Technology automation is an evolution not a revolution
When it comes to Technology Operations most people think of dark rooms, junk food, and dishevelled tech nerds clicking buttons in a race to keep the lights on. Years ago this may have been true. System outages were commonplace, organisations struggled to balance managing incidents and responding to new requests, and the whole process was manual and inefficient. Engineers were overworked and end users were dissatisfied — a tenuous line for tech shops to tread.
Modern operations could not be more different. Infrastructure as code means technology teams are spending less time on manual and repeatable tasks so they have more time to focus on faster service delivery, better communications, and improving the end user experience. Automation is the name of the game.
Automation across any enterprise is not just about delivering one single thing. It starts with building a culture with the right people to really understand processes and develop a technology ecosystem that works in your business.
This journey from dark rooms and inefficiencies to a service delivery model that is clear and user focussed is summarised by this simplified model of automation maturity levels.
Technology Automation at Transurban
When we started thinking about a modernising our operations we looked to the market to see what we could learn. We quickly discovered that there was no single path to success. To do it properly we needed to strike the right balance between people, process, and technology — in that order.
People
At the heart of every organisation is its people. In spite of a manager’s best intentions, we rarely have the time to develop skills and encourage ownership in our teams while working in the cut and thrust of demanding technical environments. A practice that works requires a mixed approach.
Team culture matters. Embrace the knowledge in your team and actively encourage everyone to bring their ideas to the table. This crowd-source approach helped us to find the right tool for the job more quickly.
Support personal development and provide opportunities for internal and external learning opportunities. Not only are you building the skills of your team, but you are recognising their work and building a culture of ownership and inclusion.
To balance this with the demands of the business we decided to partner with external companies to leverage their established people capability to get faster results.
Process
Good processes are key to sustainable growth and governance. Our first step in automation was to critically review our processes to question, map out, and understand what we were going to do first so we could avoid automating the wrong things.
If the process is inefficient to begin with, automation won’t improve it. This analysis showed us that near enough was not good enough, and we made sure that our automation was actually making things better from end-to-end.
Developing our Service Management practice allowed us to govern the automation of manual processes. Automation is not invisible, it still needs to adhere to the standard tests, auditable approval history, change tracking, capacity management, and communications for stakeholder engagement.
Technology
For us, the tools we selected had to fit with our strategic move to the cloud and consider the practical and tactical limitations of the on-premise environment. To make sure we hit both, we set this vision from the beginning and designed a clear architecture — and then stuck to it!
There are so many tools available on the market. Don’t be afraid of asking for vendors to prove their tool works in your environment before making any decisions.
Be open to building an ecosystem of tools — there won’t be a single tool or programming language that ticks every box. Acknowledging that you will have multiple tools is key to building a robust automation capability.
Our key lessons
Invest in your people. Build capability in your teams and find partners that understand your vision and have a track record of delivering.
Get your processes right before you even think about automating them. Fixing bad processes with technology will lead to larger support teams and annoy your users.
Technology is changing too fast to have a set and forget strategy. Have a short term plan so you can win confidence with your business colleagues and be agile enough to continue to sustain and increase momentum.
What’s next?
In the coming weeks we will be sharing case studies that capture some of our specific wins across Technology and how automation has been a game changer for Transurban.
Follow our case study series:
Zero downtime, speed to market and highly secure — our journey to the cloud by Mithran Naiker — CTO. Creating a highly resilient, automated, and secure cloud platform without slowing down product delivery and enhancing customer experience
Streamlining meetings and improving collaboration with Cisco Webex by Jen Goeldner — Head of Workspace Technology. One touch join, application integration, and Webex automations to deliver improved user experience to our employees and partners.
Firewall automation in a complex highly available environment by Kunal Mahida — Head of Network Services. How Tufin and ServiceNow improved quality and reduced implementation times for firewall rule orchestration.
Automation and Orchestration for Cyber Security Operations by Paul Day — Head of Cyber and Information Security. Partnering with Splunk and using Phantom to automate cyber security incident response and handling
Automating Internal Audit Reporting a real effort saver by Rani Gerszonovicz — Head of Data & Analytics. Using our Data & Analytics platform and Tableau we transformed and automated internal audit reporting.
Optimising On-Premise infrastructure to match the speed of Cloud by Scott Brown — Head of Infrastructure Operations & Service Management. Infrastructure Operations built an automation ecosystem with vRealize, Puppet, ServiceNow, and Hitachi Automation director to take the team on a journey to match delivery speed of cloud services.
Watch this space for more to come…
