My visit to Portland, Oregon, allowed me to have a meal with representatives of several local companies and the common theme revolved around how to move their Service Management initiatives forward.  The request from the folks in Portland is similar to what I have been hearing globally and I believe aligns to some of the trends that I am seeing worldwide.

First, the push to "automate everything" is driven by virtualization. Speaking to representatives of one large global financial organization this week I was taken by surprise when we spent most of my session on how to get more value by automation. The purpose for automation is not to remove people from IT; it's a combination of reasons. First is the requirement to deliver ubiquitous availability.  Using performance metrics, the organization identifies potential service outages and automatically provisions additional capacity. More importantly the estate is de-provisioned when the capacity is no longer required (the step most people forget). Second is the automation process occurs seamlessly ensuring that human error doesn't impact the scenario (according to industry analysts 80% of service downtime is caused by human error). And finally with integration into the service management environment all the correct processes are followed, including logging of the required audit steps and updates to the Asset Repository and the CMDB.

The value of automation is clear. Another financial company in the US has leveraged automation capabilities and is delivering a scalable environment with almost zero defects and when capacity issues are not resolved. If you think through the automation scenario there are so many opportunities to automate and free up your most valuable resources, your people, who can be used to drive innovation into your environment.

Automation of everything comes with a few challenges. I recently met an organization that didn't allow processes into their production environment without automation including one off processes which is overkill!

Are you automating everything and integrating the activities into your service management processes or are you ignoring the circumstances and hoping it will go away?