Eliminate manual intervention caused by routine, highly mundane tasksFree administrators to focus on more critical problems to the businessCombine management data with contextual information to further streamline IT run booksAllow IT managers to reallocate resources to deliver strategic business projectsBridge IT and business users by formalizing roles & responsibilities within the context of IT processesImprove business alignment and reduce IT costs by involving the business in IT processes
Step 1 to preparing for an ITPA deployment begins by asking critical questions to identify processes that should be automated.
The next step is to evaluate how mature your organization really is as it relates to process. The following scale is from Gartner’s most recent Infrastructure and Operations maturity model released last October. (build slide) If you have not yet deployed the ITIL service support and service delivery processes (those are ITIL v2 terms) then you may want to consider a micro-process first approach.
Once you’ve decided what type of processes you want to automate first (micro or macro), you’ll want to rank those processes by there ability to improve quality or reduce costs, and each business may place a different premium on each category, but you should establish a subjective way of grading each. Some suggested measures are listed here under each category.
Next, you’ll want to evaluate what tools you have in place or are needed for an ITPA implementation
Finally, make sure your staff is ready for implementing ITPA. They can be threatened by it and fear for their jobs – leading to resistance and subversion of the program. Make sure they understand that they are going to be redeployed to work on core as the context management gets automated.