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The Road to Automation in IT Operations-Part 2

Anirban Chatterjee

How do you ensure your journey to automated IT Ops is streamlined and effective, and not just a buzzword? The Road to Automation in IT Operations - Part 1 covered golden rules #1 and #2. Part 2 starts with #3.

3. Define and simplify processes - more intelligence, fewer steps

Similar to the previous point, simply automating complicated or bad processes can lead to more complication and overhead. To avoid this unfortunate outcome, you need to begin by identifying the simplest route between your available input and the goal output, free from the baggage of past decisions and tradeoffs. This fresh assessment will direct exactly what your automation will be doing for you in the future. It is here also that all the work you've done in the previous two steps — standardizing and reducing complexity — really pays off, since it allows you to simplify your processes even more.

By defining the processes that are important to your IT Ops team or workflows, you can make sure that they are simple, efficient and robust. Questions to ask yourself as you do this include:

Is this process actually making work easier and more efficient, or is it causing more problems than it solves?

Is there a step along the way that is taking too long?

What can we do to clear any bottlenecks?

Is there any part of our processes that is being unnecessarily duplicated and can be eliminated (as in the diagram below)?

What intelligence can we put up front, to minimize the number of follow-up steps required?


This stage is absolutely critical because, as automation scales up our operations, it doesn't just multiply what we have been doing well with our manual processes; it also multiplies any problems, glitches or defects. So, it's best to head them off at the pass.

4. Automate wisely - choose the tools that best fit your needs

Our last guiding principle concerns automation itself. This is where we realize the true value of the previous three principles — in short, it's where the magic happens. So, take your time to wisely select the tools you use to implement your automation.

As much as we try to keep everything simple, IT environments will alway remain noisy, complex and fast moving. The key to developing resilient automation is to implement technologies that enable us to deal with these inevitabilities as best we can — and it is here that AIOps shines.

Understand what goals you aim to achieve with your automation — and ask what the AIOps platforms you are considering can do for you from that perspective:

Can they help you with your naming conventions?

Are they suited to working both on-prem and in the cloud?

Can they easily integrate with your existing tools?

Will their communication capabilities adequately support the processes you are aiming to put in place?

Can they add the information to alerts through enrichment?

Do their AI and ML provide you with adequate flexibility and transparency to implement your tribal knowledge?

These and other questions are important to make sure you are properly equipped as you begin your automation journey. And, if you've done a good job in instrumenting, you'll get actionable data from the automated process as it runs, and over time you'll identify areas for your team to further improve and simplify its flow.

Automation is the future of IT Ops, and not just because it makes your IT Ops workflows and teams more efficient. By taking care of mundane, repetitive tasks, it also elevates the human role, freeing up staff to do the more interesting, innovative parts of their job that can really drive your business forward. Following these four guiding principles, will help you safely navigate your automation process.

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The Latest

Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

77% of leaders say their teams need AI skills urgently. 64% say their organization plans to train current employees rather than hire new ones. So far, so reasonable. The part that surprised me is who's been put in charge: 34% of those leaders say IT and engineering own the AI skills mandate. Learning and Development or HR own it at 7% of organizations. That's roughly five-to-one in favor of the people who understand the tools, over the people whose actual job is teaching adults how to learn new ones ...

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly focused on enhancing their observability stacks to gain deeper insights into their IT environments. Observability has become a cornerstone of modern IT operations, enabling organizations to monitor, diagnose, and optimize their systems with unprecedented precision. However, a critical piece of the puzzle often goes unnoticed in this transformation: IBM i ...

The Road to Automation in IT Operations-Part 2

Anirban Chatterjee

How do you ensure your journey to automated IT Ops is streamlined and effective, and not just a buzzword? The Road to Automation in IT Operations - Part 1 covered golden rules #1 and #2. Part 2 starts with #3.

3. Define and simplify processes - more intelligence, fewer steps

Similar to the previous point, simply automating complicated or bad processes can lead to more complication and overhead. To avoid this unfortunate outcome, you need to begin by identifying the simplest route between your available input and the goal output, free from the baggage of past decisions and tradeoffs. This fresh assessment will direct exactly what your automation will be doing for you in the future. It is here also that all the work you've done in the previous two steps — standardizing and reducing complexity — really pays off, since it allows you to simplify your processes even more.

By defining the processes that are important to your IT Ops team or workflows, you can make sure that they are simple, efficient and robust. Questions to ask yourself as you do this include:

Is this process actually making work easier and more efficient, or is it causing more problems than it solves?

Is there a step along the way that is taking too long?

What can we do to clear any bottlenecks?

Is there any part of our processes that is being unnecessarily duplicated and can be eliminated (as in the diagram below)?

What intelligence can we put up front, to minimize the number of follow-up steps required?


This stage is absolutely critical because, as automation scales up our operations, it doesn't just multiply what we have been doing well with our manual processes; it also multiplies any problems, glitches or defects. So, it's best to head them off at the pass.

4. Automate wisely - choose the tools that best fit your needs

Our last guiding principle concerns automation itself. This is where we realize the true value of the previous three principles — in short, it's where the magic happens. So, take your time to wisely select the tools you use to implement your automation.

As much as we try to keep everything simple, IT environments will alway remain noisy, complex and fast moving. The key to developing resilient automation is to implement technologies that enable us to deal with these inevitabilities as best we can — and it is here that AIOps shines.

Understand what goals you aim to achieve with your automation — and ask what the AIOps platforms you are considering can do for you from that perspective:

Can they help you with your naming conventions?

Are they suited to working both on-prem and in the cloud?

Can they easily integrate with your existing tools?

Will their communication capabilities adequately support the processes you are aiming to put in place?

Can they add the information to alerts through enrichment?

Do their AI and ML provide you with adequate flexibility and transparency to implement your tribal knowledge?

These and other questions are important to make sure you are properly equipped as you begin your automation journey. And, if you've done a good job in instrumenting, you'll get actionable data from the automated process as it runs, and over time you'll identify areas for your team to further improve and simplify its flow.

Automation is the future of IT Ops, and not just because it makes your IT Ops workflows and teams more efficient. By taking care of mundane, repetitive tasks, it also elevates the human role, freeing up staff to do the more interesting, innovative parts of their job that can really drive your business forward. Following these four guiding principles, will help you safely navigate your automation process.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

77% of leaders say their teams need AI skills urgently. 64% say their organization plans to train current employees rather than hire new ones. So far, so reasonable. The part that surprised me is who's been put in charge: 34% of those leaders say IT and engineering own the AI skills mandate. Learning and Development or HR own it at 7% of organizations. That's roughly five-to-one in favor of the people who understand the tools, over the people whose actual job is teaching adults how to learn new ones ...

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly focused on enhancing their observability stacks to gain deeper insights into their IT environments. Observability has become a cornerstone of modern IT operations, enabling organizations to monitor, diagnose, and optimize their systems with unprecedented precision. However, a critical piece of the puzzle often goes unnoticed in this transformation: IBM i ...