Recently, a Senior Network Director from one of Itential’s largest customers presented to our team on the successes and challenges his team has faced over the course of their automation program.
His experience mirrored the feedback that we’ve received from other large-scale deployments – the biggest inhibitors to maximizing the business benefit of automation were not technical, they were cultural and organizational.
In fact, his guidance on how he addressed those challenges aligned well with the Automation & Orchestration Maturity Model our team recently published.
In this model, the ability of a team to move from one stage of the maturity model to the next results in major improvements in benefits to the business, including improved productivity, improved speed/agility, and improved cross-team adoption. Reaching each new stage further accelerates and multiplies the impact of automation.
The three tips that the Senior Director shared map exactly to the transitions from one stage of maturity to the next – starting with the jump from no automation to task automation.
TIP #1: Mitigate the Natural Fear of Replacement by Focusing on Ways Automation Enables Engineers to Reduce Busy Work
One of the most common challenges that organizations face when implementing network automation is a fear of replacement or redundancy among network engineers and operators. This can slow down adoption and bring about widespread pushback if not correctly addressed.
How to Make the Move From Limited/No Automation to Task Orchestration
One of your first steps should be a team or organization-wide effort to educate network operations teams about the benefits of automation. Relating the benefits of automation to their day-to-day work is key.
With effective automation tools, network engineers find they no longer spend countless hours repeating the same routine tasks. Saving time and saving effort across the team helps engineers get back to more strategic network management activities. It’s not about automating people out of a job — it’s about automating the tasks that bog down their time today.
Network leaders should look to involve their team as early in the evaluation phase as possible, as participation is key. At Itential, we provide the ability for practitioners to learn and build real-life use cases in our platform with their own infrastructure. Seeing activities that currently take a lot of time when done manually, turn into an automated process firsthand will always raise enthusiasm.
TIP #2: Show the Direct, Practical Benefits of Going Beyond a Script
It’s important to recognize that, even before implementing a full-on automation strategy, many individual engineers are already writing their own scripts for repetitive daily tasks. But there’s an issue of scale here — scripts alone can only take you so far. Teams that are stuck at the script stage have seen improvements at the engineer level for productivity, but their overall process still suffers from delays due to all of the steps in the overall process that are not yet automated.
As an IT leader, your responsibility is to show and prove to your engineers that evolving beyond a scripting approach will benefit them directly as well as benefitting the organization.
How to Make the Move From Task Automation to Process Orchestration
“Would you share your script with the person sitting next to you?”
A lot of network engineers at teams with a scattered, scripts-based approach to automation might say yes to that question, since that person knows when not to run the script, its limitations, and how not to break the network.
“Would you share your script with someone you’ve never met who works on another team?”
Here, almost everyone would say no. Without guardrails, the idea of just letting people run wild is intimidating. That’s why building a unified automation approach is so important — the right solution will enable your engineers to share automation assets they’ve already built like scripts safely, quickly, and easily.
To address a reluctance to go beyond scripts, it’s important to start small and practical, taking on a use case that will get to production fairly quickly and immediately save the network engineers from a frustrating manual process. It’s about building trust and proving immediate value — something that takes up a lot of time today, especially if the process involves external integrations, is a great chance to prove how going beyond simple scripts still directly impacts network engineers.
TIP #3: Focus on a Platform Approach to Drive Collaboration & Scale
If leadership doesn’t develop an effective organization-wide strategy, different teams will end up with siloed ‘pockets’ of automation, each with their own tools and methods. This only further entrenches the siloed nature of legacy IT and networking, and the approach is limited in effectiveness due to an inability to scale. When implemented successfully, though, automation can be an organization-wide benefit — helping engineers save time and effort even as network change processes are executed faster and at higher volume.
How to Make the Move From Process Automation to Self-Serve Networking
The primary thing is to take a platform approach to network automation. Implementing a central platform unifies your organization’s network automation strategy, enabling all automation assets such as scripts, data transformations, and testing assets to be reused wherever they are needed — even from external systems like pipelines. Itential customers often testify that the value of automation accelerates exponentially with a platform approach, since the modular approach makes every successive use case easier to tackle.
But to get to that point, it’s important to build cultural enthusiasm and start working towards an automation-first mindset to drive participation.
Several of our customers are exploring the recent ‘Automation Guild’ or Center of Excellence (CoE) concept, which enables members of any team to participate in shared training and collaboration across departments. An Automation Guild or CoE encourages individuals to become automation leaders within their own teams, quickly building familiarity with the automation platform throughout your organization.
Our customers often see success investing in small but highly scalable use cases early on, and then exposing those automations as part of a platform. Adopting a platform to operationalize the automation of key processes for a certain region, subset of devices, or similar subcategory can easily prove the value of your investment, and then in turn helps you promote and implement a platform approach at the scale of your entire organization.
Your Role as a Leader
It’s important to understand your role in this as a leader. It’s leadership’s job to drive the cultural changes needed for automation success, ensuring everyone from top to bottom is included in the exploration and implementation processes. Building excitement and enthusiasm is important, but it can’t be artificial—it’s about starting small, building confidence, and continuing to work at it, with concrete use cases, effective demos, and a heavy focus on education. That’s how you bring everyone on board, which makes implementation easier and helps you start generating value right away.
Curious about your organization’s progress on your network automation journey? Check out Itential’s Maturity Model for network automation and orchestration, a 4-stage model that helps you understand what you’ve achieved, where you can go, and what steps you can take to get there.
Kristen H. Rachels
Chief Marketing Officer ‐ Itential
Kristen serves as Chief Marketing Officer for Itential, leading their go-to-market strategy and execution to accelerate the adoption and expansion of the company’s products and services.
