Cheat Sheet: Process automation

Making services work together saves time and manpower. Steve Cassidy explores the potential of modern automation platforms

The potential of modern automation platforms.

Automation, like writing scripts? Our IT guys already do that.

It’s true, IT folk have been automating things for decades – tasks such as making backups and archiving old files, which might take thousands of repetitive mouse-clicks to do by hand. But the new wave of automation is much more ambitious than that. It’s about automating entire business processes, and interfacing with all sorts of services and devices. It hardly overlaps at all with the sort of old-school scripting you might be familiar with.

Are we talking about handing off drudge-work to computers?

Potentially, yes. We’re not talking about making humans obsolete, but helping them to work more efficiently. For example, imagine you’re a cab driver for a small firm; a decade or two ago, you’d have driven around with a radio, receiving instructions from a full-time operator back at HQ. Today we can automate the process, so that customers can book a ride online and have details forwarded directly to your phone. Throw in a customer relations app and there’s very little need for radios and phone lines – unless something goes wrong.

Are the benefits primarily for back-end stuff then?

Not necessarily. Automation can bridge any type of gap – such as those between incompatible systems that were once “unified” with the aid of a printer, a yellow highlighter and a fast typist. The key breakthrough has been the spread of automation out of the IT department and into other realms. That includes communications systems – such as phone call management, links to chat apps and other messaging services – and building and environmental controls, such as thermostats, lighting and even security systems. The old conundrums that used to arise when a system was designed to be controlled from a fully featured GUI session are breaking down.

We don’t have the in-house expertise to program that sort of thing.

Are you sure? Modern automation tends to come in via the “shadow IT” route, like Slack and Dropbox, so employees might already be benefiting without your knowledge. Minimal specialist expertise is needed to get started: quite a lot can be achieved in a few mouseclicks, or by simply connecting services together. A few saved passwords here, a bit of uploading certificates there and you’re in.

In the longer term, it does pay to have someone acting as a librarian for your intangible stack of automation assets. That kind of role seldom supports a full-time internal person, so here you may want to take on a consultant as a curator. As your business comes to rely on automated processes, it will be a good idea to have someone on call to deal with unexpected issues ( see “How reliable is automation?”).

All of this is starting to sound expensive...

Don’t be too frightened about costs. Automation can yield huge productivity gains, and the services themselves are largely free, or near to it. Nobody is currently trying to charge serious money for the sort of code that glues together multiple services in short-term, ad-hoc relationships. That’s a sharp distinction between this model of automation – using services such as IFTTT and Twilio – and scripting and coding in PowerShell and Java.

Is it really smart to rely on a free service that might not be there tomorrow?

These days it’s very unusual for a service to entirely vanish: customers and VMs are easily bought and sold, so if your chosen service is discontinued, there’s a good chance that someone will keep the lights on long enough for you to plan a move – either to a similar service, or to a different solution.

If a platform is vital to your business, it does no harm to make contact with the provider; if they’re small enough to fail, they’re small enough to engage with you. You might find yourself in a position to enter into a formal partnership, or to keep a copy of their code in case of disaster, to reduce the risk of sudden collapse.

“Modern automation tends to come in via the ‘shadow IT’ route, so employees might already be benefiting without your knowledge”