This blog post is an excerpt from our recent pocket guide created with Red Hat, IT Automation in Government: Breaking Down What You Need to Know. To download the full report, head here.
In a complex IT environment, even small tasks can take forever. Sprawling and legacy systems are hard to develop, deploy and maintain. Citizen demands only increase the complexity, and IT teams struggle with management, availability and cost. That’s where automation comes in for government IT.
Software automation can replace manual labor currently carried out by IT administrators and other personnel, and automation technology can improve current processes, migrate applications for better optimization and provide a single language for DevOps practices across your organization.
IT automation is a large and complex category that refers to anything from very simple automatic routing of forms to something more difficult, such as the automated provisioning of backup and recovery systems without manual or human involvement. Sounds great, right? So why is it important now more than ever that government start to adopt this approach and technology?
Much as we discussed how improvements in manufacturing heralded the age of the automobile, automation improves the efficiency of the varied applications that operate in a complex, diverse and distributed information technology environment. This is because government IT environments are growing bigger in scale and increasingly more complex.
But simultaneously, demands for more efficient and cost-effective delivery of services and the secure exchange of data and information with citizens have never been higher. For a government IT department, these real-time demands mean that IT must coordinate complex tasks and business processes more often. Agencies need orchestration across different technologies and solutions, as well as management of the dozens of products that need to interact and communicate among their workflows.
The centralization of government data centers through IT automation is key to achieving these more comprehensive objectives. Automation improves operating efficiency and reduces costs, while simultaneously meeting escalating demands on the IT department and the government organization as a whole. Maximizing an organization’s automation helps prepare agencies to modernize and increase its workloads, and helps IT organizations addressing the increasing demand for speed and simplicity coming from the lines of business across a wide range of key initiatives.
Think about it this way: IT departments are the modern factories powering today’s digital government. And just as today’s factories can’t compete without automation, automation will soon become imperative for IT organizations in government. In short, if we want government modernization and digital innovation to continue at a rapid pace and at a much larger scale, government must turn to IT automation
