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How Hyperautomation Builds Steam and Breaks Down IT Silos

Marcus Rebelo
Resolve

Hyperautomation topped Gartner's recent list of Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends, but is this just another new buzzword to further complicate our increasingly complex IT world?

Over the last decade, many IT teams have unknowingly implemented various forms of hyperautomation. By orchestrating more advanced automated processes and workflows, they've essentially cracked the code on this trend already. But what exactly do we mean by hyperautomation?

Gartner describes business-driven hyperautomation as: "an approach in which organizations rapidly identify, vet and automate as many approved business and IT processes as possible through a disciplined approach. Hyperautomation involves the orchestrated use of multiple technologies, tools or platforms (inclusive of, but not limited to, AI, machine learning, event-driven software architecture, RPA, iPaaS, packaged software and other types of decision, process and/or task automation tools)."

So, what's changed that would cause Gartner to introduce this new term now? We believe the answer lies in the ability to incorporate more advanced, newer technologies into the automation toolchain today — namely artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing, along with advanced analytics and data mining, which leverage all of the above. In the coming year, we'll see hyperautomation further evolve, building momentum, and contributing to the inevitable erosion of silos in enterprise IT.

Improving Digital Experience Demands Hyperautomation

Regardless of the name, hyperautomation's capacity to integrate and orchestrate various technologies is here to stay. Ultimately, it highlights the fact that siloed IT functions are being relegated to the IT graveyard. Like it or not, the needs of our in-house users and customers alike demand that all of our tools work together to serve broader, strategic business objectives — a fact that has been further amplified by the pandemic.

When all your systems are interoperative, independent silos are not just unnecessary, they impede business objectives. The widespread adoption of APIs is indicative of this drive toward interoperability. Further, Gartner estimates that over 70% of commercial enterprises have dozens of hyperautomation initiatives underway. Unfortunately, many of these will likely languish or fail because they're siloed, lack alignment to business outcomes, or overlap with other efforts. This results in more technical debt, unsustainable IT architectures, and data issues.

Hyperautomation, by default, is starting to break through the silo walls, building incremental connections between them, and in doing so, improving overall capabilities. While it will take years before siloed architectures fade for good, hyperautomation is moving in the right direction.

Hyperautomation in Action

To gain a better understanding of how hyperautomation is already in play for many enterprise IT teams, let's look at a few examples.

Combining intelligent automation with common chat tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams delivers valuable self-service capabilities, allowing end users to perform simple tasks on their own, like resetting passwords, or more complex ones, like interactive, multi-step PC troubleshooting. A more sophisticated example might be server provisioning, which would incorporate additional steps, like automating entitlement checks.

To support these types of hyperautomation use cases, service desk teams tie chat tools into a backend system that permits the actions to occur, plus another system that has the ability to perform the automated actions on behalf of the user. Where there are multiple chat tools deployed in an organization, capabilities can be deployed across all of them with a robust orchestrator on the back end. The end user never knows whether there are two or ten different tools involved in capturing, approving, executing, and responding to their request. Better yet, the automated processes can be structured in such a way that corporate compliance and governance standards are enforced at every turn.

For organizations with multiple automation tools — usually requiring different skillsets — hyperautomation can unify this ecosystem and enable these tools to seamlessly interact with one another to execute end-to-end processes autonomously. This eliminates the time consuming, labor-intensive, baton-passing between departments to complete certain responsibilities, representing a significant savings in costs and man hours.

Let's also explore the chain of custody for new applications. In most organizations, DevOps has its own set of tools to spin up new applications in the development environment. When a new application is deployed, one engineer might run some scripts to tie it into the domain and bring it online, ensure it is patched, and perform post-deployment testing activities.

Then a security engineer might implement some anti-malware tools and confirm that the application meets the corporate build and hardening standards.

Finally, post-deployment, another team might be tasked with keeping the application up and running, tracking and maintaining change requests, and managing configuration items, along with all of their associated relationships.

Each of the users described above would likely have their own scripts and automation tools to complete their part of the deployment process. With hyperautomation, the task-based automation tools are connected by one master orchestrator, which transforms disparate steps into a seamless, unified process.

Overcoming the Challenges of Hyperautomation

The most obvious challenge to surmount with hyperautomation: no one wants to give up their walled garden. However, it's a process that occurs incrementally where one brick at a time is removed. With each brick, people gain productivity and trust in hyperautomation, and every tool becomes more valuable by extension.

Who stands to benefit? Everyone — regardless of whether you look after the network, service desk, databases, security, or systems, you'll get time back in your day. You're also going to benefit from better quality of service scores from the users that you support.

Determining which processes to target with hyperautomation can also be a challenge. The first step is to identify the most time-consuming, repetitive processes in your organization and then balance that against the complexity to automate those processes. Pick the low hanging fruit first — prioritize some processes that can be easily automated to get quick wins, then progress to the more complex use cases, or those that are less frequent but consume significant resources.

A clearly developed strategy for hyperautomation and those early quick wins will secure buy-in and investment in additional initiatives. Starting with simple ties between tools and processes brings quick value and trust, which opens up increasingly more opportunity to hyperautomate more complex processes much faster. The business benefits snowball from there.

Hyperautomation has the potential to deliver real and meaningful ROI over the coming months and years, as well as transforming the way we approach IT operations forever.

