Today, pretty much every organization accepts and understands the value that automation brings, but how many are actually successful with their automation projects?

The answer, unfortunately, is not as many as you would expect. In many cases, you will find silos of automation operating across a business. For example, a team focused in a specific area may have identified a tactical automation opportunity, gotten funding to purchase a tool and achieved some early wins, but ultimately stalled with their automation project as they failed to identify new use cases and demonstrate ongoing value.

Successful organizations think about automation strategically, bringing together the right people, processes, and tools to centrally organize, plan, and execute automation projects and then demonstrate ongoing success to the business. I’ve sometimes heard the term “automation center of excellence” used to describe the construct that these successful organizations have pulled together in order to develop a strategic automation function.

Automation centers of excellence (CoEs) typically consist of a team of expert automation engineers who are familiar with a broad range of automation technology. They take a programmatic approach to identifying automation opportunities, understanding their business impact, and building a backlog of automation activities that are focused on business outcomes.

Communication is key. Successful automation teams will clearly articulate the challenges of manual activities and successfully paint the “before and after” automation picture in terms the business can understand—time savings, reduction of costs associated with manual execution of repetitive tasks, increased quality of rollouts, reduced risk, improved time to restore service, etc. Automation teams need to provide easily accessible dashboards or reports to business stakeholders and regularly check in with them to ensure they are satisfied with their automation investments. This communication and demonstration of value will ensure continued investment in the future.

As we mentioned earlier, successful organizations bring together the right people, processes, and tools to create automation CoEs. Let’s dig into each of those areas in a little more detail.

People: We’ve already discussed the importance of the actual automation engineers, but you also need folks that can be embedded into the business to understand ongoing strategic goals/projects and look for opportunities where automation can add value. Think of these people as automation engagement leaders who will advocate for automation development in support of key business objectives and will build business cases to secure funding and then follow back up to demonstrate the successful achievement of those automation goals.

Process: Successful CoE’s will become automation factories executing in a constant cycle of identifying automation opportunities, understanding the value of the automation, being able to articulate that value to the business to secure funding and then closing the loop through delivery, execution and value realization. It’s through this cycle that automation teams can strategically extend the reach of automation throughout a business.

Tools: Tools play an important part too. Obviously, there is a broad range of automation tooling in the market and it is not unusual for organizations to have multiple different and sometimes potentially overlapping automation tools in place. To really enable Automation CoE’s we need a way to centralize and expose all that automation tooling so everyone is aware what is available in an organization. Automation Brokers such as BMC Helix Intelligent Automation enable organizations to create automation libraries which consolidate all automation actions into one place so automation teams can easily understand what’s available to them.

Another important area for the automation tooling to support is the ability to collect & track new requests and ideas for automation and to curate a prioritized backlog of opportunities. The automation team can then leverage this to develop a factory based approach to automation delivery.

Analytics can help identify automation opportunities, for example looking at the most commonly occurring event types in an event management system, or understanding which service offerings are most frequently requested. Its also good practice to easily enable end users to request/recommend new automation be built, ideally directly from the tools they are using. For example a NOC operator might understand that when they see a certain event type, there are a set number of steps they would take to triage and remediate the issue. If they can easily communicate this information to the automation team then a solid backlog can be quickly constructed.

So, in summary, many organizations are now looking to create a CoE to help drive strategic automation initiatives. If you can get together the right team of people, the tooling to support automation initiatives and the processes in place to repeatedly identify automation opportunities and deliver results, the rewards for success are high.

In my next blog I’ll dig into more detail about how BMC is helping organizations to successfully develop automation centers of excellence.

Most organizations are actively embracing cloud strategies. The promise of easily accessible and consumable cloud services helps drive business transformation and time to market, which makes the shift to cloud an attractive proposition. According to the B2B research firm MarketsandMarkets™, the global cloud computing market size is expected to grow from $371.4 billion in 2020 to $832.1 billion by 2025, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 17.5 percent.

