Autonomics sounds complicated, but it actually has a straightforward definition. Read this article to determine how autonomics can help your large enterprise improve productivity, save money, and satisfy employees.
If you’ve heard the word “autonomics” bandied about and you’re intrigued by how it might be able to help improve your business, you should first develop a full understanding of what autonomics means. At IPsoft, we refer to autonomics as the self-managing technologies that operate independently of direct human oversight to perform activities within a complex system.
As we’ve previously detailed, a simple example of autonomics would be a building manager instructing an HVAC system to set each floor to 68 degrees. The system then routinely monitors each floor’s temperature and turns on the heat or AC accordingly.
So how might this kind of automation – or even more advanced forms – benefit your company’s IT and shared services business processes? Within every large enterprise is a set of processes that can be fully or partially automated in order to simplify and accelerate productivity. In this article, we’ll create a checklist to help you determine whether autonomics is worth investigating, and how IPsoft’s AIOps (formerly 1Desk) might be able to help.
1. Does Your IT Team Handle the Same Processes Over and Over?
Your IT professionals are probably tired of constantly helping people reset passwords or manually configuring laptops for new employees. They probably dread internet outages and website downtime. That’s because these typical issues occur again and again and more often than not require the same kinds of time-consuming fixes with each incident – taking time away from other higher-value tasks (see below).
With autonomics, your company can create workflows that allow your IT operations system to solve these issues automatically, or with partial automation. By enabling autonomics to handle these common tasks, your company is reducing the number of rote tasks your workers must perform, thus freeing workers up to take on more complex and unique tasks.
2. Are Your IT Professionals Overwhelmed by Rote Processes?
Companies with small IT teams are likely to find that the aforementioned high-volume issues eat up much of the time they could be using to do accomplish higher value work. You could hire additional workers to help meet this demand, but what happens when demand decelerates? Now you’ve got an office full of workers who are getting paid to repeatedly execute very low-value tasks over and over.
- For Further Reading: AIOps: The Ultimate Bodyguard for Your Digital System
By enabling autonomics solutions to handle the bulk of your routine processes, your company empowers its IT professionals to take on more crucial work. Of equal importance, you’re not wasting money hiring staffers that you won’t need in a few weeks or months, and you’re not overwhelming your current staff with an untenable amount of tasks.
3. Do Your Customers Complain about Your Digital Experience?
Website performance issues can destroy companies that manage the bulk of their customer interactions online. If pages don’t load, if videos don’t play, or if an app keeps crashing, customers will leave your business for the competition.
In a traditional set-up, a problem is detected, and the company assigns an IT professional to address the problem and wait for the issue to be resolved. Autonomic solutions proactively guard against performance issues. If and when the autonomic system spots a problem, it automatically deploys virtual agents to resolve the issue following a Standard Operating Procedure. Most website and app performance issues are common and can be treated with these automated workflows, which means fixes before customers even realize an issue has occurred.
4. Is Your Software Ecosystem Unnecessarily Siloed?
Comprehensive autonomic solutions such as AIOps are designed to integrate IT management end-to-end by tying existing management frameworks and products together and automate support issues that cross multiple systems. This allows your company to take a holistic view of everything that occurs within your IT environment and plan automations based on the fastest path to resolution.
- For Further Reading: AIOps Brings Advanced Self-Healing to Autonomics
By connecting once-disparate systems into a unified platform through autonomics, an entire company can be made more productive. For example, when a new hire is entered into an existing HR system such as Workday, an automation within AIOps could automatically procure new system login credentials through ServiceNow as well as designate a laptop for the employee in IPcenter. In this example, the company’s existing platforms remain in place, but automated workflows connect them into a larger operation and lead to increased system-wide efficiencies. AIOps has the added benefit of Amelia, our digital colleague, who acts as the front-end cognitive interface that an HR manager can use as for the employee onboarding process. The manager can simply ask Amelia to execute on these requests, and the autonomics in AIOps does the rest.
5. Are Your Employees Making Too Many Errors?
Maybe your employees are overwhelmed by the number of tasks you’ve given them, or maybe they’re handling increasingly complex problems, or maybe some are simply careless – all of which can lead to a rise in errors committed by IT support staff. Regardless of the reasons, you’ve got to fix this situation immediately or risk reduced productivity, poor customer experiences, and lost revenue.
By empowering autonomics solutions to automatically resolve tasks, you’re taking the likely culprit of poor work completely out of the equation. Once an automated workflow is approved for a particular problem, it’s extremely unlikely that the autonomics solution will make an error. The more tasks you automate, the less likely you are to see errors.
Autonomics solutions don’t entirely cut humans out of the IT operations process. Human workers still need to program, approve, and learn from the automations in order to ensure continuing solution health. Humans are there to tweak automations, find new and clever ways to improve automations and solve problems that can’t be foreseen or automated. By combining autonomics tools with your human workers, you’re building a powerful team ready to meet any IT operations challenge, and deliver real business benefits.
