Automatic IT

Business functions such as accounting, logistics and human resources have all benefited from IT-led process automation — everyone, it seems, except for the IT department itself. But that’s all changing thanks to the growing acceptance of automated process management systems, Brad Howarth writes

It used to take BT Group’s security team 46 steps to set-up a new user account. The New Starter procedure was laborious for the team, and generally led to a poor experience for new employees.

So the financial services company turned to IT process automation technology for a solution. By taking a subset of this on-boarding process — including creation of a user account, e-mail, and additions to security and applications — and creating a proof-of-concept automation project, BT has been able to reduce a process that was previously taking seven minutes per user to something that can be completed in less than 15 seconds.

It is now looking at how automation can be applied to the remainder of its on-boarding procedures. The result: happy IT security personnel and happy new employees.

Information technology has done an incredible job making life easier for almost everyone but the people responsible for it. Business functions such as accounting, logistics and human resources have all benefited from IT-led process automation, but when it comes to actually helping the IT department itself, the report card is not so favourable.

Through mergers and acquisitions or simply the rapid evolution of technology itself, IT departments have found themselves managing outdated and incompatible systems that require a large amount of hands-on management — even for simple tasks such as provisioning new users.

An unfortunate truth for many organisations is that the state of the IT department and the tools it has to work with are less of a priority than helping the business to get the job done. The problem is further exacerbated in those organisations that treat IT as a cost centre.

So while many IT departments invest most of their time and effort in activities designed primarily to “keep the lights on”, there is rarely any money left in the annual budget for projects that might free up some of that time. Getting a business case up for easing the workload on IT staff is rarely an easy prospect, and such projects are often first in line to be dropped in the next round of cost-cutting.

But for those IT organisations that rushed to install new technology in the lead up to Y2K, and then suffered as budgets were reined in across the IT industry in the years that followed, the mid part of this decade has seen many CIOs begin looking at their internal processes and asking whether things could be done better.

According to Gartner’s vice president of research David Williams, IT management systems vendors have recognised this. Hence the second half of this decade has seen the releases of numerous new products for automating and streamlining IT process. Williams counts at least 26 automation products in the market today.

“To automate the infrastructure easily has not been achievable until recently when these new automation products started to appear,” Williams says. “Now every single big software company in the management space has got one of these products. They are starting to use these automation products like glue.”

Many of these are aimed at taking the human friction out of IT departments, yet Williams says it is important not to confuse automation with cost reduction. “They think if they automate their infrastructure they can eliminate costs from the human aspects,” Williams says. “That sort of works, but mostly in small automation procedures that don’t require a lot of administration and ownership.”

Unfortunately, however, most IT environments tend to be very ad hoc, with multiple non-standard elements. Removing costs in IT can mean focusing on a large number of very small processes, and requires investment in people and processes.

“Organisationally, companies have to be at the point where they can support the process end to end,” Williams says. “The software can do what it says it is expected do, but organisations are not mature enough at this moment in time to bring them in and see the value. The initial costs can be very high if you want to get the operation efficiency gains and do that big work. But in the mid- to long- term they tend to get that efficiency back.”

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Quick Wins

According to the manager of environment and release management at BT, Craig Wiseman, his team was able to use automation to get some quick economic wins by focusing on improving discreet processes. Wiseman says his group has now used BMC’s Business Service Management framework on two automation projects that have delivered savings in both time and money.

“In a tight labour market we need to make sure that we are getting the best out of our people, and so ideally to reduce the mundane repetitive activities and ensure consistency of outcomes,” Wiseman says. “We wanted to do something quite quickly that could show the benefit of process automation within technology, so we chose New Starter to try and show the business benefit,” Wiseman says.

Wiseman says management is extremely happy because it is saving money and delivering a consistent outcome. He says that it took a little longer to bring the security administration team around, however. “They absolutely love it now that it’s embedded in their processes and practices — they think it is fantastic,” Wiseman says. “It is about selling it to them once and getting them on board, showing them what it can do, and making sure you execute on that.”

While time savings and happy users are important, dollars are better. Wiseman says the second automation project, in BT’s application testing environment for its Wrap Web-based investment portfolio platform, is delivering significant cost savings.

The Wrap application undergoes constant development, with BT operating five pre-production testing environments. Refreshing each testing environment was taking up to 20 hours of dedicated engineering support for a task that would occur 10 to 12 times each year.

Wiseman used BMC’s Atrium Orchestrator to connect manual processes, and now Wrap system refreshes take just 10 minutes. He estimates that particular improvement is saving the organisation $80,000 in its first year, and $250,000 over three years.

Wiseman says he is keen to automate other processes, including other steps in staff on-boarding, and further enhancements in the form of re-usable release processes for software deployments in testing environ­ments. Currently BT undergoes between 600 and 700 software deployments each year, so he believes the savings should be significant. But he adds that finding and mapping the right projects is not easy.

“Our biggest challenge is to understand the process, getting the processes documented, and getting to the process logic and the decision points that people store in their head that they don’t have documented,” Wiseman says. “So every step is a process and it is challenging, and actually making sure we can develop a framework with which to get that information out each and every time, and make that gathering of requirements be a repeatable process as well.”

