solution for “IT Everywhere World”

As we advance towards a more intricate IT delivery system to support businesses, the ability to automate repeatable operational processes while ensuring strict control over audit and compliance at all integration points and functioning at the speed of business will be an essential capability for any enterprise. Industry experts and analysts call this Intelligent Autonomous Operations (IAO). However, before we discuss IAO, let’s identify the problem we are solving.

Intelligently Managing Chaos in the Emerging “IT Everywhere World” 

CIO’s have a serious dilemma on their hands… “Technology Drift”.  The management of an ever-expanding infrastructure of technologies (tools, applications, networks, devices etc..) all distributed across an enterprise (in some cases globally) but managed in highly federated organizations (silos).

Today’s complex infrastructures did not evolve in a vacuum, nor was there an intentional strategy, in many cases. They resulted from IT always doing more, doing its best with limited resources, juggling far too many priorities, and adapting to a rapidly changing technology landscape. Despite all of this, though, IT has accomplished some great things.

If you look at the evolution of IT over the past few years, three trends have had a dramatic effect on the role of the CIO – and their impact on the business.  These trends fundamentally impacted the way IT is perceived by the business and how the business interacts with IT.  These trends are also what contribute to the CIO dilemma… Managing “technology drift” in a highly federated organization where infrastructure, applications, technology, and tools are everywhere. 

Three Trends That Cause
Technology Drift:

Is AI the Answer?

Trend One: Need for Speed and Excellence

Agility and swiftness while maintaining operational excellence 

The first trend is not new at all; it’s simply the ongoing operating environment that most IT organizations experience daily. Everything is accelerating, whether it’s product development (DevOps), cloud migrations (workload placement), or the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI). While IT has learned to adapt to these rapid changes, we are constantly required to do so with the same or fewer staff than in the past. Our staff’s capabilities and knowledge continues to expand in support of these complex environments, which demand new skills every day to accommodate future growth.

Trend Two: Elevating the Customer’s Experience

Customer Intimacy through a personalized customer experience (unique to them). 

The second trend was customer intimacy, or, more succinctly, the need to provide a significantly improved customer experience through applications and services as quickly as possible, regardless of location or channel (application, internet, email, voice etc.). This demand for speed involved more cloud services, much faster development cycles, relocating compute resources closer to the customer (edge devices) to reduce latency, or even hosting services and data in specific regions to address audit, compliance, data sovereignty, or regulatory issues. This move towards a workload/customer focus rather than just the latest technology was key to improving this customer experience (personalization).

Trend Three: Responsive Infrastructure Supporting Global Distributed Workforce

Flexible infrastructure, tools, technology, and applications

The third trend was unexpected and surprised many. When COVID first emerged and businesses began to lock down, many IT departments scrambled to support the new work-from-anywhere model. Understandably, many senior executives worried that IT would not be able to pivot quickly enough to accommodate the demand. Concerns were raised that existing, outdated infrastructures, complex network topologies, and current security systems would hinder the shift to a remote workforce and negatively impact employee experience, corporate security, data integrity, and, most critically, individual productivity.

To the surprise of many, the opposite happened: IT responded very quickly, enabling seamless remote work. Productivity and collaboration in many sectors increased. IT provided the business with what it wanted—an agile, rapid-change environment focused on remote work, multi-source access, multi-channel engagement, and delivering business results.

The good news is that business leaders recognize how truly flexible IT can be and how quickly a well-managed IT organization can respond to business needs. The bad news? You guessed it – what was once seen as miraculous – reacting at the speed of business – is now expected from IT teams every day.

The Challenge: Infrastructure is Everywhere

Infrastructure Everywhere has evolved over time and consists of many components (tools, technology, applications) plus skill sets and teams. Teams, whether siloed or highly federated, have insulated themselves from uncontrolled external processes and procedures that hinder their ability to deliver solutions to the business. The problem is that while each silo or node may be well-managed internally, any action within that silo can trigger a cascade effect on other silos, leading to potentially dozens of permutations and impacts downstream. For example, a task as simple as opening a port on an enterprise network requires a processing time of 15 minutes or less; however, it takes two weeks to become a priority for the team opening the port. Therefore, for an external team, opening a port requires a two-week lead time. Is that an acceptable turnaround time? Why has this happened, and how can we solve the problem?

