Like fault lines, demographics have a nasty habit of shifting. The next shift on the verge of crashing into the collective consciousness IT is the retirement of the baby boomer. For years IT departments have run off the collective mind share of the boomers, but soon those minds will be in Florida, wearing velour track suits, and playing golf everyday. Already cracks are appearing, and you see evidence in things like the surprising demand for programmers of arcane languages like Cobol.
As IT departments recognize this, strategies are changing. Already there is an increased interest in Knowledge Mgt to start preserving that tribal knowledge before it disappears. However, must greater change is needed, and only through embracing greater automation will IT departments cope with the shift. For the all automation of modern IT departments, a large portion of work remains repetitive and manual, and much of the current automation is simply integration between systems. Enter Run book Automation (RBA) (Wikipedia), which allows many traditional manual tasks that exist to be orchestrated and automated in a flexible and effective workflow.
In one organization I know, high priority tickets with 30 min resolution SLAs are often received. In some cases, the first step for these tickets is a manual status check of 6 servers, which often takes several minutes, and makes it a challenge to maintain the SLA. Through Runbook Automation, this process can be orchestrated, and automated so that the servers have been checked by the time the technician has opened the ticket.
While Run Book Automation is new, it has great potential and is experiencing quick adoption. Much of this adoption is likely spurred by datacenter automation, but increasingly organizations are looking to RBA as a flexible way to automate the repetitive tasks that dog the techs of today. For more info, check out The Potential of Run Book Automation whitepaper.
