Editor’s Note: This blog is the first of a two-part series that recaps our first-ever “Ask Me Anything (AMA)” session. Part 2, to include questions 5-9, is set to publish next Tuesday.
Seems like there’s an overload of burning, tough questions surrounding IT automation and orchestration, doesn’t it?
Now that we’ve closed the books on 2023, we believe getting answers to said questions will help you prepare for a strong 2024, fully equipped with the information that will help you grow and scale.
In the first of a two-part Q&A series, we’ve gathered the most commonly asked questions about IT automation and provided the answers you’ve been looking for (as originally discussed in a live “Ask Me Anything (AMA)” session. We explore everything from artificial intelligence (AI) and digital transformation to IT automation use cases, return on investment (ROI), and more.
1. How should the move from traditional automation to AI-enabled automation take place, and how does AI help automation?
AIOps (artificial intelligence for IT operations) existed long before Generative AI (genAI) became so popular, and it helped reduce alert volume so IT teams could focus on building more automations to reach goals faster. So really, IT has used automation and AI for years, with machine learning (ML) models, nearest neighbor comparisons, natural language processing (NLP), and more.
The spectrum of automation today ranges from a very simple level of toil and scripts-based, all the way to a fully autonomous process. It’s not that AI necessarily drives automation progress along the spectrum, but it makes “moving to the right” easier, supporting the building of automations along the way.
AI will help people in their automation journeys with IT processes like running through tickets and understanding opportunities for automation, and driving teams to more complex, proactive processes like incident auto-remediation. (It’s one of the four IT automation must-haves for 2024, which you can learn more about here.)
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AI can become a force multiplier of the people on your current IT team, helping to identify what to automate and what’s already been done that maps out to the experience you provide. We’ll bet that AI in the future will recommend automations to run for solving specific problems, given it’s seen them before, and allowing the user to approve it or build rules around it.
2. Where can we find Resolve’s resources around accelerating digital transformation, as well as documentation, automation workflow templates, integrations, and action tasks?
This questions allows us the chance for a few shameless plugs.
Resolve’s YouTube Channel: Find demos, webinar recordings to watch on demand, LinkedIn Live replays, video snippets, and more.
Automation Exhange: Here lies more than 3,000 automations and integrations that are prebuilt, ready to be downloaded and installed for a kickstart.
Resolve’s Documentation Portal: Our AI chatbot is trained based on all documentations and will answer your questions, like, “How do I build an automation with Jira.” The chatbot, whose name is Craig, btw, will provide meaningful information and links to help you get things done.
We find there’s very little information out there that spans all of IT automation. Usually, information addresses one topic like ticket automation, service management requests, incident response, remediation, network management, data pipelines, and so on. Resolve’s resources aim to cover most IT automation subject matters with various forms of content, serving the individual interests of IT as a whole.
READ MORE: The Resolve Automation Flywheel: A “Good to Great” Automation Journey
3. Is there an IT automation use case that applies to the clinical healthcare space?
IT automation can bring real enhancements to health insurance providers, hospitals and healthcare systems, and on the clinical side of things, there’s a couple of considerations to cover. Network automation for auto-remediation, as well as that for ITOps in freeing up disc space that can take down systems represent common, ideal use cases for automation in clinical healthcare.
System Reliability During a Storm
Any organization that treats patients needs reliability as a key feature of their automation, as healthcare is 24/7 and never takes a day off. Many of these companies integrate with systems, like a network monitoring system, that help them understand their IT environment and what’s happening within it. Resolve can automatically pick up on those things taking place and dynamically remediate an issue.
As a real-world example, let’s say it’s 3 a.m. and a storm causes a power outage in Hospital XYZ’s data center, and that the IT team does have a failover process that’s not automated. IT teams have to wake up in the middle of the night, react to an emergency, and do so while patients might not receive the care they need. Meanwhile, doctors can’t access the information they need. In a scenario like this, keeping the hospital’s network and its data center running reliably is critical.
SEE MORE: Low Disk Space Remediation: Triaging the Explosion of Data and Closing the Loop
Automated Data Management
Further, you only get “good” AI when you start with “good” data – meaning you need to train AI on something solid that makes sense. Patient health data, for instance, is extremely sensitive and many steps must be taken to properly and accurately enter it into a system, like when manually transcribing a patient intake form, and then adding on the doctor’s and nurse’s notes after the patient’s visit. The manual processes leave a lot of room for error versus automated data management and access control that does it efficiently, and that produces a record of every action that took place. It means saving time and money and gaining new levels of security.
4. What qualitative and quantitative ways should organizations use to measure return on investment (ROI) when implementing automation?
Quantitatively capturing and reporting on the value of automation often starts with reduction of tasks and simple calculations, such as:
- How much time it took a human to complete a task before it was automated
- How much money that person makes per hour up against the money saved by automating the task
Qualitative measurements and metrics can be a bit harder to break down but come with a much greater business impact on your internal and external customers. Their perceived experience with you, and the responsiveness, uptime, and resiliency they expect are examples of qualitative ROI measurements. It’s possible to quantify these insights through methods like surveys, on customer retention and employee satisfaction. For example, if you reduce attrition and customer churn by a pre-determined amount, you can calculate the total amount of dollars saved.
ON THAT NOTE: Starting the XLA Journey: A Next-level Perspective for Enhanced Experiences
A conversation with a business stakeholder about customer and employee satisfaction and productivity, for instance, allows IT to become more of a strategic partner as opposed to a cost center.
Watch the full episode of “AMA: Unwrapping the Gifts of IT Automation & Orchestration.”
