When you decide that it is time to invest in IT automation, you may be concerned about whether there will be a suitable return on investment. Your IT automation plan must take into consideration various business goals for you to create an IT automation plan that will be profitable.
Understand How IT Fits with Your Organization
For an IT automation strategy to be successful, you will need to understand what everyone expects. You must understand the unique needs of your organization and how to reduce the amount of effort that is needed to accomplish a task. Then, you can determine how much of a return each automation strategy will bring.
Understand the Entire IT Process
To understand where IT automation will fit, you must understand the entire process and how automation can be integrated. For instance, you will need to understand what will trigger an automated process and when a process must be handled manually.
Decide When an Automated or Manual Response is Appropriate
Also, when an event occurs can affect whether it is more suitable to have an automated or manual response. For instance, if there is an outage during a period when your network is typically placed under less strain, is it more or less important to have the problem resolved automatically or manually?
Test Your IT Automation
To avoid having surprises when unrolling an IT automation system, make sure to have the system fully tested. The system must be tested to make sure that it will consistently produce the desired results. However, the testing should not end when the system has been rolled out because you will want to make sure that everything continues to run smoothly.
Continue to Evaluate
The great thing about IT automation is that you do not have to devote as much time and energy to carrying out IT tasks. However, this doesn't mean that you set it and forget it. To maximize your ROI, you must always be looking for tasks that can be automated and currently automated tasks that may require more manual oversight.
Automate When Training and Labor are Expensive
The areas where you should focus on automating should be those that have a shortage of people and skills. If there are tasks that you would need to train more staff members to perform, why not automate these tasks. The areas that are the most labor-intensive should be automated to save on labor.