At PAndora FMS we have IT professionals on an altar. Literally, one next to the water dispenser in the office. I’m serious! It even has its blessed liturgical cloth, its flattering parsley, its candles and the incense! But there are still things that these people miss. Here’s a hint: it’s related to ITOM.
IT Operations Management (ITOM) and automation
We all agree in the industry that IT professionals waste too much time every day, struggling with minor tasks within IT Operations Management (ITOM).
And it is that ITOM covers everything necessary to support the network infrastructure that provides IT services.
This includes both the hardware (switches, servers, data center firewalls…) as well as the company’s network and the tools needed to make sure everything works properly.
According to the latest surveys, 78% of IT professionals say they spend at least 10% of their time proactively optimizing their environments.
This extra time spent on maintenance and conservation obviously takes time from proactive optimization.
And this is where automation comes in.
Automation is that miracle from heaven that sets IT professionals free to stop wasting time and focus on things that really matter, and not on boring tasks!
Of course, most IT professionals know firsthand the value of automation.
That’s why they have their altar. *Visitable during working hours, and donations are accepted.
But automation has not yet reached ubiquity regarding ITOM.
And it’s time for that to change!
That’s why we want you to start considering automating the following types of tasks:
- Complex tasks with multiple steps
- Repetitive routine tasks or tasks triggered by a recurring event
- Tasks where a large amount of data needs to be filtered based on specific, predefined criteria
As we said, in these cases, automation can help the incredible intellects of IT professionals, and their almost intrinsic creativity to focus on other needs.
Perhaps, even with automation, you will minimize the possibility of human error in tasks.
What is the next step?
Certainly the next step is to consider which are the most relevant ITOM tools.
If your megalomaniac goal is, for example, to optimize a large government network, look for the products best designed to scale and then make sure the vendor and product are approved for use in government networks.
Here, for example, the most relevant ITOM tools could be:
- Performance monitoring
- Configuration management
- Security and intrusion detection and prevention
- Troubleshooting
If you then relax and have a tea and take enough time to consider specific processes that can benefit from automation, such as automating network configurations, you may help out your IT professionals do more efficiently tasks like:
Meeting compliance requirements, implementing configuration changes quickly and efficiently, or reducing downtime caused by faulty devices.
And network configuration automation is only one area from among them all.
Think about the possibility of automating workflows and your IT staff crying dramatically when finally getting their lives back!
Or automating tasks initiated by mobile devices, etc.
Prepare for change!
Naturally, automation leads us to the development of a new type of skills within IT staff.
The more tasks are automated, the more IT professionals become automation supervisors instead of performing those tasks themselves.
That is, while before more specialized staff needed to understand perfectly what the inner workings of each piece of hardware were like, with automation, these people need to be much more aware of how the software works.
They need to understand application programming interfaces and how they can dictate things like policies, rules, and user access.
Conclusions
ITOM and automation together are virtually the panacea for IT professionals.
The secret of a successful transition is to go little by little, in a gradual and logical progression.
Securing tasks, processes, and skill sets so that they move together toward a better future filled with altars in the office for IT professionals!
Resources
Pandora FMS’s editorial team is made up of a group of writers and IT professionals with one thing in common: their passion for computer system monitoring. Pandora FMS’s editorial team is made up of a group of writers and IT professionals with one thing in common: their passion for computer system monitoring.
