How to build an IT automation strategy

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Most companies begin their automation journey by automating a few simple tasks. While this is a great way to get started, isolated automation can only take you so far. To get the highest return from your investment and expand automation to all areas of your IT operations, you need an IT automation strategy that unifies teams, processes, and disconnected workflows.

To build an automation strategy, you should examine what your teams are currently automating, determine the business outcomes you want to achieve with automation, address organizational challenges, and share your plans to get buy-in. It’s also important to foster a culture of automation so that everyone in your organization understands why it’s important—and how it can increase the efficiency, productivity, and flexibility of your IT operations.

Accelerate your automation

Despite automation’s undeniable value, its benefits can be limited without enterprise-wide adoption. But expanding automation across a business can be challenging. Cultural barriers, inefficient processes, and skill gaps are just some of the reasons teams struggle to embrace automation. Organizations who develop a strong automation strategy are able to overcome these challenges and get the most value out of their automation investment.

By adopting a holistic, end-to-end approach to automation, you can: 

  • Maximize the value of technology investments, particularly observability tools.
  • Achieve more resilient IT operations as the foundation for artificial intelligence (AI).
  • Develop an improved compliance and risk posture.
  • Establish a pathway to greater innovation and agility.
  • Create a culture of automation that encourages adoption, fosters collaboration, and addresses skills gaps.

Explore how IT automation creates a foundation for enterprise AI

5 steps to automate your business

Developing an IT automation strategy can help you create a strong foundation for a successful adoption journey. And even though every organization has its own unique challenges to address, you can design an effective strategy by examining your company’s goals, challenges, and processes.

Identify and document your business goals. Think about what you want to gain through automation. You might want to improve your return on investment (ROI) or increase productivity in a few key areas of the business. Or, you might be more interested in improving the security and reliability of IT systems. Whatever your goals are, you should record them in a format that can be shared with others so that everyone understands why adopting automation is important.

Examine your current automation efforts and map them to your business goals. Many companies start automating a few processes or a single use case before designing a comprehensive automation strategy. When you begin to design your strategy, you should take a step back and look at the automation you’re already doing. List out the tasks, processes, and use cases where you’ve already introduced automation, and see if you can connect them to each of the business outcomes you’ve documented. This can help you figure out where your automation efforts are already serving your goals, and what you need to focus on moving forward.

Create opportunities for collaboration. It’s hard to execute a strong automation strategy when teams are disconnected. You can resolve this issue by facilitating cross-team communication or by making organizational changes that put the people responsible for creating and implementing automation on the same team. Additionally, you can make collaboration a priority by starting an automation Center of Excellence (CoE) or an automation Community of Practice (CoP). Both a CoE and CoP—while structurally different—help bring people together to share ideas, create automation content, ask questions, and develop best practices.

Discover 5 steps for defining your automation strategy

To get the most value out of your automation investment, it’s important to understand where your organization currently stands. Businesses who have just started automating a few tasks or processes may see quick wins for a specific use case, but they won't see the full benefits of automation until they execute a more sophisticated automation strategy.

While you’ll get value from every level of automation, assessing your current level of automation maturity can help you determine what steps you need to take to get even more value.

There are typically 5 levels of automation maturity:

  • Level 1 - Awareness. Individuals are successfully automating day-to-day tasks. Typically the organization has no common standards or centralized content repositories.
  • Level 2 - Standardized. One or more teams have standardized how they execute their day-to-day tasks, often with single playbook sharing and execution.
  • Level 3 - Proactive. Teams are adopting and expanding into new use cases and have built a framework for testing automation. The organization is establishing (or has established) standards, governance, access control, and best practices.
  • Level 4 - Institutionalized. Cross-functional teams are collaborating and are deploying orchestrated workflows to drive greater performance and efficiency.
  • Level 5 - Optimized. The organization has developed an advanced culture of automation. Security, observability, and IT service management (ITSM) tools have been integrated to support event-driven automation and develop self-healing infrastructure.

Getting to a higher level of automation maturity often means changing your approach to automation. How individuals or teams choose to implement automation greatly influences maturity—and the speed at which you can expand automation adoption.

Four major approaches to IT automation are:

  1. Siloed automation: Individual teams or lines of business deploy automation independently and get value from automating a single use case.
  2. Automation Center of Excellence (CoE): A centralized automation team is responsible for creating and sharing automation content. Engineers across the business use automation content, but don’t create it themselves. A culture of automation may exist within the CoE, or may be focused on a single use case. The CoE develops best practices and standards for automation and fosters collaboration across teams.
  3. Automation Community of Practice (CoP): An organically grown community of automation practitioners makes automation content more accessible to all teams. The automation CoP shares knowledge, promotes best practices, and orchestrates cross-team and cross-domain workflows.
  4. Federated automation:  Automation is widely embraced as mission-critical technology in the organization, and teams adhere to organizational standards and best practices. Collaboration is second nature, and the organization has optimized the business value of their automation investment.

Each of these approaches are distinct. But in practice, they often overlap. Some organizations may choose to stick with a CoE throughout their automation journey, while others may move from siloed automation to fully federated automation over time. There isn’t a single, recommended path to mature automation, so many organizations develop a strategy that incorporates the practices that work best for achieving their unique business outcomes. 

