IT Automation Drives Digital Transformation

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Digital transformation involves much more than adopting cloud services, delving into business analytics, and making mobility a priority. Without embracing automation to help manage increasingly complex IT environments, those efforts will not only fail but also lead some unfortunate companies to extinction, suggests a study from business software and services provider BMC.

A majority (73 percent) of the 650 IT decision makers that were recently quizzed by company said organizations that don’t take advantage of IT automation within the next five years as part of their digital business strategy won’t be around in 10 years. Respondents hailed from 12 countries, including the U.S., Australia, Brazil, China and France.

One of the popular methods of digitally-enabling a business is to move to the cloud, for some workloads at least. Of course, that also comes with its own set of complications.

“As companies continue to incorporate hybrid cloud capabilities across the digital enterprise, they are challenged by the complexity of managing workloads across on premises, public and private clouds,” said Gur Steif, president, digital business automation at BMC, in a statement.

“IT teams must be able to manage the customer value chain in spite of decentralized usage of cloud services,” continued Steif. “This is requiring a new level of IT automation to adapt to the challenges posed by increasingly diverse infrastructure, disparate data, and accelerated applications – the critical components of digital business.”

Other challenges on the digital transformation front include conflicting objectives between business units (42 percent). In fact, nearly a third of CIOs, 237 of which participated in the survey, called for better internal alignment within their organizations.

Although most IT decision makers (89 percent) believe that the way to achieve digital business objectives is to use IT automation in new, more innovative ways. That, too, is easier said than done.

Among the 98 enterprise architects surveyed, 67 percent lamented a lack of budget and 51 percent said there was too little time to meet digital business objectives. Underscoring the persistent skills gap affecting the IT industry, 44 percent said that they lacked the talent to achieve their goals.

“BMC believes that without taking a new approach to IT automation, companies will not be able to overcome the budget, skills, and time constraint challenges identified by the survey respondents,” Steif added.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Enterprise Storage Forum. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.