Wiseman says he had to be conscious of assuring people that the changes were not being made simply to reduce headcount. “We go to great pains to walk through with them that this isn’t about eliminating the need for them to work at BT,” he says. “It is to actually make better use of the IP that they have, and get them to work on higher-value activities.

“This is around trying to eliminate high-risk, high-impact activities and get consistent outcomes every time we do them.”

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The Business Doesn’t Stop

For the Australian transport infrastructure company Asciano, its opportunity for automation came as a result of its very creation. Asciano was formed from the rail transport and ports and stevedoring operations left-over from the merger of the transport companies Toll Holdings and Patrick Corporation in 2006.

The systems architect at Asciano, Paul Rashleigh, says the company operates a very lean IT team, which services a user base of 8000. One of its first tasks was to consolidate the two parent companies’ enterprise resource planning systems, based on PeopleSoft and Oracle, and the associated infrastructure.

“We are a small team, and we have a very high focus on efficiency,” Rashleigh says. “Anywhere we can leverage off improving efficiency through automation we’ll look at. We are not really hiring people, so you have to work with what you’ve got — and the business doesn’t stop.”

Rashleigh says the ERP merger was the perfect opportunity for Asciano to make its ERP capable of dealing with larger and more demanding workloads by switching to Oracle’s Real Application Clusters configuration. This delivered the added benefit of being capable of being maintained and updated during business hours.

“Previous to that we didn’t really have a truly highly-available system, so if there was any maintenance to do or any IT specific work to do it really had to be done out of hours,” Rashleigh says. “Having Oracle Rack allows us to do that work during the day, and not have to facilitate maintenance at odd hours of the morning.”

The improved working hours now mean that the team is in the office each day when the business needs them there, rather than working at night and taking days off.

“The project continues on today with some integration of business processes and streamlining of self-service to improve automation for the company,” Rashleigh says. “We were lucky to get that in, because while a lot of projects benefit IT, unless they benefit the business it is hard to get them approved.”

Rashleigh alo says Asciano is gaining further efficiencies from IT by using Oracle’s enterprise manager function within the 11g database. Despite some initial hiccups, he says in the last year it has become a solid contributor that is now depended on.

“It almost fulfils the roll of a junior DBA, sitting there and writing scripts and managing environments for us,” Rashleigh says. “It has really provided a lot of value and increased productivity. Now we can take our eyes off the Oracle environment and focus on something else, because we know this product is sitting there watching it, and will tell us if there is anything wrong or about to be wrong, and can utilise customised scripts to monitor other areas. And that came with our existing Oracle licence.”

Having been able to demonstrate the benefits to senior Asciano staff, Rashleigh has since paid to expand that licence to cover other non-Oracle environments. For instance, it is now monitoring IBM AIX systems.

“And again, that frees people up to focus on other things,” Rashleigh says. “We’re doing more for the business with the same number of people.”

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An Age-Old Problem

When Australia’s Aged Care Standards and Accreditation Agency turned to an automated process management system, the result not only made the business more efficient, it also made for a happier IT team

For the Aged Care Standards and Accreditation Agency, the opportunity to automate its manual IT processes came in the guise of a project to streamline and refresh the processes of the entire organisation.

Aged Care is an independent body responsible for managing the accreditation and ongoing monitoring of government funded residential aged care faculties in Australia.

According to its director of information services and products, David Cooper, the refresh — called Better Business — was initiated to bring together a decentralised, customised and aging system designed in the late 1990s and replace it with something more centralised and efficient.

“Basically our IT shop was small, and in our case we were probably spending 100 percent of our time ‘keeping the lights working’,” Cooper says.

The decision was taken to recentralise IT in a replacement environment built around a customer relationship management system and database for tracking interactions with aged care facilities.

The goal was to take all of the manual processes around that activity and automate them, linking various systems such as its Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SharePoint servers using TIBCO’s ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks.

The first project went live in April 2008 and related to the administration of the audits of nursing homes.

“There is a set of very precise and defined and regulated procedures around many of those audits, and we need to have a process of managing to those regulations,” Cooper says.

“It is a very defined work process and it actually sits quite well with an automated process management system. It is a much more robust, reliable, accurate and accessible set of information that we have — it is virtually real-time information.”

Cooper says Aged Care now has a much better view of the organisation’s workflow in the process and is also better able to allocate resources, such as assessors, because it can shift workloads with the push of a button.

And while the results are good for the business, and have also resulted in a happier IT team. “We are quite a small shop,” Cooper says, “but they have a much more robust set of infrastructure and applications to deal with and they have a good knowledge of how to deal with those applications and how to manage them.”

“We also have the capacity to get out our reports much more rapidly and with much more confidence that we don’t have to go through manually intensive reconciliation processes.

“It is a project that you almost dream about. It has certainly put in place the ability for the organisation to fundamentally change the way it works. There are very few projects that you come across that actually deliver that.”

Cooper believes that part of the reason why the project ran smoothly was because Aged Care runs a small IT group.

“We didn’t have a disadvantage of having a lot of legacy systems that we needed to carry with us and that removes a whole layer of complexity obviously.”

— B HOWARTH