Originally published in The New Stack Update.
Automation did not originate with Henry Ford’s assembly line. Automation will not end with voice-enabled, machine-learning chatbots supporting ITSM. Automation is evolutionary. Even though time savings are real, every few months it’s important to throw cold water on optimistic expectations.
A recent blog by HfS Research CEO Phil Fersht mercilessly dissects Gartner’s claim that 96 percent of robotic process automation (RPA) customers are seeing value, showing that most executives are misinformed, with up to half of initial implementations failing. In fact, measuring what an automation project has achieved may depend on your vantage point. Forrester analyst Robert Stroud has published reports highlighting disconnects based on job role (see Forrester analyst Dave Bartoletti’s presentation includes charts from these reports). For example, executives believe 77 percent of the release automation process is automated, while DevOps practitioners think that figure is 61 percent. Being hands-on, we expect that DevOps pros are closer to the truth.
In a different report, Forrester found 29 percent of DevOps pros releasing customer-facing apps manually, with another 42 percent only partially automating the process. Workload adjustments and knowledge management were the most likely to be done manually. Workload adjustments are currently the domain of IT operations teams, who are consequently a bit more jaded about automation hype. Even as it regards infrastructure code — and not workload adjustments, provisioning and migration — this group has been less likely to see the benefits of automated application delivery.
According to Forrester, while 61 percent of application development and deployment teams release at least quarterly, only 31 percent of their infrastructure and operations team peers are doing so. What does this mean for you? You should still push to achieve time savings and cost efficiencies. However, the next time you use a ROI calculator — even a good one like from TNS sponsor CA Technologies — remember that automation’s success may be in the eye of the beholder.
