“But Lo! Men have become the tools of their tools.” –Thoreau
In this paper, I focus on the question of why after much innovation, engineering and hard work, do Enterprises continue to spend more precious resources on operating existing computing infrastructure, rather than investing their resources in the development of new and innovative ways to apply technology towards the advancement of their business and the service of their customers?
The Reign of the Application Engineers
When computer scientists began to develop applications for automating critical business processes, such as tracking inventory and processing customer orders the applications were designed around a simple business model.
As Enterprises continued to grow more complex and business processes became more streamline, so have the applications that endeavor to model and ultimately drive the underlying business processes. Most business applications designed today mimic a structured human workflow and contain a sequence of steps required to accomplish a specific job.
The result is a modern Enterprise, which contains thousands of business applications that enable millions of jobs. These applications serve to automate much of the paper driven flow of information and activities across the core business processes.
One of the challenges of the modern enterprise computing infrastructure is the need to reduce the stranglehold on the bottom line, which this considerable technology footprint has left us with. The sheer size and complexity of the modern enterprise application architecture is daunting. Some of the challenges include:
Leveraging Data Across Multiple Applications
Managing the Impact of Changes
Cost Effective Operational Processes
Furthermore, all Enterprises share a common root in the need to be able to perform work across the silos of structured workflows and enterprise applications.
IT Process Automation is a Third Level Automation Problem
The first level of Process Automation is modeling a task within an application to streamline processing and workflow.
The EAI paradigm is good for a certain class of integration problems, but is not sufficiently flexible for building viable solutions within the areas of IT process that span highly dynamic infrastructure and operational process.
For example, one Communication Service Provider took a classic EAI approach to developing an OSS platform which covered “rigid” integration points between billing and provisioning. As a result this provider struggled to handle the automation of high volume testing and diagnostic procedures.
The nature of most IT processes is very dynamic in both the workflow rules and the architecture of the underlying components acted upon.
Subject Matter Experts are the Key
The Systems Engineer is in some sense the biggest bottleneck to many automation programs. Provide the Tools for the SME (Subject Matter Expert) to capture the repeatable steps in their work processes and you have reached the holy grail of automation.
The challenge of course is providing a platform that empowers the SME to both document the most mundane of their daily activities and leverage automation tools without requiring a large team of developers to support the effort.
So, early stages of Runbook Automation and IT Process Automation have been focused heavily on the high pain areas of IT Operations. But, the initial platforms used to action this problem and produce automation did not account for the critically important role of the SME in the ongoing advancement of the automation goals. Thus, very little progress has been made with the first entrants into this application space.
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