IT, Automate Thyself

We just wrapped a survey of members of the Oracle Applications Users Group — which includes IT directors, CIOs, IT operations managers, and developers — on the extent to which they’re able to employ automated processes to manage multi-application workloads. In other words, are there processes in place in handle the management and movement of data across Oracle, PeopleSoft, and anything else that helps keep the enterprise running?

The survey of 344 companies, sponsored by UC4, found there’s still a lot of work to be done in this area. More than 75 percent of organizations surveyed are having difficulties managing and monitoring workload.

Over two thirds of survey respondents reported delays in business processing that could be directly attributed to the inefficiencies and errors that are introduced when manual intervention is required to drive processes that span multiple applications. Automation is helping address some IT process management issues, but adoption is slow. Three out of four operations still either rely on manual scripting, or simply don’t know what approaches they should take.

The need to automate IT processes is pressing. Not only are data center infrastructures becoming more complex; the challenge of managing workload that spans multiple business applications, such as Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft and SAP, adds to this complexity. The survey shows that organizations recognize the overall value and benefit that can be derived from end-to-end process management and visibility. Unfortunately, budget constraints combined with some companies’ inability to adopt standardized IT procedures is holding back more widespread deployment of IT automation solutions.

Most organizations turn to IT process automation to reduce the amount of staff time consumed by routine or manual tasks. However, in many cases, there is little room in corporate budgets for extensive business process management (BPM) solutions that provide automated modeling, management, and monitoring capabilities. One third of those surveyed are considering strategies based on Oracle Fusion, BPEL and Application Integration Architecture (AIA). However, at this stage most are undecided or unclear about the viability of these technologies as workload automation platforms.

Copies of the full survey are available here (registration required) at UC4’s Web site.