Automation stops engineering dissatisfaction with toilsome, minor, break-fix activity
Engineering teams hate the ‘same old song’ situation: being woken up at 3am to fix a toilsome, comparatively minor task, such as remedying a disk space issue. Dissatisfaction rises when skilled professionals are asked to do basic activities that — in a more digitally mature operational environment — could be managed preventatively with automation.
A recent survey into the cost of downtime revealed that more than 70% of IT leaders report that remediation, mobilizing responders, collaboration between teams, and internal communications with stakeholders are yet to be fully automated. Other examples of relatively thankless, yet vital, activities that could be automated include managing manual releases, handling recurrent password resets, dealing with repeated identical alerts or creating users on systems. Any task that an engineer can do easily but is low value and uncreative can be considered toil.
Teams required to do this are at greater risk of burnout. That’s bad for engineer experience and, ultimately, employee churn, corporate productivity and profitability. Individual agency is important, and skilled engineering talent should be able to use all their cognitive ability for a fulfilling working experience.
A more operationally mature organization can ensure that engineering talent works with automation and improves their operational maturity: preventative and proactive, enjoyable and sustainable. This is particularly important for organizations seeking to incorporate AI into their stack. AIOps creates more need for faster responses, and to ensure data integrity, security and compliance at pace. So, without automation, it’s hard to see how teams can ensure the fast throughput and operational flow that enable a platform for stable, reliable AI outputs, let alone the flexibility to innovate as well.Automation creates stability for AI
Leaders are increasingly keen on AI as a human-supporting business enabler, but engineers see great value from automation first as a basis for ensuring the business delivers on its operational promises.
For the engineer, automation removes toil, taking the most common, burdensome and low-value tasks out of their remit. It can reduce the need for human oversight over the routine. Automation, often involving AI, becomes an assistant, helping engineers to solve bigger, urgent or strategic problems quicker.
Automation assistance, often itself using machine learning or AI within the codebase, can be used to create rules and runbooks ensuring technology fails gracefully, minimizing the number, extent and duration of incidents.
