People are expensive, so use them for innovation, not for the mundane.
The largest source of overhead for your business is human capital. Why waste that doing things that aren’t meaningful to the business? Other industries have already gone the way of automation, using it to allow smart people to spend their time doing smart things: innovating and out-competing.
Keep these four tips in mind for getting a big return from your most valuable asset: your human capital.
1. Have you ever asked, ‘Is Joe in?’
Hand-in-hand with automation of the mundane is good old-fashioned logistics. My IT experiences taught me that as soon as kids get out of school in the summer, projects slow down. It’s natural — people take more vacations in the summer, for example, so getting “Joe” to help provision that new app infrastructure may not happen at the pace the business needs.
2. People may not work well together
Another common phenomenon in enterprise IT is silos. As organizations create hierarchies, it’s natural that operations become isolated, but this can be counterproductive. Sometimes groups are siloed because they’re trapped using outdated processes, which creates unnecessary delays. Other times teams struggle to cooperate with each other for tribal reasons, i.e., “I don’t like Joe because he’s not on my team.’
3. People make mistakes
About 10 years ago, I read an analyst quote that 85 percent of downtime is “unplanned change.” Simply stated, “We did something that had unintended consequences… We made a mistake.” Perusing the landscape today, it appears the self-inflicted downtime figure is closer to 95 percent!
It’s true, people make mistakes, and it’s rarely because they lack the skills for the task at hand. The cause is usually poor communication or even a distraction of some sort. I recall a major site release at an enterprise I worked for: It started at around lunchtime on a Friday and took longer than 24 hours to complete. By the time we reached Saturday noon, we were so tired we were making easily preventable mistakes.
4. Complexity makes the human error more likely, more damaging
Although complexity isn’t a people problem, per-se, posing it as one helps us think about possible solutions. As organizations respond to gaps in staffing, uncooperative teams, miscommunication, and old-fashioned human error, complexity makes the remedy hard to determine. It becomes incredibly difficult to avoid mistakes and misunderstandings when things get more complex.
The next thing you know, your business comes to standstill, everyone waits, and we are back where we started. Automation and streamlined processes allow organizations to withstand greater amounts of complexity and deliver services reliably. Isn’t that why we’re a key resource to the business? Reliability and agility are what every company looks to achieve with technology.
Manage cloud complexity, with a little help from a knowledgeable friend
The beauty of Morpheus cloud orchestration is that installation is quick, and our list of integrations is long and growing longer by the week. Once the basic building blocks of your multi-cloud are configured, the complexity of the infrastructure melts away. Want to deploy an application to your public or private cloud? Do so with just a few clicks. Want to deploy an application consisting of many tiers, many VMs, and possibly even across several clouds? No problem, just a few more clicks. Last but not least, the platform is always there when your business needs it, around the clock.
In my IT career, I’ve always hated using “technology” to solve a “people” problem, but since joining Morpheus Data, I’m convinced it’s a great solution for these sorts of business challenges. With cloud automation, companies can add a layer of time savings and reliability, which drives innovation and agility even further. The key to success is removing barriers wherever they impede business, and keeping your most valuable assets — the human variety — focused on innovation and most importantly, revenue.
Take Morpheus’s multi-cloud orchestration platform for a test drive by requesting a demo.
