Much like automation
-Pick a card and don’t show me, he said. I reluctantly complied by selecting a random one. It was a black ace of spades. -Now I’ll look away and you can place the card back into the stack. I’ll be able to find it. It must be a new trick he learnt at his ‘Magician Masterclass’, I thought. These card tricks are intriguing, stimulating, teasing...annoying.
Much like automation.
Some compare automation to magic – at the press of a button, you are presented an outcome, without having the insights of how it happened. You’re checked in for your flight. The sweet of your choice is served by the vending machine. Your speeding ticket arrives in your letter box…
But it is not magic when you are the magician.
Is it complex? You bet.
That is at the heart of our Infrastructure and Operations Automation Journey. The vision of the initiative is having a central automation strategy and empowering our infrastructure and operations teams to automate more of the processes they are responsible for, and to share best practices as well as code. These teams are operating and maintaining thousands of servers on hundreds of assets, for example, by creating virtual machines, managing firewalls, monitoring servers. Examples of already implemented successful use cases include automated patching, installation of MSSQL and PostgreSQL databases and the recently released automatic web certificate renewal.
Through our Infra and Operations Automation Journey we aim to strengthen the internal infrastructure landscape. This can manifest in improved process efficiency, reduced project delivery timelines, and commercial gains as well as increased employee satisfaction. Because who loves executing mundane tasks? By ‘automating these away’, our people can focus their attention on more interesting tasks, and as a result, they return to their families in a much happier state at the end of the day. Isn’t that a worthy ambition?
Is this undertaking exciting? Very. Is it complex? You bet.
It is a kind of transformation that necessitates multi-faceted changes in the organisation and, as such, multi-faceted skills to deliver it
A mixture of the varied skills
On the technology side, you need the ‘techies’. Software engineers, automation designers, architects and specialists in security, operating systems, database and network, to name a few. Their challenge is to build a solution that enables all of our teams to automate many different processes. They are grappling with technical requirements, integrated tools, architectural alignment and security, which is of paramount importance.
Then there is the non-technical side undertaken by the sponsor, project/product managers, the process analysts. They are the ones creating plans (that will inescapably be derailed by reality), communicating with stakeholders (impossible to overdo), managing the organisational change and articulating the value created.
A mixture of the varied skills, backgrounds and talents brings something to life that is much more than the sum of all its parts. Becoming familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of your teammates, working together towards the same goals and ticking off joint achievements are some of the most rewarding experiences for many of us. These create the kind of energy required to move this ambitious initiative forward and build a new kind of future. This energy also enables us to deal with uncertainty, take big risks and learn from failures, because these are also an integral part of the journey.
And some would claim that this is also a piece of the magic.
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