Over the past few months, industries across the globe have experienced seismic changes. Entire workforces are now operating remotely, business continuity is more important than ever, and resilience and innovation are crucial to overcoming the worldwide uncertainty.
These shifts have accelerated business transformation. Our continually evolving networks are coming together with data, new technologies, and human insight to evolve the business world as we know it. As a result, all enterprises must reinvent their operations to succeed in the competitive market by embracing the idea of technology as a business partner that works with - not in place of - human workers.
Ultimately, technology is transitioning from an enabler to a driving factor for success - a requirement as organizations move towards becoming autonomous digital enterprises (ADE).
What is the Autonomous Digital Enterprise?
As the world continues to experience seismic changes, the ADE embraces intelligent, tech-enabled systems across every facet of the business in order to thrive in an ever-shifting, disruptive world.
One of the key tenets to becoming an ADE is by applying intelligent automation across data, workflows, applications, and systems to enable data-driven business decisions, enhance quality, reduce unnecessary manual labor, empower employees, and optimize IT resources.
With automation everywhere taking on tedious, labor intensive tasks, and minimizing human involvement, skilled workers can step into higher-valued roles that rely on human intelligence. Enterprises can therefore optimize value and develop intelligent, unified, technology-led systems that improve performance, efficiency, and innovation.
The transition towards becoming an ADE won’t be sudden, and it will require proactive input across the enterprise. To progress, teams must strive to use increased automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities in order to ensure the business continues to run as the organization reinvents itself. What’s more, with AI-driven IT Operations (AIOps), teams can now enhance existing operational to improve uptime, performance, and customer experience.
For enterprises embarking on the journey of reinvention, investing in automation and AIOps is a key first step.
Laying automated foundations
Automation everywhere lies at the foundations of ADEs, and enterprises should adopt automation across both customer interactions and internal operations. Not only will this lead to quicker execution and better time management, it will also reduce costs, minimize errors, and ultimately lead to a transcendent customer experience.
Here are a number of key factors that enterprises should consider when investing in automation:
- Hyperautomation allows machines to automatically perform tasks, thanks to AI, enhanced connectivity and digitization. By automating overall business processes, enterprises can reduce both potential errors and human involvement in menial tasks.
- Operations automation aligns application performance management (APM) and traditional IT infrastructure monitoring (ITIM) solutions, to create an application and infrastructure performance management (AIPM) solution. This lies at the heart of automated processes, as it enables both pre-emptive and reactive remediation capabilities, as well as drawing on insights to perform self-healing and auto-remediation.
- Enterprise service management (ESM) uses a structured service management framework, with dedicated automated components, to drive operations beyond traditional IT procedures.
The role of AIOps in the ADE
AIOps capabilities will be especially useful for IT management teams as they reimagine their position within the ADE. Essentially, AIOps incorporates AI, ML and big data analysis to enhance IT operations (ITOps) within organizations. It then uses advanced insights gained from AI/ML to automatically detect problems within IT systems, alert the relevant teams, and in certain cases, fix the issues in real time through actionability. Actionability means the AIOps system in place can assess how to respond to a failure and take preemptive action to prevent it.
Often, the challenges facing stretched ITOps teams have transcended human capacity. Enterprise data volumes are constantly mounting, while IT systems are becoming increasingly complexed - especially now that workforces are all logging on from a distance. These challenges are only going to grow, and therefore intelligent autonomy is key to future success.
With the support of AIOps, ITOps teams can ensure greater speed, agility and efficiency, while refocusing their attention on insightful, revenue-growing tasks – each of which is fundamental to reaching ADE capabilities.
An automation-enabled future
If ADEs are to successfully move IT operations beyond human actions, and instead deploy automation everywhere, existing IT tools need to be reinvented. Businesses should aim to understand the necessity of AIOps across different processes, the current status of these offerings and how best to embrace the potential of automation. By proactively addressing the shortcomings of enterprises when it comes to automation and AIOps, business leaders can reform processes to enable growth, evolution and success.
In the next five years, businesses will also see analytics and business data come to the forefront. By using AI to leverage customer insights, teams can deliver seamless and enhanced experiences while developing valuable use cases across the business.
In the ever-competitive and uncertain global marketplace, enterprises should be striving for both resilience and innovation. Automation will allow operations to continue, while teams work on new, forward-thinking projects to distinguish the business. Ultimately, those who embrace the transformation to ADE, by adopting new technologies, analytical insight and automation, will be the ones to excel.
- Jon Thomas, Senior Director of Product Management at BMC Software.
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