Benefits include:

• Cost reduction
• Increased agility and flexibility
• A plethora of pre-built cloud services for application developers to leverage
• Dynamic scalability of applications
• Improved performance and uptime
• Faster time to market
• Baked-in security
• Better customer experiences

So, how do you get started?

The cloud migration process requires careful analysis, planning, and execution to ensure that the cloud solution will meet the needs of the organization and its customers.

First, you need to define a clear set of business goals. These could include lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO), reducing resource waste or expanding revenue opportunities. Once you have defined your objectives, you will be able to identify which applications are potentially good candidates to be moved, and which cloud platform is best for your business. Your plan should also include a clear set of measures for success to help ensure increased business value and a positive return on investment.

Once your migration plan has been established, you need to establish a baseline of your current environment to determine how the move will impact your targeted applications and services. BMC Helix Discovery is the ideal place to start, because you can quickly perform application discovery and dependency modeling on your current on-premises infrastructure.

The solution’s software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based, agentless implementation makes discovery and dependency modeling easy, whether you are searching for applications on your current infrastructure or across cloud-native environments. Within minutes, you can obtain an accurate inventory of your hardware, software, and service dependencies so you can decide whether you need to re-host, re-platform, or re-factor your applications and services. By performing an accurate assessment of your current infrastructure with BMC Helix Discovery, you get a baseline upon which your cloud migration project can begin.

What about cost?

To realize the true benefits of cloud migration, you should understand the resource needs of the applications that are being moved. For instance, items earmarked for a lift-and-shift migration will have different needs than those that need to be re-factored or updated. Understanding the resource requirements for each application beforehand will put you in the best position to meet demand and minimize costs.

BMC Helix Discovery and BMC Helix Continuous Optimization give IT organizations the ability to see the entire infrastructure and its allocation and resource requirements. During the discovery and dependency modeling process, BMC Helix Discovery generates Dynamic Service Models, which are utilized by BMC Helix Continuous Optimization to accurately analyze and predict utilization as business-critical applications are moved to the cloud.

Performing cost optimization before migration has the added benefit of helping IT organizations determine which platform is the best fit for their business. For instance, an IO-bound application might cost less with one public cloud provider than another. BMC Helix Continuous Optimization provides teams with the intelligence they need to make informed decisions that align with their technical needs and benefit their bottom line.

Life after migration

Completing your migration isn’t the end of the story. Once your applications are up and running, there will always be the need to continually discover, monitor, and optimize your applications to improve performance and manage costs, while also delivering exemplary customer service.

The comprehensive BMC Helix suite can help you see how well your applications are performing in the cloud. By producing centralized, continually updated Dynamic Service Models, BMC Helix Discovery keeps your teams informed about their latest application configurations and dependencies at all times.

Following this centralized approach, the artificial intelligence (AI)-driven BMC Operations Management with AIOps solution uses service-centric monitoring, advanced event management, probable cause analysis, and intelligent automation to help teams manage and monitor the complexity and scale of IT operations while preventing problems with proactive management and reduced MTTR when issues arise.

Organizations need to continually optimize resource usage and minimize costs while they support fluctuations in business service demand. BMC Helix Continuous Optimization provides ongoing visibility into cloud-based infrastructure so IT teams can easily add, remove, or adjust resources to assure services and meet changing application demands.

Conclusion

Companies have been migrating to the cloud at an unprecedented pace. For migration to be a success, IT organizations must define their business goals and criteria for success and understand which applications and services should be moved, modified, or re-written, as well as how to optimize their resource usage across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments. BMC Helix Discovery, BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps, and BMC Helix Continuous Optimization address these issues with complete visibility, monitoring, and continuous resource optimization capabilities for today’s complex IT infrastructures.

Visit the BMC Helix, BMC Helix Discovery, BMC Operations Management with AIOps, and BMC Helix Continuous Optimization web pages to learn more.