about these factors when building your automation business case:
How are your customers impacted?
Understand your customer pain points such as outages and delayed resolutions and assess how automation will benefit them.
How is your team spending their time?
Assess how much time IT spends on lo-value, repetitive tasks versus high-impact, strategic activities. Then show how automation can help improve productivity.
How easily can you support organizational technology and services?
Evaluate how current processes facilitate infrastructure and services. Then explain how automation can enhance them.
How can the team support new technology?
Discuss the importance of empowering IT with automation to reduce repetitive operational tasks so they can focus on strategic initiatives.
Goals & Metrics
Your automation initiatives will have real, measurable impacts that allow you to show continuous improvement.
- What matters most to executives, managers/supervisors, and front-line staff?
- Which metrics reflect progress toward these goals?
- Which numbers are you already trying to improve?
- Are you trying to improve the quality of service? Or is cost the primary issue on executives' minds?
Specific metrics will allow you to track the impact of automation and tell the right story.
In addition to the metrics in the chart, consider tracking the impact on staff. Is your organization trying to drive down employee turnover and recruitment costs? Track whether automation's shift from reactive to proactive work correlates with improved employee engagement scores.
KPIs impacted by AI
| ITM Metric | Impact of AI | |
|---|---|---|
| Workload | Ticket Volume | ▼ |
| Tickets per User per Month | ▼ | |
| Cost | Total Cost of Ownership | ▼ |
| First Level Resolution Rate | ▲ | |
| % Resolved Level 1 Capable | ▼ | |
| Quality | First Contact Resolution Rate | ▲ |
| Customer Satisfaction | ▲ | |
| Net Promoter Score | ▲ | |
| Customer Effort Score | ▲ | |
| Customer Experience | ▲ | |
| Cycle Time | Mean Time to Identify (MTTI) | ▼ |
| Mean Time to Resolve Incidents (MTTR) | ▼ | |
| Mean Time to Fulfill Service Requests (MTTF) | ▼ | |
Source: MetricNet
Info-Tech's methodology for building seamless IT operations with automation
| 1. Assess Automation Goals and Maturity | 2. Discover Automation Opportunities | 3. Execute an Automation Plan | |
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Insight summary
Rethink automation goals
Drive meaningful, sustainable effects by selecting the right goals. Many organizations think about metrics such as reducing mean time to resolve; however, they overlook broader goals such as delivering real business value and innovation. Effective automation starts with balancing suitability, value, and risk. Through this balance, you can achieve strategic outcomes rather than quick wins.
Understand the foundational elements
Through a deep understanding of the key elements of IT operations - such as process documentation, required data, and infrastructure landscape -you can build a robust strategy to utilize the full potential of technology to automate processes while reducing the risk of failure due to misunderstanding of the gaps.
Optimize use case selection
Identifying practical use cases is essential to ensure your organization will achieve tangible benefits, aligned with your organization's strategic goals. Look for opportunities that would add value and be less risky to help you get targeted outcomes, such as improved service delivery and operational efficiency.
Enhance resilience for innovation
IT operations processes are designed to ensure stability, security, and compliance across the organization. These processes should be resilient to enable flexibility for introduction of new methodologies and embracing innovation.
Start with discovering the repeatable tasks
Create a framework for evaluating automation candidates and prioritize them according to value and efficiency. Repeating tasks are good candidates to start with, as they likely consume more time and resources than other tasks and will provide more value following automation.
Gradually hand over decision making
Not all decisions are created equal. Complex choices need human reasoning, so AI becomes a data-driven partner, providing enriched information and insight to aid agents. For more routine tasks let AI call the shots through learning with human guidance and aim for full autonomy.
Blueprint deliverables
Follow the blueprint steps to conduct a thorough assessment of automation use cases and initiatives, using the IT Operations Automation Workbook.
IT Operations Process Maturity Assessment (tab 2)
An assessment of all your IT operations processes and where they exist on the scale of manual, ad-hoc, or fully autonomized.
Suitability, Value, and Risk Assessment (tabs 3 and 4)
An assessment that allows you to make decisions about which automation initiatives to proceed with based on their suitability and value - and how to address some of those gaps.
Prioritized Initiatives List (tab 7)
A list of initiatives that increase automation or address its inhibitors - prioritized according to cost/effort vs. benefit/value.
