Moving Beyond Manual Tasks
For years, change management functions were all done
manually. Network port approvals, data sovereignty
requests, data management processes, approval cycles for
governance – they were all handled by people. Many still
are. If a task is mission-critical, or prone to mishandling,
then there should be a high level of oversight. But there
doesn’t necessarily have to be.
Technologies exist to set up automated processes that can
approve, route, block and/or manage tasks throughout an
organization. Companies can create workflows that handle
all kinds of procedures in standard scenarios but then esca-
late transactions to human intervention in certain
circumstances.
If the bulk of the menial tasks are handled automatically,
organizations can rev their engines and churn out feature
releases at a rapid pace.
Imagine if a continuous integration/continuous delivery
process were bogged down by manual processes — it
would not be a true CI/CD process. An organization has a
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WINTER 2019
well-laid-out plan, a top-notch toolchain and professionals
committed to writing, integrating and approving code. But
leaders in the organization are clinging to a patching pro-
cess that requires that approvals be handled through tick-
eting and emails. Because releases have to wait for patch
approvals, the process grinds to a halt.
It Is a People Problem
Usually, people create the obstacles. As a general rule, peo-
ple do not like change. If someone has the job of patching
servers, they want to keep their job and do it the way they
have done it for years. They do not want to cede control to
a toolset that automatically approves server patches.
Unfortunately, in certain cases, automation is inevitable,
and it is disrupting people’s jobs. IT budgets tend to be
composed of 35-40 percent hardware (servers, networking
systems, storage, etc.), with the rest allocated to people.
Procurement leaders are under constant pressure to drive
costs out of the hardware side. All that is left is to look for
savings in the rest of the budget through automating
human tasks.