Automation, anyone?

EMA, like many others in the industry, sometimes struggles to adopt a common nomenclature for slippery phenomena that cross silos - in our case that cross practice areas. Rather than seeing this as a drawback, though, I believe that just having the debates is positive and healthy.

Of course, we could avoid them and confine ourselves to only what’s obvious. But then, we wouldn’t really be doing our jobs - and some of the major waves transforming the management marketplace could wash over us unseen until we suddenly realize that we’re drowning (figuratively speaking at least) in an ocean of real confusion.

One such wave – one that’s already cresting, so get out your life rafts – is automation. There are plenty of free-floating terms/ideas/technologies out there on the automation tsunami already. For instance, there’s “Data Center Automation,” “IT Process Automation,” “Runbook Automation,” “Service Automation,” and one that EMA created primarily for internal use, “ITSM Automation,” to reflect that cluster of technologies that have grown up from service desks, service catalogs and workflow – and one might argue the CMDB as well.

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EMA, like many others in the industry, sometimes struggles to adopt a common nomenclature for slippery phenomena that cross silos - in our case that cross practice areas. Rather than seeing this as a drawback, though, I believe that just having the debates is positive and healthy.

Of course, we could avoid them and confine ourselves to only what’s obvious. But then, we wouldn’t really be doing our jobs - and some of the major waves transforming the management marketplace could wash over us unseen until we suddenly realize that we’re drowning (figuratively speaking at least) in an ocean of real confusion.

One such wave – one that’s already cresting, so get out your life rafts – is automation. There are plenty of free-floating terms/ideas/technologies out there on the automation tsunami already. For instance, there’s “Data Center Automation,” “IT Process Automation,” “Runbook Automation,” “Service Automation,” and one that EMA created primarily for internal use, “ITSM Automation,” to reflect that cluster of technologies that have grown up from service desks, service catalogs and workflow – and one might argue the CMDB as well.

EMA also has a term called “NOC Automation” which is simply a placeholder to capture any automation relevant to network operations - such as WAN optimization or dynamic routing. Other backbone technologies have been around for a long time - like configuration management, automated diagnostics and discovery - and in the data center, load balancing and job scheduling or workload automation.

You might ask, then, how do all of these (and other) pieces fit together? One simple way to look at automation is that logically it falls into three classes: machine-to-machine, machine-to-human, and human-to-human. And of course some capabilities and products cut across all three. But there are fundamentally different traditions on the two extremes.

If you think of human beings as “top” and machines as “bottom” then let’s start from the top-down. Service-desk workflows have been around for years, with trouble-ticketing solutions being the most obvious. But with the rise of ITIL best practices, the service desk (we sometimes hear the term "consolidated service desk"), is viewed as a center for automating ITIL-defined processes such as configuration, change and release management, or incident and problem management.

But this “tradition” - because it truly comes from a certain set of cultural roots - is very human-to-human centric. It’s focused on codifying how people work with each other and bringing in human-to-machine automation (configuration and release management, discovery, etc.) from this top-down view.

Service catalogs are worth mentioning here because they’re something of their own phenomenon. They hold the potential to become one of the centers bringing all these pieces together by modeling relationships – much like what is done in effective CI class and attribute modeling in the CMDB. Most visible today is customer-facing automation through service catalogs, including self-provisioning, or on-boarding new employees.