To IT or Not to IT...
A longstanding customer at a major US bank recently remarked to me, “You can take AutoMate out of the IT department, and should.” While the usage of AutoMate and BPA Server outside of IT organizations is not news (about 30% of our deployments are outside of IT), the notion that “we should” poses some interesting opportunities, but also dilemmas.
In this instance, our customer/advisor was a senior executive in his company’s financial department’s analyst group. He was using an industrial strength implementation of BPA to automate a myriad of processes associated with the bank’s use of an enterprise Business Intelligence (BI) platform. This particular BI software product is marketed as a “line-of-business” solution (meaning outside the traditional IT organization), and in this instance was being employed to model some rather sophisticated “what-if” scenarios to assist with deep analysis of global interest and currency exchange rate trends. Pretty heady stuff.
BPA has allowed the finance department to administer their BI deployment with no involvement from their IT group. This is important, not because the IT group is incapable, but rather because the firm prioritizes its IT budget on strategic, revenue-centric activities often referred to as “front office.” The fact that the finance department’s decisions affect nearly $1 trillion in assets under management does not alleviate the scarcity of IT personnel available. The upshot is that a quad-server deployment of BPA with more than 100 automation clients, is effectively managed by the finance department’s analysts, and in-turn, is used to make its BI software (which cost more than a quarter-million dollars) less costly to maintain — all outside the domain of a very capable and global IT operation.
We are quite proud of this success story, with reasonable justification. We feel accomplished for delivering to market an automation solution easy enough to use to help MS/Excel users and, at the same time, sophisticated enough to help with enterprise, N-dimensional database/ BI 2.0 deployments. And yet, we are a bit troubled, too. Why?
Simply stated, we did not bring AutoMate or BPA to market to show up, eliminate or alienate IT departments. In fact, IT managers are our core-customer constituency and a lot of what we put into our products is with IT managers in mind. AutoMate is intended to make IT pros’ lives easier, in the sense of delivering meaningful automation (read software functionality) faster and with less expense. Most IT departments appreciate AutoMate’s ability to support desires to do more, faster and with less cost. Maintaining IT's affinity remains one of our primary goals.
Still, we keep reading about how the appetite for meaningful IT solutions outstrips the ability for IT to deliver. Plus the number of unfilled IT professional posts continues to grow, and we read from Marc Andreessen that “Software is Eating the World.” Recently the US Bureau of Labor Statistics says the number of software developer jobs is growing at 21%. We need more software (automation), and yet the worldwide capacity to produce it is not keeping up with demand. What to do?
In answer, we strongly recommend that whenever possible, IT organizations be involved in the deployment and oversight of powerful automation. AutoMate is easy to use, AND it can deploy enterprise-grade, mission critical automation. In this way, a powerful automation engine can address the need for more software results, while still having proper governance. An enabling-technology-approach, if you will.
One of our particularly forward looking IT executive at a major retailer (thousands of storefronts) illustrated it best in this way:
“We don’t want to be the perfect operational definition of a bureaucracy to our business units. One that says we can’t help you, but we can stop you from helping yourself.”
Instead, the IT exec endorsed AutoMate for use-by-business unit power users with the result of delivering six times the productivity over manual processes. The IT group provides guidance, consultation and support in conjunction with our own support process. This is important for many reasons. For example, although SLA’s regularly meet 99% uptime targets, a 24x7 business operation is still exposed to 90 hours of annual downtime. IT pros need to be around to address outages no matter how infrequent. The equation of: AutoMate PLUS a productive line business PLUS a supportive IT group EQUALS “a 3-way win.”
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What do you think of the chances of AutoMate being successful in cases without formal IT endorsement?
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