One of the most common questions we hear from Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform customers is "how can I accelerate the adoption of automation in my organization?" Most of these companies fully embraced the need for IT automation years ago and understand the potential value it can bring to their organization. However, they often struggle to scale automation across their IT landscape without fully understanding why. If this resonates with you, then you're not alone, but we can help!

The first question to ask yourself is whether your organization has articulated and aligned to a clear automation strategy for your entire IT organization. Has that strategy been shared across teams and are users incentivized to embrace the changes that need to occur?  

How to design an automation strategy

It's understandable in the early stages of your automation journey to focus on the technology, and Red Hat typically recommends starting small and focusing on a few tasks or processes to establish a foundation of success. But, over time, organizations who are the most successful with automation also examine their organizational processes and address the cultural shifts that have to occur in order to optimize the value of their automation investment. The sooner you can do this, the sooner you'll see the productivity, performance, and ROI benefits from your automation. 

What follows are a series of activities the Red Hat Services teams use to guide Ansible Automation Platform customers through their automation adoption journey. During these sessions, our consultants pull together a cross-functional team that includes the customer's lines of business, engineering, operations, and application development teams. Together, they reflect and discuss the goals and current challenges within the organization. Whenever possible, we prefer to facilitate the workshops in person with sticky notes and a whiteboard because communication is easier and distractions are reduced, but they can also be done virtually with collaboration tools like Miro.

1. Document the business outcomes you want to achieve with automation

Do you want to improve ROI or IT productivity? Are security and reliability the most important for your business? Maybe your ticketing SLAs haven't been met or network configuration is too manual. Can automation help you accelerate a transformational project that's been stalled? Starting with the end results in mind will make it easier to map out the steps needed to get there. 

Also, notice that I used the word "document." It sounds obvious, but you should write down your strategy and share it with others to make sure everyone understands the "why" behind your automation goals.

2. Determine how much of your current automation is tied to your top business objectives

This is a critical step. Ask everyone to write down their top automation use cases, then see if you can map them directly to your primary business outcomes. If you can't correlate and articulate how your automation helps you achieve your business goals, you're spinning your wheels. In general, expanding your automation practice has less to do with the total number of tasks or systems you're automating than whether it's having an impact in the right ways. 

Hear from Mapfre, a global insurance group, on how they approached this in their organization.

3. Build an automation-first mindset

To drive transformation through automation, most companies will need to adapt and change the behaviors across their organization. One example of this is an organizational-wide "automation-first" philosophy. Put another way, current processes need to be examined through the lens of automation. You know you've achieved this step when all teams in your organizations are writing automation content, feeling comfortable and proficient, and applying automation to solve problems has become second-nature.

Want to learn ways to drive this mindset across your organization? Hear from Navy Federal Credit Union on how they built a culture of automation.

4. Work on cross-team collaboration and trust

It takes time and patience to break down barriers between teams that may have a history of suspicion and finger-pointing such as development and engineering teams. To break down silos, some organizations put their developers and platform engineers on the same teams to facilitate communication and make sure perspectives are understood. At a minimum, these teams need to agree to resolve the issues identified through your top use cases so that everyone is working towards the same objectives.

5. Establish an automation community of practice

A community of practice is a collection of individuals coming together to share ideas, Ansible content, experiences, questions, and best practices around automation. Through a community of practice, these individuals can grow their skills, learn from one another, discuss best practices, and uncover new ways of collaborating. Communities of practice also create a space to consume and contribute automation content so that you're using automation in a trusted and repeatable way.  

Do you have the right automation strategy in place? 

Once your strategy is laid out, you need to make sure it serves your business for the long haul–even when the next exciting new innovation or technology comes along to distract you. To pass the sustainability test, your automation should be:

• Simple: Identify 4 or 5 use cases that support your specific business objectives. That's your starting point
• Accountable: Establish organization-wide standards and change processes
• Responsible: Consider compliance and security implications proactively as you implement use cases
• Autonomous: Remove human intervention as much as possible. Create predictable automation that works consistently everywhere time and time again
• Scalable: Ensure your automation content can be shared across different IT domains in a repeatable way. Establish your source of truth for automation content

Above all, remember that adoption of automation is not a destination. It's an ongoing journey and should be approached with a goal of continuously evolving processes and cycles of improvement.

Additional resources

• Get expert guidance on your automation journey with Red Hat Services
• Enable collaboration and sharing of automation with Ansible plug-ins for Red Hat Developer Hub