Multiple automation technologies cause problems

Almost all IT workers that use multiple automation technologies are having serious problems as a result of the need to process more jobs, according to a Forrester survey.

Big data, business analytics, cloud computing and mobility are technology trends that are putting pressure on business processes.

The report, which was sponsored by BMC, found that critical job failures, file losses and excessive manual intervention were reported by 90% of respondents that use multiple automation technologies.

The Industrialising IT Workload Automation survey polled 472 IT decision-makers in the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific. It looked at trends related to job scheduling in mid-to-large IT systems, that control and manage the millions of jobs that must be processed daily.

With growing pressures to support big data, business analytics, cloud computing, mobile devices and more, the number of jobs to be processed is rapidly rising.

But survey respondents believe a centralised automation system is critical.

• 76% of respondents said workload automation can reduce manual efforts and errors.
• 73% said workload automation improves business user satisfaction.
• 55% of business users view user self service to be an important or critically important workload automation feature.
• 69% of those who have used workload automation said it has freed up the time of at least two full time employees. 79% it  freed up the time of 10 or more people.

Mobile operator O2 has deployed software to automate business processes, which will reduce the cost of back-office operations and cut its reliance on offshore recruitment to cope with spikes in workload.

The full study results were discussed in a recent BMC webinar with Forrester analyst Jean-Pierre Garbani. See the webinar here.