Key deliverable:
IT Operations Automation Strategy Template
Boardroom-ready presentation template that demonstrates your approach for selecting automation use cases and initiatives and a roadmap for automation and business cases.
Blueprint benefits
| IT Benefits | Organization Benefits |
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Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs
| DIY Toolkit | Guided Implementation | Workshop | Consulting |
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| "Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful." | "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track." | "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place." | "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project." |
Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.
Guided Implementation
What does a typical GI on this topic look like?
| Phase 1 | Phase 2 | Phase 3 |
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Call #1: Determine goals, key metrics, and KPIs. Call #2: Discover IT operations use cases and assess their maturity. |
Call #3: Determine automation suitability for each process. Call #4: Determine automation value and risk for each process. Call #5: Determine automation feasibility for each process. |
Call #6: Prioritize the initiatives based on impact vs. effort. Call #7: Build a roadmap and finalize your automation strategy. |
A Guided Implementation (GI) is series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.
A typical GI is between 5 and 7 calls over the course of 3 to 4 months.
Workshop Overview
| Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | |
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| Activities | Assess Automation Goals and Maturity | Assess Suitability, Value, and Risk of Automation | Assess Automation Feasibility and Finalize Initiatives | Prioritize Initiatives and Build the Automation Roadmap | Next Steps and Wrap-Up (offsite) |
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1.1 Define your organization's goals for automation. 1.2 Discover and itemize your security use cases. 1.3 Assess the maturity of your IT operations processes. 1.4 Identify the target state for each process. |
2.1 Assess the automation suitability of your IT operations processes. 2.2 Assess the value and risk of adding more automation to your use cases. 2.3 Determine the initiatives to address suitability or value/risk challenges. |
3.1 Assess the feasibility of adding more automation to your use cases. 3.2 Determine the initiatives to address feasibility challenges. |
4.1 Align automation initiatives to business goals. 4.2 Assess the effort and cost of each initiative. 4.3 Prioritize and sequence the initiatives into appropriate waves. 4.4 Finalize the Automation Roadmap. |
5.1 Complete in-progress deliverables from previous four days. 5.2 Set-up review time for workshop deliverables and to discuss next steps. |
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Contact your account representative for more information.
workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889
Phase 1
Assess Automation Goals and Maturity
Phase 1
1.1. Define automation goals
1.2. Assess IT operations readiness for automation
Phase 2
2.1. Identify automation use cases
2.2. Create an inventory of initiatives
Phase 3
3.1. Build an automation roadmap
3.2. Create a communication plan
Phase 1 will walk you through the following activities:
- Discover automation goals
- Identify automation use cases
- Conduct a current-state assessment
- Identify the target-state of processes
Phase 1 involves the following participants:
- I&O leaders
- IT operations team
- Business process owners
Build Seamless IT Operations With Automation
About Info-Tech
Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
What Is a Blueprint?
A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
- Build Seamless IT Operations With Automation Deck
- IT Operations Automation Strategy Template
- IT Operations Automation Workbook
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Unlock Sample ResearchContributors
- Adam Blau, VP Product Marketing, BigPanda
- Andrew Graf, CPO & Co-Founder, TeamDynamix
- Jimmy Tom, AVP Technology, Canada Life
- Ramesh Rangaiah, Enterprise Architecture Director, HighTower
- 1 anonymous contributor
Create a Service Management and IT Operations Strategy
Optimize the IT Operations Center
Improve Incident and Problem Management
Optimize IT Change Management
Harness Configuration Management Superpowers
Develop an IT Infrastructure Services Playbook
Develop Infrastructure & Operations Policies and Procedures
Stabilize Release and Deployment Management
Deploy AIOps to Improve IT Operations
Create Visual SOP Documents that Drive Process Optimization, Not Just Peace of Mind
Improve IT-Business Alignment Through an Internal SLA
Implement Infrastructure Shared Services
Next-Generation InfraOps
M&A Runbook for Infrastructure and Operations
Reduce Manual Repetitive Work With IT Automation
Take Control of Cloud Costs on AWS
Take Control of Cloud Costs on Microsoft Azure
Govern Shared Services
Responsibly Resume IT Operations in the Office
Take Control of Infrastructure and Operations Metrics
Engineer Your Event Management Process
Design Your Cloud Operations
Build a Continual Improvement Program
Align Projects With the IT Change Lifecycle
Prepare for Microsoft 365 Copilot
Build Seamless IT Operations With Automation
