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.

Chris Steffen joins the EAE podcast to discuss how automation teams can collaborate with security teams to maintain a secure, resilient environment.

Enterprise automation is expected to orchestrate critical processes 24x7x365. Automation teams must address risks from infrastructure failures and security vulnerabilities in their tools and environments.

Key Ideas

- Automation systems carry high risk due to their critical role and extensive integrations across business, analytics, and operations.

- Cloud and SaaS foundations still require automation teams to understand configurations for reliability.

- Business-critical automation systems often demand 99.999% availability ("five nines").

- Risk assessment is the first step to address cybersecurity, examining implementation, integrations, operations, and access controls.

- Limiting access privileges and eliminating unused accounts reduces vulnerability.

- Changes to systems can impact availability and security, requiring careful change management proportional to risks.

- Security teams and automation teams share the goal of a reliable, resilient environment.

Takeaways for Automation Leaders

- Regularly assess risks from human error, software defects, and third-party failures. Test updates in non-production environments before rollout.

- Build relationships with security teams to prioritize risks and improve team knowledge.

- Audit access management to identify and limit unused or excessive privileges.

- Review change processes for automations, software, and infrastructure to identify mitigations for significant risks.

Show Links

- Chris Steffen - Cybersecurity Awesomeness podcast - Zero Trust Working Group for the Cloud Security Alliance - "Five Nines" High Availability (Wikipedia) - NIST Cybersecurity Framework - SANS Institute⁠

Building on the learnings from a recent EMA survey on mainframe modernization initiatives, we discuss where these initiatives fit into enterprise activities and what automation teams should consider when involved in these efforts.
Key Ideas
- Business transformation and technology portfolio modernization efforts are occurring in many organizations
- These initiatives have become a core part of how businesses evolve to meet customer expectations and grow into new markets
- In the past, many technology teams took an incremental "just enough modernization" approach to limit costs and risk, however, this can be insufficient where dramatic business process changes are needed
- Mainframes and other aging systems are commonly identified as bottlenecks to achieving the targeted customer experience and related business goals, requiring modernization or replacement to enable the initiative's objectives
- Enterprise automation is an integral part of these modernization efforts, maintaining existing process flows through the legacy system while establishing new workflows for the targeted process changes

Takeaways for Automation Leaders
- Automation teams are expected to maintain existing service levels on existing workflows while the business processes are evolving into their new form
- Consider modernization as an ongoing business activity that the automation team participates in rather than a one-time project
- Develop a playbook that can be applied to each modernization effort, and invest in building the skills of your team to become valuable contributors to these efforts.

In this episode, we explore BMC's recent decision to split into two companies, a strategic shift announced shortly before BMC Connect 2024. We break down what this means for the future of BMC and its customers, diving into the key updates from the conference, including exciting innovations from BMC's Innovation Labs, the latest on HelixGPT the Change Risk Advisor, and Helix Edge.
We also discuss what BMC's business changes mean for the automation ecosystem, and insights from automation users currently undertaking mainframe modernization efforts.
Tune in as we discuss how these developments will shape the future of AI, automation, and IT operations.

Enterprise Automation Excellence Podcast: Episode 2 - Orchestration

Dan Twing and Tom O'Rourke discuss the increasing use of the word "Orchestration" in the automation space, considering whether it reflects a relabeling of existing concepts or an evolution of the automation landscape. They look at how automation's use has expanded from technology operations to business process management and how orchestration enables more complex use cases via delegation of task management to specialized scheduling solutions.

Key Points:

- Orchestration is an evolution in IT automation, enabling the management of more complex processes across hybrid infrastructure environments

- Orchestration expands the use of automation to control the specialized scheduling functions embedded within applications (e.g., ERP systems) and middleware.

- Orchestration can help to coordinate the management of disparate systems to achieve end-to-end automation of complex business functions.

- Some existing automation tools already include orchestration capabilities, integrating with built-in schedulers to manage tasks and monitor activity.

Takeaways:

- Evaluate your existing automation tools to understand their orchestration features. Many workload automation tools may already have significant orchestration capabilities, even if they're not labeled as such.

- Map automation coverage: Use the Gartner SOAP framework to map out your organization's current automation coverage. This may help identify gaps and redundancies in your automation strategy.

- Look for new opportunities to apply orchestration within your organization. Consider areas where coordinating multiple specialized tools could improve efficiency or reliability of complex processes.

- Focus on developing or acquiring additional integrations with key systems and platforms in your IT ecosystem to expand your ability to orchestrate across diverse environments.

- Discuss orchestration with your stakeholders and other executives. Be ready to explain how it aligns with and supports broader business goals and digital transformation initiatives.

Feedback and Questions: eaepodcast@emausa.com

EMA: https://www.enterprisemanagement.com/

EAE Podcast Home: https://em360tech.com/podcast-series/enterprise-automation-excellence

Enterprise Automation Excellence Podcast: Episode 1 - Welcome
Dan Twing and Tom O'Rourke discuss the goals and scope for the Enterprise Automation Excellence podcast, then discuss the learnings that automation leaders should take from the CloudStrike outage this past July.

EAE Podcast Home: https://em360tech.com/podcast-series/enterprise-automation-excellence

Feedback and Questions: eaepodcast@emausa.com

EMA Cybersecurity Awesomeness Podcast - Episode 72 (CloudStrike): https://media.transistor.fm/cb00ae8d/0932d549.mp3