Badly managed technical debt means that we take ugly shortcuts to meet the delivery dates, and that usually important work is downprioritized and left for the future, as explained in this post. Here are some phrases which are signs that technical debt is being accumulated and not managed properly. At some point, it will become …
While economists are worried about the world economic debt (close to $260 trilliion or over 330% of GDP), it is very strange that the IT industry is not taking its Technical Debt seriously enough. Technical Debt is one of the greatest problems in IT today, and there are a lot we can learn from its …
Automation brings along several benefits, but, as manual operations give way to logical machines and decisions and actions are taken without direct human involvement, a number of dangers arise. Most importantly, automation introduces new types of errors. These
are errors which have not been encountered in the specific environment until now.
I tried to gather the automation benefits specifically for IT Infrastructure. Benefits can be small or large depending on the organization and the implementation. Automation is an investment, which requires cost, effort and good planning. Returns are not immediate, or may never come if automation is not planned correctly. The ultimate goal of automation is to eliminate human involvement. So, all benefits derive from reducing the human factor.
The term "auto-mation" comes from "(ε)αυτός", the Greek word for "self". Automating the IT infrastructure means making it capable of fullfiling its purpose without human involvement. In a 2015 report, Gartner talks about 3 IT automation tiers: IT tasks, IT services and IT processes. finally to processes. However, these 3 tiers are never static in real-life. We will amend Gartner's classification towards a continuous improvement model for automation in IT infrastructure:
Next-Generation IT 