Automation is considered as a modern phenomenon today by most of the technology adopters, while its history is quite extensive. Automation is the biggest disruptor for technological transformation. The phenomenon was first crafted by Homer, a Greek writer, in The Iliad, one of his epic war story. The book stated the tale of Hephaestus, Greek god of craftsmen who was asked to engineer all the arsenal used by the idols of Mount Olympus. In order to complete the task, Hephaestus-shaped automatons. Automatons were automatic machineries, or machines, molded from metal. They helped Hephaestus in his labor work and made promising production of the glorious weaponries used by gods and humans.
The term automation, in the industrial sense, was first coined by Delmer S. Harder, Vice President, Ford Motor Co., in the year 1948. Thus, automation as a term isn’t new in the industry.
Since the last two decades, automation has been an effort of expedition and accuracy within IT infrastructure. Script writing productivity increased tremendously in early 2000’s as the management of these scripts wasn’t too complex or frequent—which was due to the limited options of operating systems, databases, and devices.
In the year 2015, technology trends confirmed that datacenters were more automated than ever. Defined scripts were used to do periodic checks in order to make sure that the tasks and jobs are running on schedule, but these checklists are no longer needed for any manual updates today.
Now, automation of most of the tasks includes the tracking and analysis of historical footprints of the requests and incidents with similar footprints. Documented retention of historical footprints is beneficial as operations, management, and auditors can be assisted by algorithmic systems to view the relevant reports on-demand, in-real time. This can also assist in the decision making for any changes needed in scheduling. Thus, this has led the scheduler to proactively notify stakeholders with predictive analysis on system behaviors over exceptions, including errors or delays, eliminating the need for traditional or manual checklists. These changes are rapidly expediting the step-by-step digitalization of organizational functions in the customer landscape. This is making the automation a crucial contributor towards digital transformation.
Intelligent automation touches multiple dimensions in an IT lifecycle to realize the extreme automation in the IT infrastructure services, which is essential to strengthen the digital strategy from the root in digital transformation journey. With intelligent automation, user experience and user self-help enablement is the key objective such as cognitive virtual assistants, at the front end. And, at the back-end the algorithmic systems have allowed a predictive impact call-outs to proactively alert systems on precautionary remediation actions and their execution to avoid impacts even before they occur.
Intelligent automation solutions take knowledge of business processes & variations into consideration while executing automated business process validation. This way they are able to verify that the right business outcomes occur.
Therefore, the idea to adopt intelligent automation can help reduce the redundant effort associated with day-to-day business processes and transactions. Introducing intelligent automation is a key cog in the technology management wheel today. Thereby, businesses having a mandate like ‘get the most out of our infrastructure compute?’ and ‘save operational cost’ will look to automation technology. This will ensure the digital existence of the enterprise systems.
As these intelligent automation products continue to enhance their capabilities, we may observe a spike in the adoption rate confirming the inclination of users towards a simplified way of living called ‘digital way of living’. Though the promise made by the intelligent automation solutions is to ‘set and forget’, technology still can play a notorious role.