Marcus Rebelo is Director of Sales Engineering, Americas, at Resolve

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How Hyperautomation Builds Steam and Breaks Down IT Silos

Marcus Rebelo
Resolve

Hyperautomation topped Gartner's recent list of Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends, but is this just another new buzzword to further complicate our increasingly complex IT world?

Over the last decade, many IT teams have unknowingly implemented various forms of hyperautomation. By orchestrating more advanced automated processes and workflows, they've essentially cracked the code on this trend already. But what exactly do we mean by hyperautomation?

Gartner describes business-driven hyperautomation as: "an approach in which organizations rapidly identify, vet and automate as many approved business and IT processes as possible through a disciplined approach. Hyperautomation involves the orchestrated use of multiple technologies, tools or platforms (inclusive of, but not limited to, AI, machine learning, event-driven software architecture, RPA, iPaaS, packaged software and other types of decision, process and/or task automation tools)."

So, what's changed that would cause Gartner to introduce this new term now? We believe the answer lies in the ability to incorporate more advanced, newer technologies into the automation toolchain today — namely artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing, along with advanced analytics and data mining, which leverage all of the above. In the coming year, we'll see hyperautomation further evolve, building momentum, and contributing to the inevitable erosion of silos in enterprise IT.

Improving Digital Experience Demands Hyperautomation

Regardless of the name, hyperautomation's capacity to integrate and orchestrate various technologies is here to stay. Ultimately, it highlights the fact that siloed IT functions are being relegated to the IT graveyard. Like it or not, the needs of our in-house users and customers alike demand that all of our tools work together to serve broader, strategic business objectives — a fact that has been further amplified by the pandemic.

When all your systems are interoperative, independent silos are not just unnecessary, they impede business objectives. The widespread adoption of APIs is indicative of this drive toward interoperability. Further, Gartner estimates that over 70% of commercial enterprises have dozens of hyperautomation initiatives underway. Unfortunately, many of these will likely languish or fail because they're siloed, lack alignment to business outcomes, or overlap with other efforts. This results in more technical debt, unsustainable IT architectures, and data issues.

Hyperautomation, by default, is starting to break through the silo walls, building incremental connections between them, and in doing so, improving overall capabilities. While it will take years before siloed architectures fade for good, hyperautomation is moving in the right direction.

Hyperautomation in Action

To gain a better understanding of how hyperautomation is already in play for many enterprise IT teams, let's look at a few examples.

Combining intelligent automation with common chat tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams delivers valuable self-service capabilities, allowing end users to perform simple tasks on their own, like resetting passwords, or more complex ones, like interactive, multi-step PC troubleshooting. A more sophisticated example might be server provisioning, which would incorporate additional steps, like automating entitlement checks.

To support these types of hyperautomation use cases, service desk teams tie chat tools into a backend system that permits the actions to occur, plus another system that has the ability to perform the automated actions on behalf of the user. Where there are multiple chat tools deployed in an organization, capabilities can be deployed across all of them with a robust orchestrator on the back end. The end user never knows whether there are two or ten different tools involved in capturing, approving, executing, and responding to their request. Better yet, the automated processes can be structured in such a way that corporate compliance and governance standards are enforced at every turn.

For organizations with multiple automation tools — usually requiring different skillsets — hyperautomation can unify this ecosystem and enable these tools to seamlessly interact with one another to execute end-to-end processes autonomously. This eliminates the time consuming, labor-intensive, baton-passing between departments to complete certain responsibilities, representing a significant savings in costs and man hours.

Let's also explore the chain of custody for new applications. In most organizations, DevOps has its own set of tools to spin up new applications in the development environment. When a new application is deployed, one engineer might run some scripts to tie it into the domain and bring it online, ensure it is patched, and perform post-deployment testing activities.

Then a security engineer might implement some anti-malware tools and confirm that the application meets the corporate build and hardening standards.

Finally, post-deployment, another team might be tasked with keeping the application up and running, tracking and maintaining change requests, and managing configuration items, along with all of their associated relationships.

Each of the users described above would likely have their own scripts and automation tools to complete their part of the deployment process. With hyperautomation, the task-based automation tools are connected by one master orchestrator, which transforms disparate steps into a seamless, unified process.

Overcoming the Challenges of Hyperautomation

The most obvious challenge to surmount with hyperautomation: no one wants to give up their walled garden. However, it's a process that occurs incrementally where one brick at a time is removed. With each brick, people gain productivity and trust in hyperautomation, and every tool becomes more valuable by extension.

Who stands to benefit? Everyone — regardless of whether you look after the network, service desk, databases, security, or systems, you'll get time back in your day. You're also going to benefit from better quality of service scores from the users that you support.

Determining which processes to target with hyperautomation can also be a challenge. The first step is to identify the most time-consuming, repetitive processes in your organization and then balance that against the complexity to automate those processes. Pick the low hanging fruit first — prioritize some processes that can be easily automated to get quick wins, then progress to the more complex use cases, or those that are less frequent but consume significant resources.

A clearly developed strategy for hyperautomation and those early quick wins will secure buy-in and investment in additional initiatives. Starting with simple ties between tools and processes brings quick value and trust, which opens up increasingly more opportunity to hyperautomate more complex processes much faster. The business benefits snowball from there.

Hyperautomation has the potential to deliver real and meaningful ROI over the coming months and years, as well as transforming the way we approach IT operations forever.

Marcus Rebelo is Director of Sales Engineering, Americas, at Resolve

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...