The possibilities of automation are endless — and that scares many employees. And while enterprises today need to have a short- and long-term plan in place to retrain and reassign their resources whose jobs are now done through automation, IT Automation is aiming to make IT processes faster, more efficient, and ultimately more agile to provide the organizations with higher productivity, healthier and more stable IT environments, and faster turnaround times.
To make selling this easier for you, we have compiled a list of our top five arguments that will get your business units on board and excited about embracing IT Automation.
1) Increased Productivity
One of the biggest roadblocks to making technology changes in a department is the loss of productivity while preparing for and making the transition, fixing issues, getting back up to speed, and then adjusting to the learning curve that comes with anything new. Anyone who has been through an OS or other upgrade knows how long they can be without a device and that they will have to relearn how to use it.
Current statistics show that over the course of a year in a large organization, IT issues result in 2 full days of missed work and 6 full days of being unproductive. According to a study from UC Irvine, it takes an interrupted worker an average of 23 minutes to refocus their mind. In a Gartner survey, network downtime can cost up to $5,600/minute.
With proper IT Automation in place, issues can be discovered and fixed before they are even known to the user. For issues that manage to cause downtime, the fix for that issue is recorded and goes into the repository, limiting the amount of additional users who will be affected by it.
2) Labor Savings
While IT Automation can certainly reduce the number of IT workers needed, it also can save on labor costs for all departments. Having more productive employees with little to no downtime for technical reasons can mean getting more work done with the same, or even fewer hands.
For business units that are struggling to keep their head above water, they will look to new hires or temps to fill the gap, and face the staggering associated costs. Besides the base salary of a new hire, another 30-40% needs to be added for taxes and benefits, making a $50,000 a year employee cost up to $70,000/year.
While the yearly costs of a new employee add up fast, there are also the initial costs of procuring equipment, finding/creating desk space, and other hiring fees. While all of those costs can really add up fast, they don’t take into account time costs. New employees need on-boarding, administrative paperwork processed, and training from a senior employee(s), and their learning curve can be as much as 6-months. All of these time-drains, plus the possibility that the employee won’t last even a year, make the wise investment in IT Automation a foregone conclusion.
3) Future-Proofing Your Department (Evergreen IT)
One issue that keeps top level management up at night is the fear of making a huge tech investment only to have it become obsolete soon after — along with their job. IT Automation might seem to fit into that category, but it actually is quite the opposite.
Once IT Automation is properly in place, the level of knowledge of the whole IT environment makes future endeavors more intuitive, allowing them to be completed more efficiently.
Operating System and other upgrades become a repeatable and predictable process. Slow, out-of-date, or broken devices are identified quickly and, if possible, either fixed through IT Automation or replaced.
4) Digital Innovation
Whether it is a department initiative or a mandate from the top, adapting new technologies earlier than your competition is the edge companies need to gain or keep market share.
However, adopting new technologies requires more resources from a device, possibly pushing the device to the point of slowing it down. This risk is minimized in an IT environment where the status quo are healthy devices with automation protocols in place to keep them that way.
Using a series of prompts, users see their device’s health score and the actions needed to improve. This allows an employee to take responsibility for the speed and efficiency of their device, which directly improves their work performance.
5) Assurance
A common scenario that plays out in all types of organizations is that an upgrade or migration is blamed for an application not working, especially when it is LOB. Even if the upgrade happened weeks or months ago, it usually takes the blame.
Part of an IT Automation strategy is post-migration success. When a user starts their device for the first time after an upgrade, there are a series of prompts that take the user through the new apps to make sure everything is working and that all personalized settings have been brought over. Not only is the user signing off that everything is working, they are also getting trained on the new software. If an issue arises later, time won’t be wasted blaming the upgrade — it will be spent finding the real issue.
Conclusion
Selling change is always hard — but as with anything else, align your debate with their needs and highlight the tangible benefits this will bring to their daily work lives, to cost savings, and to your company’s bottom line.