The Solution: Intelligent Autonomous Operations (IAO)

Enter Intelligent Autonomous Operations (IAO):

IAO combines various AI agents, monitoring, and control functions into an automated process or task manager (IAO agent) to coordinate the management of complex operating environments where infrastructure is ubiquitous, thereby enhancing control and speed amid process chaos.

IAO is a relatively new term in the industry, but the problem it solves has been embedded in complex infrastructures for years; the ability to aggregate information across many silos and automate the flow of those disparate processes via a central authority or task manager function.  For repeatable, complex processes, IAO can bring you closer to a lights-out operation and free up limited resources to focus on higher ROI tasks.

IAO can be built using the best-of-breed tools, technology, platforms, and processes likely already available in your organization. IAO is a strategic mindset, based on the implementation of AI leveraging current technology.

There are many potential upsides to IAO. Here are a couple of examples:

 Onboarding and Offboarding Employees

Onboarding and offboarding an employee are two separate processes, with its own process owner responsible for keeping track of what’s completed (or not).  Depending on an organization’s size, the onboarding process can impact dozens of teams and entail access to data, applications, security, HR, finance, asset delivery, real estate (office/cubical management), networking, mail, and mobile devices.

With a well-designed IAO process stream, you can integrate third-party systems to automatically trigger actions based on specific use cases (e.g., leave of absence, termination date, department transfer), thereby coordinating formally disparate workflows into a single process stream.

Automated offboarding actions for departing employees will allow you to generate a return shipping label, notify the user about expected asset returns, transition employee software files to secure storage, reallocate unused software licenses, free up or reassign cloud instances, and revoke the user’s access from all system access points. The system will also enable tracking of offboarding status across finance, compliance, audit, SO, networks, and inventory, creating a continuously updated dynamic status report on demand leveraging AI to aggregate the information to the requester via a natural language processing (NLP) technology.

Zero-day Threats

A nightmare scenario for security teams is the morning the CFO or CSO shows up and asks, “How many of our thousands of endpoints are at risk because of the threat we just identified?” Next question: “And how fast can you bring them all up to date?” You know the inventory data is out there, right down to the release level for each device, but how do you put together a process to automatically check every device and then spin up the process needed to upgrade that device with the least impact on the end user?  It can be done, but oftentimes, many teams will need to marshal the troops and focus resources – and hopefully, all follow the agreed-upon process for updates.

 An IAO process task manager is designed around just this kind of problem – monitoring and reporting for policy adherence and issues but allowing the IAO to initiate remediation or proactively invoke compensating controls automatically. Workflows can trigger notifications, approval requests, control installation or reactivation, owner reassignment, isolation and de-provisioning actions, and more leveraging an organization’s existing IT tools and ticketing. The issue is not to reinvent what we already do well but to augment it with intelligent automation – reducing errors, accelerating delivery, and minimizing the staff required to complete complex tasks.

Where Do We Start?

As we move towards an ever more complex IT delivery system to support business, the road to an IAO mindset begins with (1) the ability to automate repeatable operational processes as well as the ability to (2) observe (monitor) real-time insights and end to end performance of your infrastructure no matter where it is located either in the cloud, datacenter or at the edge.  In our experience, fostering adoption is the most challenging part of the process.  Begin by taking small incremental steps towards automation and observability.  Additionally, take stock of your current tools and technology with an eye toward eliminating redundancy.  Simplification, data integrity, and discipline is the key to successfully adopting an IAO mindset.

Identifying and dedicating talent to integrate your disparate systems into an IAO solution is the next hurdle. Not having dedicated and experienced people to develop your integration points will hinder adoption. The individuals must have the right mix of technical knowledge, process re-engineering, problem-solving skills, and a high EQ. We call these people connectors.  Those individuals are the connective tissue or bridges between the silos (business or technical) within an organization.  Finally, IAO integrators must have both IT and Business CXO sponsorship to effectively carry out their tasks across the enterprise.