Live from Gartner IOM

Great keynote presentation on disruptive technologies.

David Williams lead the discussion around IT Operations Process Automation/Run Book Automation. He used Incident Management (as discussed in the Dow/Rohm and Haas press release http://budurl.com/rohmdow ) as an example.

He went on to discuss how automating processes that cross infrastructure silos represents an opportunity for a major advance in operational efficiency but that many organizations do not have anyone responsible for such processes. Odd isn’t it? With all the push around ITIL and process definition, so few people are actually held responsible for cross-silo process success. His position was that the person driving ITIL in an organization should be the person investigating IT Process Automation/RBA.

Are you responsible for cross silo processes? I’d like to hear from you–please connect with me via the comments function.

He also put out a warning that the big 4 vendors will use ITPA/RBA as a Trojan horse to drive the sale of more of their own products and that those vendors are little incented to provide automation beyond their own product set.

This could lead to a serious problem if you adopt automation from a big 4 vendor–if you buy one of their ITPA/RBA products, you’ll still need a product from another vendor to automate processes that are supported by tools from multiple vendors. If you do that, how will you manage multiple automation products? The answer is to work with an unbiased vendor to begin with.

Cloud has also been a big topic here. Don’t forget to sign up for the Opalis Cloud webinar here http://budurl.com/cloudweb, or if you’re at Gartner IOM, come see our presentation with Dow on Thursday morning.