If you’ve read any of my previous blogs, you know I’m a big advocate of enabling teams to effectively measure the business impact that network automation can have on their organization. By identifying the best use cases to start with and build upon based on the value they bring back to an organization, teams can ensure that their automation strategy is set up for success from the beginning.
Most recently, I shared a blog outlining a three phase approach for identifying the financial impact and benefits of choosing the right network automation use cases and now I want to really hone in on the first phase as it is the basis for a successful strategy. There are two main objectives teams need to tackle in order to uncover the use cases to start with:
- Understand the business impact (both in effort and time-to-complete) for each use case.
- Calculate which use cases have the highest potential for savings and efficiency.
We’ve built the Itential Automation Value Calculator to do just that. Let’s take a deeper look into how it works.
Itential’s Automation Value Calculator Success Metrics
While every team may measure value differently, Itential’s Automation Value Calculator provides success metrics that can be achieved through automation for the top network automation use cases. Some of these metrics include:
- Human Effort Time Reduction – This is important for organizations that are focused on shifting resources off repetitive, time-consuming tasks to enable them to work on higher-value projects.
- Human Effort OPEX Value – This is important for organizations that are focused on quantifying the business value of human effort augmented by automation.
- End-to-End Duration – This is important for organizations that are focused on overcoming the challenge of shortening the time to deliver services to internal and external customers.
Easily Calculate Your Automation Savings
By leveraging this calculator, teams can easily identify the impact each use case will have on your business. For example, is a mere $100 difference or an impactful $1M difference? By running a few variations for each use case, you can quickly identify which use cases don’t really have a material impact on your business and which ones are the heavy hitters.
So let’s take a quick look at an example of how it works.
One of the most common networking use case, software upgrades, is a good starting point. By inputting a few simple numbers based on your specific environment, you can easily see the real value automation can bring.
The following inputs are what’s required to calculate the value of automating software upgrades in your organization:
- How many devices are in your network?
- How many times per year do you upgrade each device?
- How much time of manual effort is spent on each currently?
- What is the average time from the initial requests to the completion of the upgrade?
- What is the average cost for individuals who perform upgrades?
That’s it, just five simple questions. By answering each of the questions, our calculator can run these numbers based on real life benchmarks from our customers who are already automating these same use cases so you can immediately see a rough estimate of the value automation can bring back to your organization. For example, here is the breakdown of our benchmark numbers that current customers are seeing today from automating software upgrades:
By leveraging this calculator, teams are able to fully understand the business impact for each use case in order to have a strong foundation to build their automation strategy on.
Build Your Automation Strategy Based on Value
This approach is a flexible way to run some scenarios and validate or disprove your assumptions, understand what happens if the price of labor goes up or down, run it across a few different use cases and become better informed on how to approach your automation strategy.
Once you have this full understanding, the process of identifying which use cases have the ability to drive the highest benefits in areas that are critical to your business is simplified. This will help you effectively communicate with leadership and obtain buy-in on building out your automation strategy based on companywide initiatives and priorities.
I’ve had a lot of experience running these numbers with numerous customers over the years and can promise it’s well worth your time. Feel free to schedule some time to talk through your results with one of our automation experts to see how Itential can help you maximize the impact of each use case through network automation.
You can also catch up on my blog series detailing the four key metrics to measure the business impact of network automation as well as watch my webinar, “Measuring & Maximizing the Business Impact of Network Automation” on-demand.
Morgan Stern
Vice President, Automation Strategy ‐ Itential
Morgan Stern serves as the Vice President of Automation Strategy for Itential, where he is responsible for assisting Itential’s global customers in developing, implementing and deriving value from their automation strategies using the Itential Automation Platform. For the majority of his career, Morgan has focused on assisting large enterprise and service provider organizations in maximizing the business impact of new technologies as an architect, consultant, author, and industry speaker.
