What do you mean you can't automate because you don't have defined processes?

You get stuff done everyday right?
W. Edwards Deming said that the front line people understand the processes and management doesn’t. If you think you don’t have processes you must be in management
My introduction to Total Quality Management and Dr. Deming was in the late 1980’s. I was working for a small Houston company that, as a result of our focus on customers and quality, earned a slot on the Inc. 500 list in 1991. 4 of us went to a 3 or 5 day seminar lead by Dr. W. Edwards Deming himself and a month later we closed the company for 2 days and sent every employee through a crash course on TQM at the American Productivity and Quality Center. Then the work began.
We identified several critical business processes and documented the steps and interactions with other groups. This work was done by the people who executed the process every day. It was not an ivory tower exercise. The result was that we identified and cut out unnecessary work and immediately improved our processes.
We lowered our costs and improved business performance. Is your IT shop being asked to lower costs and improve performance for the business?
IT can and should do the same thing American Business Technologies did. Start with a handful of critical, repetitive processes. Your front line people can and should do the work—they know what they do every day. Get it documented. The payback is almost immediate and the cost is minor. Whether your organization chooses to then take the step of automating those processes or not is a separate question.
Stop paying your IT Ops people to be firefighters and start paying them to be process builders. This can be a formal incentive program, a contest between teams, or a recognition evening of pizza and your favorite beverage.
In the last major recession, the companies who focused on and investing it their core competencies came out strong. What will you do?