Avoiding the Trough of Disillusionment with RBA/ITPA

Gartner recently published a hype cycle showing RBA/IT Process Automation at the Peak of Inflated expectations. Next stop—the Trough of Disillusionment. Can that be avoided? Yes. This post discusses how to avoid the Trough.

The first thing to understand is that the trough applies to a technology segment and the expectations of the market as a whole. It does not apply to every vendor and every buyer—it’s all about aligning expectations with product capabilities. You can be individually happy with your purchase while the market is at the nadir of the trough if you are clear about your expectations and make a good product choice. Let’s examine a couple expectations people may have as they consider purchase at the Peak of Inflated Expectations.

I can choose bundled capabilities for specific uses today and expand them later
I can select an overall automation fabric today that will work with my installed tools to automate end to end IT processes

Either of these can lead to disillusionment.

If you select today for a way to automate end to end processes using your installed tools here are the things you want to look out for:
· Packaged support for the tools already in your environment. The more field delivered or customer built components that are needed the greater your total cost.
· Difficulty in changing as your environment changes. Point to point integrations will become costly in the long run. Look for the ability of the product to discover, share, and act on the information within tool silos to reduce effort if you change workflows or swap one tool for a new one from a different vendor.
· Workflow development and maintenance—how much coding and scripting will be required for the tasks and workflows you intend to build?
· Level of automation delivered. Some products are built around the notion of an operator approving each step in a process; others are more fully automated and rely on triggers with only occasional need for a person to intervene.
· Demonstrated scalability. Architecture slides are not only boring PowerPoint content, they don’t tell you what you need to know—how many transactions will I run and how many does the vendor have running in the real world?

BMC, CA and HP are bundling limited purpose automation with their Service Desk and Server Configuration tools. Connecting the device configuration tasks to change management processes is an example of this type of integration and automation. One would expect that when these companies connect their tools to one another that the cost is free/minimal and that the functionality is entirely out of the box. This makes them look like a no brainer proposition but there are at least three things to look out for.
· Are the assumptions about cost and out of the box functionality for even these limited use cases valid?
· When I want to extend these products beyond limited purpose automation, how much will it cost (software license fees, professional services, training, etc.) to extend these packages beyond their initial limited purpose into an end to end IT operations process automation solution? Does the vendor offer packaged products to integrate with your existing management tools?
· Vendor lock-in. The last thing you want to do is end up with multiple IT process automation tools that don’t work with each other.

Taking the long term view of planning and strategy is the way to avoid the Trough of Disillusionment. Start with the end in mind, check your assumptions and get production references.