What makes a great automation solution? Our take on the five selection criteria

Whereas intelligent automation solutions help to reduce the costs of IT operations by 20-30 percent, the potential benefit is easily multi-fold when extending automation to support functions and business processes.

Our ambition is to be fully equipped to deliver automation benefits for our Nordic customers.  

In March, we announced an automation partnership with Ayehu, a leader in intelligent automation. Our approach has generated interest among our customers, analysts and research communities alike. Info-Tech Research Group recently interviewed us about our automation vision and roadmap, along with drivers for our automation tool selection criteria. I believe that our five criteria – modularity, no-vendor locking, flexibility to expand, pre-built APIs, and a design thinking approach – are very applicable to many Nordic companies and organisations.

As we at Tietoevry are on this journey, I wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on our key lessons learned from along the way.

Let’s take a closer look at each criterion; Modularity, no-vendor locking, flexibility to expand, pre-built APIs and a design thinking approach.

1. Modularity

We wanted to secure adaptation to different use cases and ensure that automation solutions function in all environments: on-premise, in the cloud, or in our customers’ private on-premises environments.

Different customers have different expectations and needs. Some are looking into operating automation as self-service, some want to get support from the service desk, and the ones who have implemented automation on a wider scale might be looking for ways to orchestrate and manage automation systems effectively end-to-end. We wanted to be relevant, and to have solutions for all these needs, leveraging the public cloud, DevOps, AIOps and data lake capabilities.

2. No-vendor locking

Today’s automation solutions have a great deal of valuable data. Considering data privacy and GDRP needs, it’s important that customers feel secure towards automating use cases and processes.

Our customers need to be able to trust that if they move to another managed service provider in the future, or if they decide to in-source, they will be able to take their existing IT automation solution with them. Furthermore, automation use cases deployed by the service provider are the customer’s IPR and propriety.

I believe that this is an important differentiator for us as a service provider. When automation infrastructure is independent of the Managed Service Provider that you choose, you don’t lose the automation infrastructure investment if that relationship ends.

“It’s nice to see a large MSP promote lack of lock-in as a differentiator and to focus on relationship building and quality of service.”

Research by: Derek Shank, Info-Tech Research Group, April 14^th, 2020

3. Flexibility to expand

We don’t want to fixate our customers on a single technical automation environment, thereby limiting automation scope and making architecture rigid and service provider-centric. Instead, we wanted to be able to build patterns that could be re-used for various customers and which would be applicable to the customers’ environments and architectures, e.g. as workflows for event management and incident resolution that should be configurable and orchestrated under any monitoring system and tools.

4. Pre-built APIs

We wanted to be able to quickly and easily build a minimum viable product to show automation value to our customers, while also being able to further refine the solution to adapt to that customer’s environment. This approach requires the usage of pre-built APIs and Software Development Kits for integrating different tools and systems, relevant to the customer’s existing environment.

5. A design-thinking approach

Customer engagement and co-innovation are crucial. Getting to know the customer environment is where the main use cases come up with a high degree of repeatability.

Automation is about being able to concentrate on what makes an impact

We are driving increased automation to be able to provide more value and innovations to our customers. We want to be able to re-allocate experts to assignments and projects which will generate more value to our customers than manual and repetitive tasks that can be automated.

Along the way, we have seen that a sound automation strategy and implementation ensures higher SLA adherence, higher end-user customer satisfaction, standardisation, adherence to higher quality, and employee satisfaction.

To obtain the engagement necessary to make their efforts successful, organisations pursuing an automation program should prioritise effective change management communication and full leadership support.

Do you already use your full automation potential? Contact us to find out.

Listen to the related Podcast: Insights to automation, AI, and digital transformation

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