Learn how Navy Federal Credit Union created a culture of automation

Your organization may already be embracing one or more modern IT frameworks. But if these models are too restrictive or too lax, it’s important to address these challenges before tackling major changes to your automation. Overly rigid IT processes can become a barrier to the operational and cultural changes that need to occur in order for automation to be successful. To create a strong foundation for advanced automation, start by identifying the operational models you currently use and consider ways to improve them.

Common IT operational models include:

DevOps
DevOps framework breaks down barriers between teams to deliver applications faster, promote collaboration, and increase quality. By adopting a “you build it, you run it” mindset, organizations can break free from overly rigid processes and reduce friction between operations and development teams.

Platform engineering
Platform engineering focuses on a frictionless developer experience, push-button infrastructure, templates, and self-service workflows. It empowers developers to be more autonomous and relies on an internal developer portal to curate tools and services they need to be productive.

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
Initially introduced in the late 80s, ITIL provided standardized IT service management based on best practices and documented processes. It centralized the ongoing maintenance of systems in most organizations. While ITIL has evolved to include IT strategy, introduce feedback, and better align with DevOps principles, some consider the model outdated and have begun to shift to other frameworks.

Information Technology Operations Management (ITOM)
ITOM is a subset of ITIL that addresses the security, governance, and compliance of datacenter, cloud, and edge environments. It uses monitoring and observability tools to improve management efficiency and performance of IT infrastructure. It also embraces automation and AI to help maintain system availability and reliability.

If you want to transform IT operations with automation and increase your ROI, everyone in your organization should adopt an automation-first mindset. But if in-house automation expertise is in short supply or concentrated on a single team, it can be difficult to spread awareness and get people involved.

To expand adoption and implement your automation strategy, you’ll need to create an internal culture that encourages people to learn and share knowledge about automation. One of the best ways to do this is to establish an automation CoP.

What is a CoP?
A Community of Practice is a group of people who organize themselves around their expertise and passion for a shared interest. A CoP is usually developed by the practitioners or experts. While corporate leadership may support a CoP by providing the infrastructure it needs to succeed, membership is not dictated by management and the CoP doesn’t necessarily receive formal or consistent funding.

How can an automation CoP help?
An automation CoP creates connections between professionals who share an interest in learning how to use automation to accomplish business goals. It can serve as a vehicle for establishing automation best practices, energizing both new and existing practitioners, encouraging cross-team collaboration, and identifying new lines of business. It can also help establish a method for sharing automation content so that new automation developers can learn from what other practitioners are already creating.

And because the outcomes of a CoP usually include relationship building among practitioners, an automation CoP is a good fit for organizations looking to bring automation to their entire IT stack. The shared interest and passion among members is an important tool for increasing engagement in the business’s automation strategy. The more teams are engaged, the more likely they are to find new ways to incorporate automation into their tools and workflows.

Establishing an automation CoP
Although there isn’t a single way to start an automation CoP, you can usually begin by organizing a planning session for automation practitioners and enthusiasts. It’s helpful to have people from across the organization in attendance; you should encourage automation subject-matter experts (SMEs), business leaders, architects, and developers to participate.

Once you’ve gathered as a group, there are some key questions you should ask to determine the goals of your automation CoP. These might include:

  • What is our mission statement?
  • Who are the stakeholders of our CoP?
  • How will the CoP benefit its members?
  • What kind of activities will the CoP organize and how will they further its mission?
  • How will members of the CoP communicate and interact?
  • What are some of the challenges the CoP must overcome?
  • What are some short-term goals our CoP can work toward?

After you’ve determined your CoP’s goals and identified the activities that bring members together, you should document everything. You’ll also need to encourage participation and invite others outside of the initial planning group. You can communicate the goals of the automation CoP to individuals and teams within your IT organization, and expand these efforts to other teams over time. This approach can also help you get manager buy-in, which is essential for attracting interest and engagement.

Get started with an automation CoP

Automation community of practice: Tips and best practices

It’s easier to build an automation strategy when you adopt a unified automation solution that helps you align teams around a common framework and orchestrate automation across use cases and environments.

Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform is an end-to-end automation platform that comes with all the tools you need to create, manage, and scale automation across the enterprise. It reduces operational complexity and provides a consistent user experience across teams, breaking down barriers between architects, developers, and system administrators. An Ansible Automation Platform subscription includes an event-driven solution, an expanding suite of development tools, and access to certified and validated Ansible content via Ansible Content Collections. These bundles of content contain modulesplaybooks, and documentation to help your cross-functional teams start automating fast.

Red Hat will not only ease the transition by helping you install and configure Ansible Automation Platform, but will also assist you in expanding automation across your organization. Red Hat Services provides support in the form of hands-on training, mentorship, and automation courses—helping your teams learn to use more advanced automation techniques as your adoption journey evolves.

Red Hat Services also applies real-world experience to help you improve infrastructure and application workflows, security and compliance, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), and DevOps practices with enterprise-wide automation. Our experts will work with your organization to adopt an automation-first approach—helping you establish a robust automation Community of Practice.

Evolve automation in your enterprise with Red Hat Services—>

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