Dan and Tom discuss Tom's observations and learnings from the 2024 Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies conference in Las Vegas.
AI and improving Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) leadership were key themes, with sessions addressing strategic and tactical approaches for technology, business, and staffing issues. The I&O outlook for 2025 and beyond was optimistic, while acknowledging executive frustrations with the increasing costs of cloud, failures of major projects, and the disruptions generated from CVEs and other security events.
Key Ideas

- **Generative AI**: Gartner believes that we are still in the early days with respect to AI, with many immediate opportunities for productivity improvements that need to be balanced with potential risks and unpredictable costs, highlighting the lack of best practices and challenges moving from a POC to production.
- **Automation & Orchestration**: Automation teams need to focus on value to their customers, prioritizing efforts to orchestrate business processes over tactical task automation. Automation leaders should adopting Agile development processes and metrics for managing their team's efforts.

- **I&O Agile Adoption**: Highlighting enterprises that have introduced Infrastructure Platform Engineering (IPE) and Site Reliability Engineering(SRE), Gartner recommends restructuring the infrastructure organization around these disciplines, looking holistically at the infrastructure as a managed platform, and adopting product management thinking as a framework for managing the evolution of the environment.
- **Digital Employee Experience (DEX)**: Building on feedback from corporate boards, Gartner highlighted staffing and skill shortages as a workforce risk and impediment to business transformation initiatives, which is leading to an evolution in employee tools and rethinking about management approaches to improve employee engagement job satisfaction.
- **I&O Leadership**: I&O leaders need to become more strategically-focused and proactive in managing their portfolios, aligning their priorities with key business initiatives and building up the confidence and trust of the executive team in I&O.
Takeaways
- Prepare for integrating the new AI-driven tools and data flows integrating into the infrastructure
- Find ways to use AI tools that help with day-to-day activities, but make sure that there are checks of the AI-generated results
- Shifting to Infrastructure as Code approaches to make updates to the environment can reduce risks and improve security
- Collect and review metrics for the customer experience, not just technology operations
- Agile retrospectives can be a powerful learning mechanism for improving staff skills and performance
- Allocate time to skill development for yourself and your team, consider where upskilling is more effective and quicker than hiring
- Be prepared to discuss the value of I&O projects in the context of business initiatives, not just the technical results that they provide
Show Links
[Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference](https://www.gartner.com/en/conferences/na/infrastructure-operations-cloud-us)
[AI and the Future of Work, Paul Redmond](https://paul-redmond.co.uk/speaking/)
[Transformational Leadership, Carla Harris](https://www.carlaspearls.com)
[Super-Communicators, Charles Duhigg](https://www.charlesduhigg.com/supercommunicators)

Dan has returned from Italy where he participated in an HCL Automation customer event focused on orchestration of business processes as an integrated element of a centralized automation solution.
HCL has embraced orchestration as encompassing business process automation as an extension of traditional job scheduling and workload automation, leveraging the centralized automation team and controls that exist in many organizations.

HCL announced the 2nd generation of their Universal Orchestrator product, integrating with the other elements of their Automation Orchestrator Suite.
Key Ideas:
- Automation continues to increase in strategic importance, over 40% of IT executives are now measured on automation expansion (up from 30%)
- Use of automation tools by _citizen developers_ outside of the centralized automation team continues to increase as well, allowing the process experts to shape the automations they rely on and expanding the number of processes that are automated.
- The empowerment of citizen developers raise challenges with change control and governance, sometimes interfering with the automation team's efforts to maintain reliability and resilience
- 28% of enterprises have significant citizen developer contributions
- 52% limit citizen developers to experimental work
- 20% use citizen developers primarily for requirements definition
- Automation tools need additional work to support citizen development effectively
Show Links:
- HCL Universal Orchestrator: https://www.hcl-software.com/automation-orchestration/uno

We're most of the way through 2024 and it's time to start thinking about plans for next year. In many cases, the budget has already been set, but it's still important to think through what your priorities will be and how to allocate time for yourself and your team.
Important Trends:
* Digital Transformation – 70% of organizations are in the midst of transformation efforts, relying heavily on automation services to achieve their digitization goals
* Cloud Migration – Increasing push toward multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, strategic focus on SaaS applications
* Expanding Automation User Base – Growing emphasis on citizen developers, business teams taking on more automation responsibilities
* AI Integration – new integrations, increased need for data management

* Data Analytics – more production applications, growing importance in business decision making

* Cybersecurity – continued focus on keeping automation software updated, access management controls
* Legacy systems – slow retirement of legacy hardware and software, requiring maintenance of specialized knowledge of automation integrations
While many automation leaders feel that their teams have no time to take on additional work, the payback on service and skill enhancements can be high. We advocate being proactive in selecting areas where they can make improvements.
- Organization Alignment – understand your organization's business goals and make sure that your team's efforts are supporting the business plans
- Service Improvement – find an area where you can improve the way you serve a user group, such as reducing the time to fulfill a user request.
- Team Development – determine what skills you and your automation team need to support the business goals and evolving technology portfolio of your organization
- Communication Plans – develop communication strategies to keep you team, management, stakeholders and users aware of what you're doing to deliver automation services to the organization
To get started, allocate a couple of hours a week of your time to an improvement initiative. Identify a project that will address immediate operational needs or a strategic effort that will help you get to where you need to be in the long term. Share your improvement plan with your team and manager so that they can support you in the project.
Good luck, and let us know if you have any questions.